We brought Grandad to the church last night, and are to bury him this morning. I didn't want to go in to the funeral home to see him in his coffin - dressed in his suit and Aston Villa tie, the bruise from when last he fell still shining on his forehead, rosary beads knotted in his hands. But I was opening doors, escorting an elderly aunt and it seemed only proper to follow her in. Funerals are all about propriety, aren't they? I lasted all of two minutes in there. It wasn't Grandad himself that I didn't want to be around, it was everyone else crowded into the tiny chapel, the dim light, the uncomfortable silence. I sat outside instead, talking weather with the funeral director and golf with my two handsome little cousins.
My air of decorum lapsed between the funeral home and the church; my dad and I took a stroll instead of a lift and the elastic snapped in the waistband of my woolly black tights, meaning I had to spend the rest of the evening trying to walk with my legs crossed lest the tights ended up around my ankles (I eventually tied a great big knot in the waistband, making for an unflattering silhouette but a more natural gait). I'm playing it safe for the funeral mass this morning and wearing jeans and cowboy boots. I've to do a reading (as Gaeilge, so I may as well give a weather report as a reading from the Book of Wisdom, as I think I'll be the only one present who speaks Irish anyway) and the last thing I want is to trip over my own undergarments as I step up to the plate.
I am, however, reassured that no matter what I do up there this morning, I cannot possibly be more offensive than the priest who welcomed Grandad to the church last night. I've written about Fr. Sensitive before, after I enjoyed a particularly misogynistic sermon of his over Christmas. You might expect a degree of compassion from him on an occasion such as this one, but you would be disappointed. As well as getting Grandad's name wrong from the get-go, he indulged in an offensive, insensitive, irrelevant and entirely inappropriate sermon which lasted for the best part of, oh, a fucking lifetime. He spoke mainly about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family, denouncing promiscuity (repeatedly, loudly and in no uncertain terms) single parent families, "other things" and money, the root of all evil. He peppered his sermon with humanising touches, being holy does not have to mean being boring you know. Why, he himself enjoys the characters in the Premiership and has a friend video the football for him. "Alex liked football too" he admitted, trying to turn his self-indulgent rant into something that was relevant to the man we were there to mourn and failing miserably by again calling him by the wrong name. Had it been anything other than my grandfather's removal I'd have walked out, as would everyone else I spoke to after the sermon. As my brother pointed out afterwards, funerals are the Catholic church's no. 1 PR opportunity, where they can prove their worth by offering solace to a grieving family in front of a crowd that they wouldn't have on a Sunday - an audience, not a congregation. Instead people left the church yesterday evening relieved not to be a part of it.
My air of decorum lapsed between the funeral home and the church; my dad and I took a stroll instead of a lift and the elastic snapped in the waistband of my woolly black tights, meaning I had to spend the rest of the evening trying to walk with my legs crossed lest the tights ended up around my ankles (I eventually tied a great big knot in the waistband, making for an unflattering silhouette but a more natural gait). I'm playing it safe for the funeral mass this morning and wearing jeans and cowboy boots. I've to do a reading (as Gaeilge, so I may as well give a weather report as a reading from the Book of Wisdom, as I think I'll be the only one present who speaks Irish anyway) and the last thing I want is to trip over my own undergarments as I step up to the plate.
I am, however, reassured that no matter what I do up there this morning, I cannot possibly be more offensive than the priest who welcomed Grandad to the church last night. I've written about Fr. Sensitive before, after I enjoyed a particularly misogynistic sermon of his over Christmas. You might expect a degree of compassion from him on an occasion such as this one, but you would be disappointed. As well as getting Grandad's name wrong from the get-go, he indulged in an offensive, insensitive, irrelevant and entirely inappropriate sermon which lasted for the best part of, oh, a fucking lifetime. He spoke mainly about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family, denouncing promiscuity (repeatedly, loudly and in no uncertain terms) single parent families, "other things" and money, the root of all evil. He peppered his sermon with humanising touches, being holy does not have to mean being boring you know. Why, he himself enjoys the characters in the Premiership and has a friend video the football for him. "Alex liked football too" he admitted, trying to turn his self-indulgent rant into something that was relevant to the man we were there to mourn and failing miserably by again calling him by the wrong name. Had it been anything other than my grandfather's removal I'd have walked out, as would everyone else I spoke to after the sermon. As my brother pointed out afterwards, funerals are the Catholic church's no. 1 PR opportunity, where they can prove their worth by offering solace to a grieving family in front of a crowd that they wouldn't have on a Sunday - an audience, not a congregation. Instead people left the church yesterday evening relieved not to be a part of it.
