His two sons, his grandsons and a family friend all gathered at the mortuary to wash him thoroughly, before his body, simply covered in a shroud, was laid in the ground. His head was turned towards Mecca and wooden boards laid over him to protect him from the clods of earth that would be sprinkled into the grave by those who mourned him. He was an 82-year-old Muslim with a long white beard who had died the previous evening. Tim Gardam, principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, took us behind the scenes to witness the rituals of a Muslim funeral. We could hear the splashes of water and squeezing of cloths in the mortuary, where one of the grandsons told us, ‘To be here is a privilege…A moment when all fear of death is banished.’
Such an intimate moment could not have been filmed, but as radio listeners we could enter into the spirit of the moment without intruding on the private grief of those who were washing the body. It was a privilege for us too, and an intensely valuable reminder of how precious the experience of death is for the living.
In Beyond This Life (a two-part series on Radio Four, Sundays), Gardam has been thinking through this connection between the quick and the dead; a connection that has now been almost lost by the Christian community. Gardam also talked to two teenage girls whose friend Dan had been killed in a car crash. Neither of them had any faith in God, or much experience of formal religious worship. How, then, should his death be acknowledged? What kind of service could be devised to celebrate his life? Hymns were not relevant because none of the teenage mourners would know the tunes; prayers, too, were meaningless. Yet both the girls said they wanted to believe that Dan was now ‘in a better place’, almost as if it was their responsibility to ensure he got there. The impulses are still the same, even if the rituals for expressing those instincts have been abandoned.
You don’t often hear lullabies sung at funerals but Lucie Skeaping’s edition of The Early Music Show on Saturday (Radio Three) gave us a selection of soothing, rhythmic, repetitive melodies that were both calming and deeply reassuring. I’d love her first choice, ‘My sweet little darling’, to be played at my funeral, though not I hasten to add because of the words. It’s thought to be by William Byrd, and in the version played on Saturday was sung by Alain Zaepffel accompanied by a consort of viols. Zaepffel sings with such an amazing liquid tone that I’d defy anyone to feel miserable after hearing it.
Gormley on Epstein (Radio Four, Tuesday) was an inspiring reminder by the sculptor Antony Gormley (who gave us the ‘Angel of the North’) of his debt to Jacob Epstein. ‘He was solely responsible for the arrival of modernism in Britain,’ argues Gormley, and not afraid to damn the contemporary obsession with abstraction as ‘not leading to any true development in sculpture’. Yet Epstein’s most famous work, ‘Jacob and the Angel’, which used to take pride of place in the entrance to Tate Britain, has now been relegated to the top of a staircase. ‘It’s no good,’ says Gormley.
He took us back to Epstein’s childhood in New York at the turn of the century; a city teeming with immigrants, where he saw all of human life compressed into tight units, living and surviving in close-up. The experience fuelled Epstein’s art throughout his life: ‘I saw so much that I can draw upon it now.’
This was a wonderfully evocative programme (produced by Kate Bland), and a privilege to be able to hear someone of Gormley’s stature and insight giving us a masterclass on why Epstein matters: ‘He was not afraid to make large, very heavy things about things which can’t be grasped.’
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