Toby Young Toby Young

Death at a funeral

Something very odd occurred at a funeral I attended last week — somebody died. I don’t mean the person who was being buried. They had died a few days earlier, obviously. I mean one of the mourners passed away during the service. That was shocking in its own right, but what made it surreal is that the other mourners carried on as if nothing had happened.

The funeral took place in the deceased’s garden, where her family had arranged for her to be buried, and at the conclusion of the service someone announced that wine and food would be served. The 100 or so people in attendance formed a queue at the kitchen door and started chatting among themselves. Meanwhile, the poor woman who had died was flat out on the grass behind them.

Actually, that description doesn’t quite do justice to how bizarre the scene was. The woman wasn’t simply lying in a corner of the garden, where she might have gone unnoticed. Rather, she was being attended to by a doctor who was doing his best to resuscitate her. That is, he was performing vigorous CPR in a way which was impossible not to be aware of. Then, after about ten minutes, an ambulance crew arrived and started trying to shock her back to life. It was like a scene out of Holby City, with a paramedic shouting ‘Clear!’ before applying the electrodes. It could not have been more dramatic. And yet no one paid the slightest bit of attention.

I can think of several explanations. The first and most important is that there are no longer any clear social guidelines when it comes to death and funerals. Had it been a Christian service, there would have been an obvious authority figure — the vicar or priest — and he would have suspended or postponed the service while he dealt with the crisis.

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