We had just laid the empty coffin across our kitchen table (Gordon's name stencilled vertically down the middle and a letter from his wife placed carefully inside) when a friend happened to drop by. She looked uneasily at the man-sized blockboard box lying where the children's evening meal should have been and declined the offer of a cup of tea.
In these sanitised times, it's not usual for the business of burial to intrude on the practicalities of everyday life, but by now my husband Dan and I were so consumed by the practicalities of death that a coffin on the kitchen table seemed almost normal. That day Dan had made the coffin in his shed in a matter of hours: a hasty end to the long-drawn out death of a dear, close friend.
Early in 1997 Gordon's wife Alison had asked us to host their wedding party. Disliking the fuss and formality of traditional English weddings, they wanted a simple affair held in our house (having spent, as they said, 'so many happy eating hours' there) to celebrate their relationship and the forthcoming birth of their first child. When, three years later, Alison asked us to organise Gordon's funeral, there was a sad symmetry to her request.
Twenty months after their wedding, Gordon - then aged 39 - had collapsed outside his City office where he'd been working as a computer analyst since leaving New York to join Alison in London. He'd noticed an occasional weird numbness in his left arm for some time but no one, not even Alison - a consultant at a London hospital - suspected anything was seriously wrong. Now, a brain tumour the size of an orange was located in the right side of his brain.
Gordon should have died that night but somehow pulled through. Six weeks later, there followed a long and complicated operation to his brain, conducted while he was still conscious, resulting in a complete lack of awareness of everything on his left. A subsequent operation a year later left him paralysed and wheelchair-bound. Despite a terminal prognosis, he later underwent a gruelling course of radiotherapy to enhance the quality of his last remaining months, finally dying on 3 November 2000 at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Fulham.
In the days leading up to Gordon's death, Alison began tackling the difficult question of his funeral. They'd previously visited Richmond and Sheen cemetery together and while Gordon had been quite clear he wanted a simple burial with no accompanying ceremony or religious spin, they hadn't discussed details. Although they'd intended to settle the manner in which he would be buried, somehow the business of eking out every last moment of life had in those final weeks overshadowed any thoughts concerning the tumour's inevitable consequences.
At this stage, distraught and distracted, Alison did not feel equipped to make any decisions alone, although she knew that, like her wedding, she wanted a ceremony that was both informal and minimal.
'If I could, I'd take him home and bury him in the garden with my own hands,' she said. She was appalled at the idea of strangers in the form of funeral directors handling her husband. The pomp and show of hearses and men in black suits filled her with dread, as did the prospect of buying a mass-produced coffin and getting anonymous pall bearers to lower her husband's body into a hole in the ground on a plot of land which held no significance to either of them. continued from previous page Fortunately, 72 hours before Gordon died, a social worker at the Royal Marsden handed her a copy of The Natural Death Handbook. It was the reassurance she needed to bury Gordon in the way she wanted to.
It was now up to us to step in and deal with the funeral arrangements, just as we had dealt with those for the wedding. I rang round several Richmond undertakers just to check out how minimally they were prepared to be involved. At one point, I provisionally booked a single funeral director for two hours from Holmes and Daughters for the bargain price of £40 just to oversee proceedings. In the end, however, we decided to go it alone. Since Alison was renting a house, she couldn't bury Gordon in the garden and therefore the next best option was to purchase a plot at Richmond and Sheen cemetery, close to where she lived with her three-year-old daughter, Helen. She wanted a place to return to - somewhere which would become deeply personal. She also wanted the burial to be simple so Helen could behave as she liked and would not be scared.
Liz and Natasha, who run the office at the cemetery, said that only once before could they remember a family turning up in their own vehicle with a coffin in the back to bury their relative themselves. But, despite the rarity of a do-it-yourself funeral, they were respectful of our request to be left alone, stipulating only that graveyard staff would have to dig the hole, and on the day of the funeral the two of them would have to walk ahead of the car to the plot.
Our mutual friends, Helen and Michael, who had also helped out with the wedding, now came down to London to help with the funeral. Gordon's brother Robert and his long-term partner Paul flew in from America. There was no one else. Gordon had wanted a small and personal funeral and Alison made a special request that we should not wear black.
The Royal Marsden Hospital were as surprised as the cemetery that we were doing the funeral ourselves. Mike, in the delicately named 'Facilities' department, hadn't come across anything like this before but agreed to keep Gordon's body for as long as we wanted. As we were the undertakers there was no need to make an extra stop at the funeral directors'.
The funeral took four days to arrange. Dan offered to make the coffin using Gordon's much-treasured tools and was thankfully spared the embarrassment of getting his measurements wrong when Liz at the cemetery spotted from a fax that he'd built the coffin four inches longer than the length of the plot. Modifications were hastily made.
On the day of the funeral, Dan and Michael (a consultant oncologist in Leeds) went to the Royal Marsden to pick Gordon up. Despite the body being concealed in a shroud, Dan recognised him from the position he'd been lying in for the past few days of his life. Having placed the body in the coffin, he said he felt the urge to make Gordon comfortable again, putting a cushion under his legs and wedging cloth on either side. Then they carried the coffin out on to the Fulham streets and slid it unnoticed into the back of Alison's red Vauxhall people carrier. Driving on to Barnes, they called in on Alison for a quick cup of coffee, leaving the coffin in the car draped with a colourful rug. Helen came outside to have a quick look at 'Daddy's box'.
The burial itself went without a hitch. Behind a yew tree two gravediggers discreetly concealed themselves, ready to lend a hand should anything go wrong. The coffin fitted into the shaft, no one lost their grip, the webbing pulled through easily and all of us said a few words about Gordon.
Of the funerals I've been to, this was the most raw, most real and most wretched. What none of us had anticipated was the agony of three-year-old Helen crying inconsolably 'Daddy, Daddy,' asking why he was going down into 'that hole' and begging for someone to get him out.
It was a heartbreaking moment but, as we drove away with Helen's voice wailing for her daddy, there was a sense that as harrowing as this was, one day she would thank her mother for letting her experience her father's funeral. Having been so closely involved in the care of her dying father, it seemed entirely appropriate that she should be closely involved in burying him.
