Something for the coffin

In the Church of England, parish doesn’t refer to a congregation, a membership roll or a sphere of influence. It means a literal geographical area. The whole country is divided into historic parishes, which until the 19th century were coterminous with secular areas of administration. Every vicar or rector (the terms are largely interchangeable and equivalent) has a parish, and everyone who resides in the whole country has a vicar or rector whether he or she likes it or not. It is the duty and joy of a parish priest to conduct the funeral of anyone who resides in the parish if that person or a loved one so wishes.

And so it was that I was called to preside at the funeral of Michael. Michael had had a difficult life. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative muscle condition that affects one in 3,500 boys. He spent a good deal of his life in a children’s hospice and was only 14 when he died. After receiving the funeral director’s call I went to visit Michael’s mother. She was young; I guessed that she must have had Michael when she was about 17. She had no other children, and there was no sign of Michael’s father or any other partner. She had been alone with Michael; she was even more alone without him.

Like most funerals of people not closely connected with a church, Michael’s funeral took place in the crematorium chapel. There were touching mementos from other hospice children and from nurses and well-wishers. I was invited back to the house for the wake. Clergy tell themselves that they attend the wake for a sense of completion—the death or the service may evoke profound feelings that mourners might want to share with a priest while the rest of the company finishes off the Lambrusco. But the truth is that clergy attend these events to receive compliments about how pastoral and sensitive the funeral was and how well they “captured” the deceased even though they never knew him.