The Green Funeral Company’s Claire and Rupert Callender offer an ecological alternative to traditional funerals. Ru attends to our collective grief.
EVEN if we do not know someone who has died, as a result of the Covid pandemic or anything else, we are all grieving. Grief is always about more than just death. We grieve missed opportunities, ended relationships, things said, things not said, our fertility, our youth, the passing of time, friendships lost in the swirl of life.
And now we are all grieving for the most unimaginably simple yet profound and far reaching losses we have ever experienced together. Good things we took for granted all of our lives.
The absence of big family Sunday lunches, an inconsequential cheery chat over a pint, the everyday bustle of our High Streets, the swirl of a crowd of people in a foreign city, the hush that falls on a cinema as the lights go down, the roar of a crowd of thousands at a football match, the feeling of dancing all night with friends and strangers under a summer moon.
All of this has gone, for now. There have been many stories arising from our national and international experience of this pandemic. Lockdown is of course causing a huge crisis in mental health, but it is also causing people to reflect and mourn for all sorts of things.
One thing I have heard of over and over again, is people weeping for their long dead. Parents and siblings who have been buried for decades.
It is like the collective permafrost of our emotions is thawing, and there revealed are the bodies of our ancestors, perfectly preserved, as if they had died yesterday. Lives we thought had been absorbed into the mantle of history, love we thought had been dispersed into the subsoil of our past are freshly exposed, vivid with detail and familiarity.
This has been deeply saddening for some, and strangely comforting for others.
Our ancestors, including ourselves, are always closer than we think, and grief is never completely wept dry. Human hearts remember deep and long, and have a loyalty that far outlasts conscious memory.
Thanks to science, and the amazing work put in by our astonishing health workers, NHS as well as private carers rather than any moves made by the bumbling of our government, this virus will be gradually wrestled under control, and the life that we grieve for so keenly right now, will slowly return.
After the terrible global ravaging of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918-19 had passed and the danger was over, joy rushed into fill that empty space.
It paved the way for The Roaring Twenties which saw an explosion of culture music and dancing and public exaltations of shared pleasure.
We will dance and hug each other again.
In the meantime, lower your head to see what is being revealed. Uncover your perfectly preserved grief, exhume your ancestors, far and near who suffered as we all do through the gift of being alive. Weep for them.
Mourn your own unmourned deaths, dress your own long unattended wounds, quietly aching just under your everyday clothes, pushed aside by hurry, and other’s needs.
We will sing together again.
Visit www. thegreenfuneralcompany. co.uk or email enquiry@thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk or call 07759 890 639.