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Funerals are shockingly short and sudden occasions, for all the solemn dignity of the actual event. After my mother’s death, at the ripe old age of 91, in November, there is a permanent absence, which takes adjusting to. I like the old custom of the month’s mind: a photograph flanked by flowers and a candle burning for a month. And because Mother was buried, in a grey-green country church yard where time has had a stop, there is somewhere I can go to be in touch.
I’d taken for granted the fact that she wanted to be buried, tucked under the earth in the shadow of the church that she had gone to during the happiest years of her life. Thirty per cent of us, a remarkable number given the creeping secularism of society, still do. But I hadn’t thought much about the grave itself. Mother’s final home is a piece of property which presents its responsibilities - replacing flowers, planting bulbs, clipping turf - and has neighbours. I have already begun to nod at their relations. Most immediately, it demands identity.
My brothers and I walk around the graveyard looking for inspiration at the other graves. The oldest stones are illegible, lichen-covered or wind-scoured, but still dignified. The baroque eighteen century table tombs favour verse, not good, but heartfelt; the flourishes are fading as they weather. The Victorian ones are a tad over-sized, the lettering stands at attention like an troop of infantry. But I liked the flat cambered stones that sheltered the graves like roofs.
Modern markers are timid in comparison. Our scurrying lives have led to the chilly concept of ‘low-maintenance’ graves. Diocesan fiats limit originality with rules about size, style, stone and decorations. Stones have to suit the place, not the dead. There are even regulations about wording. One diocese directs that inscriptions ‘should be neither presumptuous nor laudatory’ and decoration limited to ‘vertical lines or a small cross or small flower’.
With a strong sense that Mother deserved better, I found myself researching into burial customs. In Dominion of the Dead, Robert Harrison describes the antiquity of our urge to people the ground under our dwelling-places with our ancestors. The first permanent homes were built to house the dead, not the living. Then we popped them in our own cellars, only later shifting them to church crypts and graveyards.
The burial chamber of a Saxon Christian chief was discovered last year in Essex. Sand had filled it, preserving everything as it had been arranged 1400 years ago. A drawing showed how thoughtfully it had been furnished, not with treasure but with comforts. A basket of blankets, a folding chair, a checkers board leaning against the wall, a purse of small change - to tip St Peter? Mother, a wizard at creating domestic cosiness, would have loved it.
I’ve been saved from such impossible aspirations by a friend who told me about an organization (based at Snape Priory, Saxmundham, Suffolk) called Memorials by Artists, which puts you in touch, wherever you live, with local artists who specialise in memorials. She took me to see her own mother’s headstone - made by a sculptor who knew the right stone to use, and who, like Eric Gill, saw letters as living things, not mere symbols. A piercing at the top of the stone echoed the ogee curves of the church windows, and every word of the inscription was chosen with care.
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