Ashes to ashes

My 70-year-old acting teacher and friend died suddenly this week. A heart attack in Market Square, which sent him lurching back for a fatal bang on the head. He was forever young, and went without the indiginity of tubes up the nose and other instances of the pointless prolongation of life that is misnamed "care". "'Get up, find a space, and stand in it'," started one of his close friends in her tribute.

In the car coming back from the wake, I wondered aloud why Christianity has to stick its oar into funerals all the time. A surprisingly short day: I joined a couple of stragglers who, like me, were back in Lancaster three hours after it had started. A funeral, surely, lasts all day.

As soon as I found out his funeral arrangements, I rang Kirsty. To tell her that a friend had died and that the girls might have to get their own tea and be on their own for two or three hours. "Yeah, it's David, my old acting teacher. The funeral's on Friday at 1.15 and then we're all going up to Bolton-le-Sands for the wake, so I'll probably be back at about six or seven."

Although I know Kirsty better than to receive anything like sympathy, I wondered whether I might receive a brief expression of regret at my loss, or a suggestion that she could get any of the numerous reliable neighbours round here to look in on the girls whilst she's entertaining her boyfriend in Kendal.

She hardly paused. "Well, you had the the other weekend off for the cricket." I felt a hot flare of anger at her lack of empathy. "Yeah, but I've got to go to his funeral haven't I?", challenging her to oppose it so that I could let loose the volley of indignation I was repressing.

The funeral reminded me that I should circulate to my daughters, to Kirsty, and Kim, (who would be good in a crisis) my wishes; the most important amongst which are that, after my body has been plundered for anything that might be useful to anyone else, I want to be buried, not cremated; and I do not want the slightest mention of Christianity nor its secular equivalent, "spirituality", at my funeral. I find cremation repellent, a violent, disrespectful act made even more odious by its inevitable recall of events of the past century. How we have normalised the burning of our deceased loved ones is incomprehensible.

When I am dead, my body will be lowered into the ground in a cheap, flimsy cardboard coffin, into a grave at Scotforth Cemetery in Lancaster. Worms will consume my body and I will be recycled into the wings of flies and the legs of fleas.