If you want to have a good time, go to
a funeral, not to a wedding
MATTHEW P \RRIS
Funerals are much to be preferred to weddings. There is something sad about a wedding: a shapeless, grimly joyful occasion involving the certain waste of an entire day, the possible waste of two people, each of whom half the congregation think we know better than his or her lover, promises that few trust, and a vague feeling of doom. Deep reservations swim beneath a sea of silly hats, and the outcome is imponderable. Marriage is the ultimate interment, burying people alive. At a funeral at least the individual has stopped breathing.
Funerals are essentially optimistic; beneath the aspect of mourning lurks a powerful sense that life goes on. Everything is certain: the end of one life, the continuation of life itself. The prescribed ceremony reflects as much: brisk, determinate, short and sincere. The socialising which follows is simple and curtailed. Finality is the essence of the thing, and even in grief there is something beautiful about finality. No death is timely, and all death is timely.
Funerals seem to come along in clusters, and I've attended a handful recently. They have all been of people I liked and respected, and some have been of people I loved. Not one have I left unhappier than when I arrived. I do not mean to suggest that sorrow is absent at such times — it can temporarily overwhelm — but, because the emotion has focus, it has point; there is — I say this respectfully — a kind of satisfaction to be found in the clarity of it all.
But of all the merits a funeral can claim over other rites, the greatest is this: a funeral is interesting. Here is a ceremony which is also informative. We rarely know a person as well as we suppose, and there will be all sorts of unexpected things we didn't know at all. At a well-organised funeral at least one and often a number of speakers will set out the life in some detail: a true curriculum vitae. This will include facts, reflections, stories and circumstances — particularly those from early years — which while hearing you realise were probably integral to the personality you so admired, but which would not have been something they would have had occasion to volunteer, or about which you would have found occasion to ask.
I enjoy learning. The thrust of organised religion, the whole point of ritual, being to comfort and confirm by the repetition of the familiar, one so seldom learns in a church, but at a funeral one does. The ceremony could be improved, however, in one important respect.
Eulogies are just that: eulogistic. I have no objection to this. Place should be found at the close of a life for a simple paean for what was good, admirable or lovable in a person, and a eulogy can achieve that in a way which is unstinting without being unintelligent. But recall, if you will, the last well-made eulogy you heard: do you not remember the slight, amused, fascinated ruffling of collective composure caused by the small hints it is permitted to include, that the deceased was not perfect? People love to hear this acknowledged, and are interested to hear the speaker's own opinion. This interest does not, or need not, arise from disrespect, but from honesty and from a sense of inquiry, too.
At a country funeral I attended in Wales, an excellent eulogy (given — and excellence here is rare — by the vicar himself) came wonderfully alive when the speaker hinted that the deceased had bootlegged liquor and cigarettes. Half the congregation knew this; half did not. Every one of us found the hint arresting, for it reminded us that our late friend could be, for good or ill, impatient with regulation. All at once a portrait which could have been flat, two-dimensional, took on depth and therefore life.
At my old headmaster's funeral recently a speaker mentioned the deceased's morning bathroom ritual: the sounds of shaving, splashing, tuneless humming and the BBC World Service turned up impossibly loud. The recollection was so striking and the congregation's chuckle so spontaneous, not just because the report was accurate as to that particular event, but because it hinted at how infuriatingly tin-eared and self-contained our old friend could be, secure within his world and oblivious to others. This quality did enrage, did cut him off from philosophies undreamed of in his own — but it is also what made him great: a moral confidence which made him an achiever and enabler. If at Michael Stern's funeral there had been no recognition that he missed some things while finding others, that he could be absolutely maddening as well as wonderfully galvanising — if, in short, one had not been prompted to reflect that tunnel vision, intense certainties and blocked ears both rob and enrich a life — one would have left the church the poorer for it. That vignette and the reminder of how mulish he could be did not make me love Michael less, but it steadied me against the tendency to sentimentalise.
I should like to hear at a funeral a counsel for the defence and a counsel for the prosecution. It would from the outset be understood that both speakers loved and admired the deceased, but their two speeches would establish a sort of Socratic dialogue, founded in respect, on the subject of where our departed friend had succeeded, and where he had failed; why he had done well what had been well done, and why he had fallen down in those things where he had not succeeded. The congregation would hear about the costs of his virtues, and the benefits of his vices. They would be gently reminded whom he had hurt as well as whom he had helped.
To hear a departed friend discussed thus would be more than interesting: it would stimulate reflection in every mind about our own lives and conduct; about what might be said about us when we go; and about what we might learn from the failures as well as the triumphs of those we have loved.
I am not joking. I mean it. I hope one day that something like this might be arranged for my own funeral. Indeed. I could begin work now on the prosecution's speech. That would be the easiest part.
Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.
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