I opened the church ready for this morning's funeral, then received a call from my friend Valdo, with few corrections to the eulogy I'd written, and practiced reading it until the ladies from Residence Nova Vita arrived. Madame Morel brought an old Macbook with her, to display photos on during her personal tribute. Forewarned of this I was able to provide a couple of extension cables joined, to power the transformer, as there was no socket near enough to the place where she would have to stand. Fortuitously, it had a CD drive, which meant it could be used to play some recorded piano music. We tried it out and it worked fine.
When we went into church to set up the equipment, three quarters of an hour beforehand, we find that the Pompes Funebres attendants had already arrived and installed the coffin in the usual place, without announcing their presence. As the service was to be held in the choir with the coffin in the midst, I asked if this could be done, and they were most obliging. I was a little surprised that there were only two men in attendance. Usually there are three or four on a funeral back in Cardiff.
Attempts to link the Macbook to the portable amplification system to give a more substantial sound were however disastrous. The audio-out socket on the MacBook was not compatible with the standard 3.5mm audio jack. Another reason never to buy Apple products, no matter how good they may be. They enslave you to the consumption of their ever more expensive tech' ecosystem. It would have been easy to slip into the house and fetch an office Windows device to use for playing music, knowing that its audio output would be compatible with the audio cable and sound system, but Madame Morel insisted on sticking with her Mac, rather than juggling with different devices. Neither of us expected when it came to playing music at the start of the service that the MacBook would refuse to play tracks it already showed it could play. After a few minutes embarrassed fiddling we gave up, and did without.
I did the service and eulogy in French, apprehensive that my reading pronunciation would be intelligible, and even managed a few unrehearsed introductory comments in French. There were native French speakers and English speaking ex-pats in the congregation of dozen, so I recited Psalm 23 in English, plus the Kontakion for the Dead from the hymn book in addition. It seemed to be well received.
After the service, the reception took the form of a light lunch at the Hotel Bristol a few hundred metres up the road from the church. We all sat around a long table for a stylish finger buffet and wine. I was seated close to the three care home workers who attended, plus a Nova Vita resident who'd been a friend of the deceased, and was herself in her nineties. She was most engaging and interesting to converse with, having been born in an English colonial household in Malaya between the wars. She's a fluent speaker of French and German, and attributed this to having learned Malay as well as English in the home as a child. Before they met in Switzerland, her husband had been a prisoner of war in Italy. He was a career military man and they moved house twenty times during their life together. Returning to Switzerland towards the end of her life due to her daughter living here. An amazing lunch companion.
It rained all morning, and then I had to drive myself to Bex after lunch for the interment. In the town the signage to the cemetery seemed adequate, and I drove to within 500m of it on the edge of town, but was unable to recognise it, as there were no further sign posts, and although it's a straight road it's much further away from the town, with its walls surrounded by tall laurel hedges and nothing to indicate where the entrance is. I had to double back and solicit the help of a friendly local resident, just leaving home in his car, to find it. He took the trouble to escort me there, using a short cut only a local would have known about. Perhaps he was aware of how difficult it could be for a stranger to identify the place. How kind!
It just kept raining throughout the interment, and I was glad that I'd slipped my order of service into a plastic wallet before leaving the house. Two cemetery workers joined the funeral attendants to lower the coffin into the grave, and apart from myself and the notaire, the three Care Home staff were present.
Then we drove to a restaurant in the town centre for a final cup of tea before parting company, benefiting from a free parking day in the nearby parking place, as today is one of Switzerland's special jours de congé, Jeune Fédéral. A jeune is a fast, and there was a time when state churches called upon the population to pray and fast for the well being of the nation. Although Swiss church attendance is as dire as in any other secularised Western European country, Protestants more so than Catholics, special services are still held with this intention. The occasion is marked by messages from public figures in churches and state, reflecting on moral and social issues, and encouraging citizens to work together for the common good - a bit like the Queen's Christmas speech.
One last thing about a demanding but fascinating day. Madame Morel and her colleague turned up at the cemetery in a large decorated high-top van, belonging and promoting her husband's business. He designs and builds kinetic sculptures. Over lunch she talked about their holiday Scotland before which he had to deliver one of his works to the MAD museum in Stratford on Avon. We had a very funny moment when she spoke of towing a trailer containing their motorbike and a sculpture of her husband. How strange, I thought, and quizzed her, which was when she explained he was a kinetic artist, of international repute, only slowly realising that she meant to say made by her husband. That says something about my limited knowledge of the nuances of French!
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