The day before Greg Mcqueen died in Brunswick Heads, the funeral director arrived at Greg’s home to organise his services.
As ever, strong and sassy to the end – Greg was laying in his lounge room hospital bed.
The family and I stood in sweltering March heat, as the cool-as-a-cucumber funeral director adjusted the cuff links beyond the sleeves of his navy blue Armani suit.
Boxes for dead people
He brought with him a well developed aura of austerity, fear and sadness as he ceremoniously opened the first page of the book – the book of coffins, caskets – boxes for dead people.
He proudly showed us the one on the first page and he said, ‘this one is $10,000’. The Mcqueen family looked like they’d been doused in a bucket of ice water.
Greg’s wife Angela looked at the book, and looked at the funeral director, and looked at me, and looked at her family, and looked at her dying husband who was enjoying the sun coming through the window, and looked back at the book.
‘Um. Well I don’t know…’ The clutches of the ‘but-don’t-you-want-the-best-for-your-dear-loved-one?’ grin had no effect on the funeral director’s audience.
He turned the page and was in the middle of saying ‘this is quite a nice one for $8,000’, when I interjected and suggested there might be something more of a budget option.
The relief in the room was visible, that is everyone but the funeral director who stared daggers at me while he flipped over to the very last page of his tome with a loud ‘floomp’. ‘Well, we have this plain pine one with rope handles for $1,800’.
I was appalled by the man’s behaviour.
‘What do you think Greg?’ asked Angela from across the room.
‘I’m happy with that one,’ said Greg, and again I interjected and reminded them all that they would only be covering it with a Collingwood football flag anyway. ‘You won’t even see the box’.
It was that day that I decided to make funerals more ‘user’ friendly.
We don’t do death well
As a culture, we don’t do death well. We are not taught about it enough as children, we are frightened of it as adults and mostly, we just don’t know how to ‘be’ around it.
The knee jerk response to a death in white Australia is to immediately align oneself with the dearly or not-so-dearly departed.
All of a sudden there are ‘best friends’ popping up all over the place, and handfuls of ‘oh I went to school with them’, and ‘I used to shop on the street where they lived’ – we seem to need to bathe in the limelight surrounding the hole where someone once was.
What is that?
The other common phenomena is to home in on the people who really were close to the deceased and point out their faults – a local GP told me that is it very common for the care-giving children of an elder who has died or is dying, to be the subject of targeted character assassination from remote siblings, as a response to their own guilt.
A woman I know spent almost four years, almost single-handedly (her choice), living with her elder who didn’t want to go into a nursing home. Out of a blue, an interstate sibling who had always been congenial, turned into a slandering, bullying monster, who turned everyone’s life into a miserable abyss just as they were all grieving.
WHAT IS THAT!?
We don’t do grief well
Yes, everyone grieves in a different way but it’s important that everyone UNDERSTANDS, that everyone grieves in a different way.
Once we are born the only sure thing is that we will at some time, sooner or later, die.
Wouldn’t it be better if we were prepared for that? How ‘normal’ would it be, and less mind, body and soul-wrenching if children were desensitised to the idea of death as a frightening ghoul waiting to pounce, and shown that, no matter the cause, it is a usual and expected part of our existence – people can attach whatever afterlife beliefs they want to it, but no matter where we end up, death is still part of the process, unavoidable, final and actually, ok.
Imagine living life in a way that accommodated that…
Such is…
In an addendum to the Mcqueen story, his widow said the arrival of his cremains was an entirely different vignette to the Armani-clad coffin salesman.
‘When he turned up with Greg’s ashes he looked like he’d just walked off the beach, wearing thongs, a singlet and boardies.’
Ah, such is life – or death.
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