1 Don't Put That In

“Don’t Put That In!”

I hear these words a lot. Once the ice is broken on a family visit and the stories are flying, people forget that I am taking notes and they just go where the blether takes them. They tell a juicy tale … and then remember that I am gathering these stories to write a funeral service and they turn to me in panic and say: “Don’t put that in!”

Maybe it was an off-the-cuff mention of a favourite piece of choice language used in times of mischief … or maybe a way that things were done back in the day that would have social services at your door in a heart-beat today. I hear them all. And I love hearing them all because that is when you know you are really doing your job right – you’ve melted away into the background and people are just talking as if you aren’t even there. That’s the point. A service is never about me – I don’t even introduce myself at the start of a service – I am just the voice chosen to re-tell the stories. I should vanish into the background and let the stories take centre stage.

Often, I manage to persuade the family to let me sneak the story in. We aren’t there to tell the tidy surface of a person, but to really tell them as we found them. My favourite compliment after a service is to be asked how I knew the person in life. Isn’t that wonderful? That you might have listened closely enough that people who DID know them think that you must have known them too? To be told that you ‘got them to a T’ – high praise indeed.

But those ‘lost’ stories – the ones that I really don’t get to put in. That’s what this is going to be about. Sort of. These days I laugh and tell people that I am going to write a book called ‘Don’t Put That In!’ and that all of those forbidden stories are going to find their way into the pages. With names changed to protect the innocent … probably. Sometimes families get really into that idea and give me a few other stories ‘only for the book’ and tell me that they would love to read it one day. Maybe this is the first step towards that ‘one day’.

To give you a flavour of the stories that I DO manage to get families to agree to put in anyway, this is a golden story from a client of the past:

We’ll call her Betty and her husband Jimmy. Well, Jimmy and Betty had what she referred to as a ‘mixed marriage’ where their families had given them a great deal of hardship over a union of a young Catholic boy and a young Protestant girl. They were sure enough of their love to marry regardless and had enjoyed more than 50 years together. Not that it was perfect, her family assured me, but they made it work.

Jimmy’s faith was important to him and so, when he passed, Betty wanted him to have the Catholic service that would have meant so much to him. By this time Betty was rather hard of hearing and so spoke more loudly than she thought she did. She had also developed a wee habit of muddling her words and these two things came together in a show-stoppingly hilarious wee verbal mishap.

During Jimmy’s funeral service, as the Priest passed by the grieving family, Betty turned to her daughter and loudly proclaimed ‘I do love the smell of incest!’ Now, of course, she meant incense and of course it was a terrible case of muddled words and bad timing … but it had the whole family absolutely creased with laughter when they told me. And laughing again when I used it as one of the last stories told at Betty’s own service … after I persuaded them that it was too good to ONLY go in the book!

Younger generations conveniently forget that the older members of their family were young once too and that the dark sense of humour that they are so known for had its origins in their up-bringing. And then there are the people like I plan to be who relish the ability to get away with stuff because they are old – who have the attitude that they have worked hard all their lives and are going to make their retirement an interesting one.

My own plan is to remind myself how to knit and to knit lovely, clearly home-knitted, jumpers … with terrible swearwords on them. I can’t wait to see people’s faces as they take in the hand-crafted goodness, lean in to see the finer detail and find the F-bomb there in all its glory! I’m laughing already just thinking about it! Sweet old lady and sweary jumper – what a combo!

Clothes and outfit choices provide quite a number of my ‘one for the book’ stories, but here’s one more little gem that I DID manage to put in:

We’ll call him Fred and call her Ginger. They were a couple who liked to dance and who shared, what their family referred to as, a ‘rather dark’ sense of humour. In fact one of Fred’s favourite stories was of a dancefloor … situation back when he and Ginger were still dating. He told of a young Ginger dancing an enthusiastic foxtrot when the elastic of her knickers snapped and they fell right off her! He said that she just stepped out of them and carried on dancing and this, he would later joke, was how he came to get her knickers off before they were married!

There were tears of laughter as well as loss during Ginger’s service. So much so that I had to take a moment to take a breath and get myself serious again! Ginger had outlived Fred and the gathering was small since she was 90 years old and most of her friends had passed already. Her family and I, however, told tales and laughed and it was one of the warmest celebrations of life that I have been involved in.

So, in amongst the stories only for the book, I will also be telling some of the ones where I also heard the phrase “Oh OK, do put that in!”