Steve Braunias: I was MC for a friend’s funeral

There is so much industry and necessity behind the scenes of death, writes Steve Braunias. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Kay’s funeral was held last Saturday at the Maclaurin Chapel in the grounds of the University of Auckland. I was asked by the family to MC, to officiate, to act the vicar; and so I now play funerals. Are you thinking of dying? I may be available. Weddings and 21sts next, who knows? I’ve been wondering about a late-career change. Kay was a good friend to me and always very generous and maybe her farewell is her final gift.

Kay’s funeral was packed. From my exalted position at the altar, it looked like everyone was jammed in tight next to each other, which might have been a good thing because the chapel was terribly cold. I was standing around with a few people before the funeral began and someone suggested we move outside to get warmer. The winter sunlight was thin, reluctant, withholding, and approximately 0.003 degrees higher than the pretty icebox of the Maclaurin, with its glass windows framing the bare hard bones of oak trees. Kay died in the frosts and crystals of winter.

Kay’s funeral took a lot of work. There is so much industry and necessity behind the scenes of death. Families have to labour around the clock while wandering in a daze of grief. Death is a running-over. It hits the living as well as the dead. To see Kay’s family during the week was like attending the scene of an accident. The paramedics had gone; in their place, those other attendants of death, the funeral professionals. I studied their quiet demeanour, their dress - cufflinks, sensible socks. I can do that. I’m a funeral amateur looking to turn pro.

Kay’s funeral was not religious. But the Maclaurin Chapel was a lovely venue and a reminder that the architecture of belief is an ideal setting to pay respects to the dead. You go to church to think about the way it ends. An enormous crucifix was fixed to the back wall of the Maclaurin. On another wall, obscured from those jammed in tight in the pews, was a Don Binney original - a 1967 painting of a kawaupaku (little shag) in flight above Te Henga (Bethells Beach). I stood and studied it. Binney was taught by the great ornithologist Dick Sibson at King’s College. It gave him a lifelong love of birds. But the shag was soaring at something like 5000 feet in the picture; it’s a low-flying bird, adept at skimming the surface of water. “Kay,” I wanted to tell her, “I don’t think this picture is right.” She loved ideas, information, argument.

Kay’s funeral went smoothly. The eulogies were articulate and beautiful. A grandson read from Nabokov. A woman remembered turning somersaults as a little girl at Kay’s wedding. There were photos of Kay over her 89 years, set to When the Carnival is Over. I introduced it. I said it would provide an opportunity to reflect on Kay, to think of fond memories of Kay. But this was quite impossible because the sound desk made a dreadful hash of the song. It was faint, scratchy; then it roared into life; then it retreated again into hiss and static; then ear-splitting volume, then a distant racket; on it went, like a recording from hell. Kay’s grandchildren wept – with laughter, at the awfulness of it, and I think Kay would have laughed, too. But it was a shambles. I wasn’t the only funeral amateur at the service.

Kay’s funeral was nerve-racking to MC, to officiate, to act the faux vicar, but everyone has to put their vanities to one side at an event on behalf of the dead. It’s not about you. It’s about the missing person. It’s not about God, either. Kay was not churchy. Kay was a great reader. She talked to me one night at a party about how she was reading War and Peace for the second time. I read from it at the funeral, when Tolstoy writes of the book’s hero, the big, dreamy, hapless, adorable Pierre: “He had learned to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything; and he looked joyfully at the ever-changing, ever grand, unfathomable infinite life around him. And the closer he looked at it, the calmer and happier he was.”

Kay’s funeral was followed by refreshments. I took along a batch of cornflake biscuits I baked that morning - all part of the service, you know - and sat back with a cup of tea. The sunlight had got stronger and fought its way out of high clouds. The family dog seemed to fall ill. It was mooted that he may have stolen a cornflake biscuit - raisins are potentially poisonous to dogs. The grandson who read from Nabokov said, “He was doing so well, and then he killed the family dog.” Another funeral, so soon … I’d best check my calendar.