“A live performance of ELO’s Mr Blue Sky in the church … absolutely everyone must be invited to the house afterwards. Don’t ask Millie or Matt to do anything – it’ll be too much.”
I knew that after 17 years of telling me what to do to avoid my screwing up, Helen was giving me her final and most bloody awful set of directions – her wishlist for her own funeral. Sitting at the hospital bedside, her sister Sarah and I listened in silent pieces. It jarred so much with Helen’s positivity over the past 20 months. But true to form, minutes later she was enthusing about the Italian holiday she’d organised, which was still five months away. As it turned out, she would miss being there by four months and 26 days.
Helen’s list was short, including a low-key crematorium committal, followed by a full-fat church celebration of her life.
Dying in your 40s means the people who care are mostly alive and mobile. This would be big and Sarah and I planned a last great hurrah for Helen – as much her as our wedding in Vegas had been but without the (female) minister in the pink trouser suit.
A band was formed of friends and family and a week before the service 40 people turned up to practise ELO’s uplifting but musically complex anthem to life. It was an emotional but beautiful and love-shrouded afternoon which would ensure that the vim and vigour of singing in church would match Helen’s passion for life.
On the dreaded day, the crematorium service was OK despite my fears and long-held desire to be tipped off the pier in a tea chest when my own time comes, rather than put loved ones through it.
My biggest fear had been that the first sight of the coffin would be too much for everyone, so we’d chosen a beautifully rounded wicker one to lessen its impact. I held Millie and Matt tightly as the hearse arrived with their mother – the woven coffin and its garland of wild flowers not really disguising in any way the full horror of who was in it and why we were there.
We walked behind the ancient Rolls-Royce whose fumes from what was clearly a dangerously over-rich engine added no small amount to the sheer horribleness of the occasion (later that week I saw it on a recovery truck so I was right and just hope it hadn’t broken down “occupied”).
We laid single flowers on Helen – mine a poppy to mark how much she had loved buying a ceramic one from Blood Swept Lands …, the Tower of London’s centenary Remembrance display. Millie laid a sunflower and Matt a single snowdrop, which was beautiful but heartbreaking in its fragile simplicity.
Leaving, my iPod played a selection of Helen’s favourites. There are still probably people shocked by the group of mourners with Carry on Screaming! blaring out of the speakers on their coach – it wasn’t on Helen’s list but I’m certain she would approve. So we had endured the farewell, protected by the physical and emotional chainmail of our linked hands and hearts.
At the church, the only one of Helen’s wishes we didn’t follow was that Millie and Matt insisted on reading Edward Lear’s poem, The Owl and the Pussycat, which we’d loved. They read in turn in front of the 350-400 gathered with such composure that it left no room for me to indulge in either nerves or breakdown. This wouldn’t be the last time that I’d take heart from the kids’ youthful version of their mother’s determination and courage.
My eulogy is calm and clear. In researching for it, I’d felt just how accomplished, loved and respected Helen was and feel that everyone discovered a new facet of the richness of her life.
Helen was the star of her show, which is how it should be, and as I asked the congregation (not sure the vicar approved) to applaud a too short life so well lived, I could not have meant it more. I always knew I was lucky to have known her but now realise how privileged I was.
I’d expected this to be the worst day of my life. Helen’s funeral was always going to have competition for sheer memorable misery alongside the day she was diagnosed with cancer and when I had to tell the kids that there was no hope. In truth, it was a perversely beautiful day, filled with admiration, salutation and discovery.
“I’ll remember you this, I’ll remember you this way”
• Adam Golightly is a pseudonym
