Closing the circle

Overcast with periods of showers today. I spent much of the morning recording and editing the audio for next Thursday's Morning Prayer. Then, with the prospect of five funerals in one day to prepare for, there was a lot more work to do. Phone calls to make, service sheets to prepare and brief introductions to each service to write, each one being different. 

A learning experience for me, with each family responding to the death of a loved one in different ways. Some organised a celebratory memorial gathering in the weeks after. For them Tuesday's brief service is definitely understood as a ritual of closure two years on. Having no information about the deceased apart from name, age and address in other cases means that when mourners arrive for their service, I'll need to find out quickly before we begin. 

I was impressed to hear from bereaved next of kin of the positive experience of being dealt with by funeral companies and the University Medical School, in preparation for a death anticipated. One woman told me how a young medical student relative had shown her around the Faculty of Medicine and given her a tour of the anatomy department. She was impressed by the respect shown towards the bodies students worked on, and was persuaded to bequeath her own. She persuaded her husband to do likewise. Another couple also made the same decision, finding consolation in the midst of sorrow at the prospect of continuing to be useful at the end of life in the flesh.

For all the families, this brief ceremony reunites their memory of the departed with that person's mortal remains, after the two years of separation as an anonymous subject in an anatomy laboratory completing the circle of life in the traditional customary way. 

I stopped for lunch, then continued working into the afternoon before setting foot outside the house for a walk to Aldi's to buy wine for the weekend. Fortunately, there were no more showers. After supper another unsatisfying double episode of 'The Sommerdahl Murders', which went on too long. It was eleven before I went out for fresh air before bed and walked around the streets of Pontcanna. I was surprised at the queue of slow traffic on Penhill Road, then remembered that the 'Tafwyl' Welsh music festival started tonight in a broad enclosure on Cooper's Field containing a huge tented stage which I noticed yesterday. I heard people on the streets chatting in Welsh on the street making their way home from across the Fields. It reflects the social change which has taken place in our neighbourhood since we moved back here fourteen years ago.