Despite having spent the first five years of secondary school in the constant company of the same thirty other boys, I can call to mind very few of their names. And those that I can remember are locked to a single defining feature. Richard played the guitar. Mike rode a Moulton bike. John bred Dutch rabbits. Malcolm had flat feet.
What has prompted these maunderings is the recent news of Paul’s death. Of him, too, I can remember only one fact: that he spent lunchtimes playing chess. Once, as I left the classroom leaving the door open, bent over the board in concentration, he bawled after me ‘put the wood in the hole’, a command I have heard neither before nor since.
It is such random memories which are the stuff of funerals. Faced with the task of constructing an encomium, celebrants encourage family and friends to supply anecdotes and memories to personalise and spice the standard litany of appreciation, loss and grief. Thus it is that memories such as my recollections of classmates are woven into a thumbnail sketch of the departed. For members of the congregation who hardly knew the deceased (‘he was my late cousin’s best friend, I thought I ought to attend’) this conflation constitutes their abiding image. At best it is partial, at worst misleading. Memories are notoriously faulty, and who could resist embroidering their story when the protagonist is no longer there to challenge it. But the most egregious error lies in highlighting snapshots out of context. Did Paul really love chess, or was it simply preferable to standing around on a draughty playground? Did he eagerly share his love of the game with his grandchildren when they came to visit, or refuse to have a chessboard in the house because of the uncomfortable associations? And even if those fragments retrieved from half a century ago are accurate, how much do they reflect the character of the deceased in maturity, whose identity, preferences and beliefs might be far removed from those of the callow youth? Which begs the question: is a person the sum of their lifetime’s worth of activities and contributions, or merely how they manifested at the closing curtain?
But it doesn’t matter much. The main memories the woman whose cousin was the best friend of the deceased will take away relate to the interminable queues on the motorway and the quality of the catering at the wake. Managing her expectations, we need to remember that the real purpose of a funeral is to ease the suffering of the widowed spouse and children - who perhaps never really knew the person anyway.
