When my boy died I travelled up to be with him and I was hundreds of miles away from home. I had to find someone to bring him home for me.
My first idea was to phone someone in the small Dartmoor town where he went to school. I had no idea at that point that undertakers were so variable. So there I was in this anonymous hotel in a big city, refusing to queue for coffee as I couldn’t tolerate just standing there waiting. I remember just walking to the front of the queue not giving a shit who might complain.
The horrible undertaker
So at some point I called this undertaker place and explained that we needed him to be picked up from the Midlands. I needed to know how they were going to move him - what kind of vehicle. The guy said, “We use a Ford Galaxy with the seats taken out. We’ll pick it up in that.” Yes, he said, “It.” I objected, he said “We have to have a language to understand each other in this business.” So that was that, no way could I allow them to touch my boy.
The lovely undertakers
My dear friend called me - or maybe I called her - who knows? She had bumped into someone who recommended an undertaker. I called them. Oh. My. God. They were incredible.
An old farmhouse with slate rooved stone outbuildings in Cornwall became my son’s holiday home for a week or so. He had an outbuilding to himself. I took his music there and they played it to him when I wasn’t even there. I went every day and sat in their kitchen sometimes with their young children around, sometimes not. I smoked in those days. Skinny little rollups one after another, all day and all night. Sometimes I could hardly breathe.
We put his flags and posters up in his ‘room’ and we sat with him - the other kids had a smoke with him - he had grown a plant before he died. I drank Mumm Champagne despite the fact that he used to call me, “Mother.” I took some clothes there for him but didn’t realise how cold he would be in just a t-shirt. I stripped off the top of his that I was wearing and asked them to put that on him. They did. And also lent me a jumper,
Talking and smoking and self-recrimination
“They” were called Claire and Ru and they were amazing listeners. I talked and talked about my boy, my other children and our lives and they heard me and kept telling me what a great Mum I was. I have sometimes thought that they did that because they knew. They knew what was coming for me. They knew about the tsunami of self-recrimination and guilt that was about to engulf me and overwhelm me for years afterwards. A retracing of every decision and action I had taken or not taken for him since the day he was born and I rashly allowed the nurses to put him under the lamps because they said he had jaundice. That has worried me - the effect of that separation just after birth. They told me when they gave me his ashes that these weighed the same as a new-born baby.
Anyway, they were amazing and I made the decisions I had to make about coffins and other stuff. These aren’t really decisions though, just whims or random ideas that masquerade as considered preferences. We had an open coffin and a huge fly kept buzzing round him in the church. It wasn’t a great funeral, it was random and lots of people I should have told I didn’t think of as I couldn’t really think. There was no food at the after pub and I still feel guilty that my mum was there having to eat packets of crisps while I drank too much gin.