Burying my parents and siblings was hard enough – then came the admin
At my mother’s interment, my brother gave a eulogy by the grave. “Mum and Dad bought this plot on my 24th birthday,” he said. “But it only came with a 50-year lease. So if I manage to survive to the age of 74, I hope I have enough savings left to buy an extension!”
In spite of my sadness, I smiled. It was just like Tom to try to lighten the mood. He was 55 and I was 53 and 74 seemed a long way off. Two and a half years later, I was standing by the grave again and Tom was in it.
“Dying,” says the poet Sylvia Plath in her poem Lady Lazarus “is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” I have thought of that poem quite a lot in the last few years. I am, of course, no expert in the act of dying. I’ve had cancer twice and done my very best to keep myself alive. But after burying both my parents and both my siblings, I’m beginning to feel like a bit of an expert in death.
The first funeral I ever went to was my sister’s. My father phoned me at work to tell me that Caroline had collapsed while she was washing up. The paramedics, he said, had done their best. I lay down on the floor of my office. My head was wedged against the filing cabinet. The finance manager knocked on the door and my words sounded ridiculous as I told him that my sister was dead.
I was 36 when Caroline died. Tom was 38. Caroline was 41. Our mother had been the only one to go to the funerals of her mother and our elderly Swedish relatives and I’d missed my Scottish grandmother’s funeral because I’d been ill. I had no idea how to arrange a funeral or register a death and I had no idea how you were meant to do any of this when your world had just been blown apart.
It’s been 23 years since Caroline died, but I still remember the moments of panic that punctuated the grief. At the funeral parlour, we were handed a brochure with different types of coffins. It felt surreal to be gazing at different woods, finishes and fittings and wondering how on earth you were meant to choose. After we had picked one made of beech, I suddenly thought maybe the coffin would be too small; maybe coffins always came in a standard size and Caroline wouldn’t fit in it. Later, I plucked up the courage to tell my father about my worry and he said the undertakers knew what they were doing.
On the morning of the funeral, I went to M&S to pick up the sandwiches for the wake. The woman at the counter told me there had been an error. “I’m afraid there’s nothing listed here,” she said. I kept showing her the receipt and she kept shaking her head. “Please,” I said. “I can’t tell my mother there are no sandwiches for her daughter’s funeral. Please, please, please, please.” In the end, she found some. Tom waited in the car outside while I picked them up.
That’s the thing about death. On the one hand, it catapults you into another universe where you wonder if you will ever again be a normal human who doesn’t just want to lie on the floor and howl. On the other hand, you have to take on a new role as project manager, party organiser, admin supremo and bereavement counsellor, all the while trying to keep yourself fed, clothed and sane while holding down your actual job. It’s a peculiar mix of the existential and the banal and it’s the banal that can trip you up and leave you feeling as if you have been punched in the gut.
Both my parents left very clear instructions. My father died at 70, of cancer of the colon. He wrote a list of the hymns he wanted at his funeral. He said there should be a “short address” by the rector of his church, but “no personal comments or tributes”.
My mother was equally modest. “For John’s funeral,” she wrote, “I asked for double time at the crematorium, but I don’t think that will be necessary for me.” She, too, made a list of the hymns and possible venues for the wake. One was the Tithe Barn at Loseley Park, where we used to pick raspberries and eat honey and ginger ice cream. But she had crossed out the words “Tithe Barn” and written next to them “too big”.
When my mother died after breaking her hip, I followed her instructions and booked one of the pubs. I swapped it for the Tithe Barn when it became clear that it wasn’t going to squeeze in all the guests. For Tom, I booked the Tithe Barn straightaway. In the 19 months between my mother’s funeral and his, the catering costs had soared. That’s the other thing people don’t tell you about death. It’s very expensive. Organising a funeral is very much like organising a wedding. Or I imagine it is. By the time I put Tom’s casket in the family grave, we’d had no weddings in our family and four funerals.
Tom died, suddenly, of a heart attack, the summer before the pandemic. For a while, I thought I would die of grief. But you can’t. Tom was single and didn’t have children. There was no one else to tell his friends, no one else to register the death, cancel his bank accounts and get the grave transferred to my name. There was no one else to do the endless, endless paperwork.
At Tom’s bank, under “relationship to customer”, there was no option for a sibling. The clerk went off to check and came back with a senior manager who tried again and failed. Tom died without a will and let’s just say that getting probate as a sibling is no picnic.
And then you have to clear the house. But first you have to wash the dishes the person you loved has left in the sink. You have to pick up their toothbrush, their comb, their flannel, their pyjamas. You have to go through their socks and pants. Perhaps this is easier with a spouse. With a sibling, it feels like a terrible intrusion, but one you have to make. You have to open their wardrobe and touch the shirts, jackets, jeans and suits the person you loved will never touch again.
I prefer, as business people say, to “eat the frog”, so I drove to B&Q, bought lots of giant bin bags and stuffed it all in as many as it took. I put the bin bags in the back of Tom’s garage. What followed was even harder. When my mother died and we sold the family home of 50 years, Tom took quite a few of the ornaments and pictures and some of the furniture. I’ve lived in the same flat for nearly quarter of a century, and it’s already jam-packed. But who wants to throw out their parents’ first dinner set or the paintings and artefacts they acquired over half a century? Who wants to throw out the family albums?
Shortly after I put the house on the market, the pandemic hit. Charity shops stopped doing house clearances. Viewings were tricky. Sales were slow. It felt like a metaphor for everything. And still I had a garage to clear, a garage full of albums and papers and letters and ornaments and memories. A garage that held the history of my family.
In the end, when I could, I took the boxes of albums and papers to my flat. I took a few pictures, rugs and ornaments. I got a house clearance company to take the rest. Just before the sale went through, I picked up my brother’s car from his drive. I got rid of mine and now drive his. It makes me feel close to him.
I won’t pretend any of this has been easy. I loved my sister, I loved my father, I loved my mother and I loved my brother. There’s a part of me that still can’t believe they’ve gone. What I do know is that my siblings’ lives, so cruelly cut short, remind me every day that I’m lucky to be here. At each packed funeral, I was also reminded of how much each member of my family was loved. After Tom died, I decided I had to tell their story. It’s my way of trying to keep them alive.
I suppose what I’m saying is that death is not the end. I’ve had more of it in my life than I ever expected or wanted, but I will still shout from any rooftop that death is not the end. We live on in the memories of the people who love us, and remind them that life is precious and short. I’m careful with my time now. I spend it with people I like. Where I can, I cut the crap. Life is far, far too short for the crap.
Oh, and I finally got to organise a wedding. It was in lockdown. It was wonderful. But you’ll understand that it was a bit of a relief that we only had two guests.
Christina Patterson’s family memoir ‘Outside, the Sky is Blue’ is published by Tinder Press (£10.99)
