Funeral For A Friend

Somebody asked me to retell the story of my dad’s funeral so I will. My dad was my friend as well as my dad and it hurt like hell when he shuffled off his mortal coil. It was the usual stuff like ‘did I tell him I loved him enough?’ and ‘did I let him down?’ and ‘who will I actually listen to now?’ and all that regular sort of emotional guilt that most of us go through at such a time.

My dad had arranged his own funeral as far as he could have. The pall bearers were his two best friends – one 6 feet four inches tall the other 5 feet 2 inches tall. The remaining two were my uncle Cyril with an artificial leg and myself.

We couldn’t use the local church as planned as the vicar was in a ‘drying out clinic’ having partaken of too much communion wine so we had to use the Methodist chapel in the town. The chapel itself was up two flights of stairs as the ground floor was reserved for other things such as the Sunday School. The main door was a glass sliding door much like the kind you get at a supermarket or, as you say in America, a shopping mall.

The undertaker was called Hedley and, given his occupation, he was known as ‘Deadly Hedley’ due his penchant for going everywhere at all times with his tape measure and, should someone look a bit unwell, measuring them up just in case. He was also an ‘old fashioned’ undertaker who wore a top hat and tail coat.

Getting my dad’s coffin up the stairs was problematic but, apart from a wreath slipping onto the shorter of his friends head halfway up, we managed it fairly incident free.

A nice service and everyone went outside to await our solemn procession back to the hearse and then on to the graveyard.

Halfway down we realised that we couldn’t negotiate the turn in the stairs downwards so Hedley said “Put the coffin down chaps and we’ll slide it around the turn”. This we did. Unfortunately all four of us accidentally ended up at the back of my dad’s coffin with only Hedley at the front.

The coffin began to tip down the stairs and Hedley couldn’t hold it alone and, stuck behind, we couldn’t stop the inevitable.

Hedley turned and ran, holding his top hat in place, tail coats flapping. My dad, in his coffin, slid after him down the stairs with three of the pall bearers in hot pursuit. The fourth, my Uncle Cyril, tried to join us in our pursuit of the runaway coffin but his artificial leg’s adjustment pulley arrangement couldn’t cope with the sudden movement. Something snapped and his leg fell off.

The assembled mourners were startled to see Hedley run past the automatic glass doors which ‘zinged’ open as he did and ‘zunged’ close after he had passed, followed closely by my dad in his coffin – ‘zing’ ‘zung’ – and then the three of us – ‘zing’ ‘zung’.

We made a hasty repair to my Uncle Cyril’s artificial leg and with what dignity we could muster carried the coffin solemnly out to the waiting hearse.

On arrival at the graveyard it became immediately apparent that the grave digger, using an automatic digger for the first time, had misjudged the depth of the grave.

As we lowered my dad down he continued to swing at the end of the rope way beyond the expected six feet. In fact, we were clearly running out of rope.

Fortunately, with very little rope left in our hands, my dad’s coffin hit the bottom.

Unfortunately, the small amount of rope remaining had resulted in the four of us being very precariously balanced on the very edge of the grave. The strain of being so balanced was too much for Uncle Cyril’s hastily repaired artificial leg and it fell off again, falling into the grave.

“Ey up! Cyril’s leg’s gone in!” shouted a mourner and my mother demanded that somebody retrieve the artificial leg.

“It’s all right” said Cyril, “I’ve a spare at home”

In the event nobody was brave enough to retrieve the artificial leg so, to this day, my dad is buried with my uncle Cyril’s artificial leg.

My dad had the most incredible and often surreal sense of humour.

Is it really possible that he had far more of a hand in his own funeral than we could ever imagine?

I’ve no idea but I do know this. I’m sure my dad would have preferred being alive to dead but if he had to be dead then he couldn’t have scripted it any better than it went.

Postscript :

Uncle Cyril died the following day jumping onto a bus. He had forgotten to attach his spare artificial leg and went to land on the artificial leg that wasn’t there, fell under the bus and was squashed. His spare artificial leg was buried with him. As a result both my dad and my Uncle Cyril are buried with artificial legs.

It must be a northern thing.

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