I was at a funeral the other day at which the music was so inspiring that I struggled to feel sad. That’s fair enough, you may think — but the person in the coffin was my own mother.
This is a difficult point to explain in cold print, but there are reasons why I wasn’t grief-stricken at the death of the person who meant most to me in the world.
My mother Pamela loved my sister and me with a passion; she radiated holiness, but in an unobtrusively English way.
She was also a very private person, sometimes driven to distraction by her attention-seeking son. She never sought — and never received — any official recognition of her decades of service to the Catholic Church. Well into her eighties, she spent day after day taking the Blessed Sacrament (and her joyful smile) to Catholics lying seriously ill in hospital. Later, one of those patients was able to perform the same service for her.
Alas, in her last years my mother suffered enormously. I won’t go into detail, but the nature of her illness meant that I did most of my grieving while she was still alive. Therefore planning the music for her funeral wasn’t as upsetting as it might have been.
But it was an honour as well as a duty and I had to get it right. Catholic music is often excruciating — I call it ‘Joan Baez meets Hildegard of Bingen in a 1970s cocktail lounge’. At funerals this is toned down a bit, but if there’s one thing worse than cod-folk ‘worship songs’ it’s a traditional hymn with an organist who vamps his way through the accompaniment. If that had happened, I’d have lost all my self-control and probably flung myself on the coffin like a Sicilian widow.
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