Religion, Great Aunts and more dire funerals.

When I was five my strict, challenging, lovely Great Aunt got down on her hands and knees and let me ride around the garden on her back because I was pretending she was a horse.

When I was eight she washed my mouth out with soap and water because I said "Bugger." Once. Quietly.

When I was sixteen and got my G.C.S.E's she said, "Of course they're not bad, but you could have done a lot better if you had just applied yourself a little bit more." She was a Headmistress you see.

When I was twenty five she said to my husband when I took him to meet her, "I'm sure you must be very handsome, but I can't see you until I sit down." Because by then she was so bent over with Osteoperosis that her main view was mostly of the floor.

This is the Great Aunt who spoke fluent French and German, and who (according to her passport stamps) spent a long time in France during the war, but who denies ever working for the Resistance.

This is the Great Aunt who had a different pair of coloured leather gloves for every single occasion. And a hat to match.

This is the Great Aunt who's retirement plan was to travel around the world in her car, but who's 'God' took her sight away before she could.

This is the Great Aunt whom I am named after. 'Great Aunt Isabella', or to me and you 'Auntie Ella'. And randomly, nearly everyone else knew her as 'Katie' but no-one seems to have any idea why.

This is the Great Aunt who's funeral I attended today. And what a lot of them there seem to be lately.

But this one is different. This one is really High Church. Since she was very religious they have pulled out all the stops. There are at least three Vicars, a Canon, several Lay Preachers, heaps of prayers, five hymns, a ceremonial reading, a lot of 'committing this body to God', pomp, circumstance and me busily studying the upside-down prayer cushion for most of the service, trying to decipher the date that it was stitched in.

(And also noticing that the Canon obviously smoked a lot of gear in his cassock in his spare time since he had a lot of hot rock burns in it, all down the front of it.)

So I deal with the pretence of prayers and the miming of hymns I don't know, and the eulogies, but then if that wasn't bad enough we the family have to follow the pall bearers out of the church whilst everyone else stands and watches, and I am aware of them all looking at us to see if we are crying, all of them staring at us and silently accusing us of not being the perfect family, of only caring for her now she is gone, of only wanting the inheritance, and not being bothered about the illness, of not putting her in a good enough home and what was she doing in a home ANYWAY...

...tut...

And we have to follow whilst they carry the coffin round to the graveyard, and then have to stand by the side of the weirdly deep hole (why is it so deep?) And do the whole "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" thing, and we throw little Sillers onto the coffin because they were her favourite flower and my Auntie Rosie picked them in her garden especially, just before the funeral.

But it was exactly what my Great Aunt wanted. She would have loved the ceremony of it all, the importance, the fact that in her final moment she was having all the glory after her years and years and years of selfless Churchy service. Because she spent thirty years dedicated to this particular little village church, writing prayers, reading sermons, organising flowers. Generally caring...

So why is it that when I know this was what she wanted and had specifically requested, why is it that the whole time we are burying her I am picturing her being dead and being in the coffin and slowly rotting away, and the worms coming and the mould coming and the maggots coming, and I am just wishing she had chosen to be cremated because it's so much cleaner, so less messy, so much more dealable with. For me.

But she was worried, you see.

She was worried that if she was cremated then there would be nothing to resurrect.

She was worried that if she was cremated then there would be nothing to resurrect, and this mattered to her because she truly, utterly, totally believed that One Day The Resurrection Definitely Would Happen.

Bless her.