Kate Legge; 10/05/08,
Even those familiar with the blood and bile of domestic warfare were agog at the drama surrounding the death of a favourite son. The charismatic Melbourne QC John Udorovic let go of life barely 15 minutes after his second wife failed to stay the divorce he’d raced through in the final round of his three-year battle with lymphoma. His parents and brother led the first batch of death notices along with two children from marriage number one. Next came his “loving fiancee”, Olyvia, a family law barrister, who mourned “a beautiful man with a beautiful heart. I will continue to play our music – ’til dawn, as we did together…” Nothing from the second (newly ex) wife (also a family law barrister), or the two children from this union. Two days later their less florid tributes appeared. But it was the one immediately below that drew sharp intakes of breath. Signed by a woman called “Stella”, it declared: “Few knew you as well as me … I will hold our beautiful, private memories in my heart for both of us as you wished.”
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Mourners at the requiem mass in mid-April were unsettled by the volatile mix of passion, grief, jealousy and intrigue surrounding the QC who was known for his daring inside the court as well as out. Wife number two (who held a separate service the following day) was edited out of the photographic montage that was screened as mourners listened to When A Man Loves A Woman and Elvis Presley’s I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You.
Death is about to get sexier as baby boomers heed Dylan Thomas’s urging and go boldly into that good night. Families will feud over inheritances worth millions more than our parents’ parents ever bequeathed; first, second and third partners of the deceased will jostle for recognition and influence; church rituals will be snubbed in favour of secular memorial services for a generation reared on science and self-expression; voluntary euthanasia will be legalised or the growing demand for suicide drugs will be met by the black market. Death and dying – the only certainties of life – are being reinvented.
We’ve videoed everything we do – weddings, giving birth, children’s milestones – so cameras will record our decomposition from dust to dust. It’s not enough these days for undertakers to organise hearses, embalmers, cemetery plots and poker faces. They must be able to cater for a multimedia event.
Youngsters, once shielded from death, are now encouraged to step up with a sprig of wattle or a poem. Teenagers pick funeral songs from their iPod playlists. Eulogies are expanding in length and number as we grow more confident at the lectern. Plasma screens salute the deceased with slide shows and soundtracks. Coffins might be painted in club colours or plastered with sheets of guitar music. If there’s a celebrity inside, the service might be broadcast live.
Wakes and funerals are the new weddings, social occasions set to become increasingly sophisticated and saddeningly common as the over-65 cohort swells. The demographic clout behind this phenomenon is best illustrated by the casket shape of projections for Australia’s age distribution. At Federation the old were scarce. Fewer than one in 25 people was aged over 65. Now they make up one in every eight and by 2044 more than one in four of us will be 65-plus. If the 1994 hit Four Weddings and a Funeral were released today it’d be called Four Funerals and a Wedding.
In February, a 62-year-old businessman attended a service for the wife of a close colleague. Guests gathered at the couple’s house for a wake at which every detail from the catering to the band had been chosen to send the woman off in signature style. As the afternoon concluded, the new widower turned to his friend. “How would you rate it as an event?” he asked. The businessman was stunned. Both men had once belonged to a professional group where members scored functions on a scale of one to 10, based on the quality of speeches, venue, guests, and polish, but neither had ever put a family funeral to this test.
Death once silenced those in its presence.
We didn’t have the language or confidence to face our mortality. Funerals were stiff affairs run by ministers who might have been complete strangers to the family in the front pew. Men didn’t cry. Even if the coffin was customised, the last rites were one-size-fits-all. But as baby boomers shepherd their parents into God’s waiting room and stare death in the eye, ceremonies and traditions are being shaped by consumer confidence and a generation’s belief in the psychology of “closure”.
Princess Di’s death dared us to mourn differently. The eulogy delivered by Earl Spencer was applauded in Westminster Abbey, where Elton John performed Candle in the Wind rewritten in her honour. Public emotion and floral wreaths clogged the gateway at Kensington Palace. Ten years after this extraordinary service was beamed around the world, the BBC re-screened the entire procession and funeral in an eight-hour epic.
Footy commentator Clinton Grybas was not royalty but the televising of his funeral earlier this year left one colleague bemused by the hype and hoopla. Mark Tobin of Tobin Brothers Funerals says he steered the Grybas family towards a new Christian church in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs because it had the technological bells and whistles for audio-visual presentations and could accommodate up to 1000 people. Vanessa Amorosi sang Grybas’s favourite song, Shine, while Mike Brady appeared to belt out Up There Cazaly.
“Even in religious settings, family members want to personalise proceedings,” Tobin says. “They want to celebrate a life, not their faith. People want to be creative. They want to treat a funeral as something that has no rules; you start with a blank sheet of paper and create an event that is more compelling and rewarding than following a set format.”
John Harris, who’s in his 52nd year as a funeral director with the Sydney-based firm WN Bull, says he has handled two funerals recently where the families called in event planners. “These families actually sent out invitations because they wanted particular guests to attend. Funerals and weddings are not that far apart and if you think about it, death lasts a lot longer than a marriage,” he says. “People today are much more confident about stepping outside the square.”
Modern celebrations are the mother-lode of a service industry-powered economy. If boomers got married by celebrants in parks and gardens, their children’s weddings resemble mini-coronations. Birthday parties for kids have swung from home-made cakes and fairy bread in the backyard to bouncy castles, mobile zoos, clowns, trips to rock-climbing gyms. As it is in life, so it will be in death.
Chapels around the country are being fitted out with the latest audio-visual technology. In Tasmania, the funeral firm Millingtons has hired a gun in film and video production to cut and splice people’s life stories. “We are very conscious of the `fact that funerals are almost a show. You’re putting on a production,” says managing director Scott Cranfield. He’s revamping uniforms (hats and gloves, long woollen dress coats, full navy suits); creating a ladies’ division to satisfy growing demand for the feminine touch; introducing luxury European cars to the fleet of Fords, happily accommodating every whim, even the Cadbury’s worker buried in a purple coffin like the chocolate wrappers. He’s recently purchased a small stone church because, although we’re more likely to shop than pray, traditional backdrops comfort us.
“We are event planners,” says Ron Foley of Sydney-based funeral firm Walter Carter, which handled the funeral for INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence. The star’s body required 24-hour security and daily meetings were held to discuss logistics and planning.
Celebrity deaths set precedents that the industry is keen to promote. Following the deaths of Steve Irwin and Peter Brock, a newsletter published by the industry’s biggest firm, InvoCare, editorialised on the country’s mourning. “We were drawn to our TV screens to watch special after special on their lives. We were drawn to the radio where people recalled stories of meeting both men. Thousands of flowers were placed outside Irwin’s zoo and along Mt Panorama in honour of Brock…
“While these two outstanding Australians were significant to us, equally the life of every family member or friend we lose is important … the community is coming to terms with the fact that a life lost can be celebrated and must be remembered – something we are all entitled to – whether we are a celebrity or not.”
How baby boomers grieve will not alter the fact of death but we’ll experience it in our own inimitable way. There’ll be excess, but also theatricality, more laughter, applause, great ingenuity in a remembering freed from restraints and rule books.
British fantasy writer Philip Pullman told The New Yorker magazine of his family’s decision to scatter the ashes of his stepfather, a former RAF pilot, in fireworks shot from a rocky headland into the Scottish sky. “My stepbrother gave a little address, perfectly judged, and my sister lit the fuse. And it was the most wonderful display! The sky was full of stars – a brilliant display. My sister’s little daughter said, ‘That’s the way I want to go.”‘
On a bend of road near a beach that I visit, someone has nailed a rubber fin to an electricity pole in honour of the carpenter who was killed here in his Kombi driving home one night after work. Dried flowers, a strip of driftwood with his name engraved and personal memorabilia warn young surfers who hoon past that life is tenuous.
These shrines have become part of the streetscape, bringing death into the foreground as grief and loss have found new pathways. We’ve learnt from veterans and victims who bottled up trauma until it poisoned them. We’ve smashed a labyrinth of walls outside of Berlin in pursuit of personal freedoms. Death – often called the last taboo – is our next frontier. Count the changes already here. Counsellors talk us through every emotional mire, palliative care nurses staff hospices where terminal illness stalks, blogs and webpages are beginning to provide an electronic network of support and links.
Dyingforbeginners.com was the legacy of Jessica Disteldorf, 24, who died in. March from a rare lung cancer. The site was designed for people like herself, sufferers too young and beautiful to die. Disteldorf kept a video diary, recording her bald head and breaking heart for the ABC’s Australian Story. “I’m wide awake. It’s 4am…” one entry begins. “Thought I’d come out and talk about dying I guess. Um, I’m dying and I don’t really like it” – her voice falters as she swallows her lump-in-the-throat terror – “It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.” I watched these gutsy accounts of her journey nine days after her funeral and wept.
When my mother died of lymphoma in 1980 there were no support groups where sufferers could rail against death or share their fears. We tiptoed around the unbearable idea of her absence as if avoiding the subject would somehow keep her alive. The medical system served as our accomplice, scheduling another dose of chemotherapy two days after she died. Her funeral was tinny. The sound system failed us so her favourite Bach concerto couldn’t be heard in the mock chapel where the service was held. At the graveside a box of sanitised dirt for us to throw on top of her coffin cheapened any connection to the burial, and I still feel hot from shame at our timidity.
Regret over a similar disengagement with his parents’ death 30 years ago is how author Mark Wakely opens Sweet Sorrow: A Beginner’s Guide to Death, one of four new books on death and dying out this month. Aged in his 20s when his mother and father died, Wakely wasn’t present at their deaths, didn’t view their bodies and played no part in the funeral arrangements. He blames his youthful self-absorption with the largeness of life for his death-shy stance.
Now 51, he’s thrown himself into the largeness of death, examining everything from autopsy to cremation. His journey so consumed him that when someone recently asked him for a scrap of paper to jot down a phone number he gave them inadvertently a sheet of instructions about lining a coffin. Friends pointed out that he’d begun to lower the tone and volume of his voice. “We speak in hushed tones around death, frightened perhaps that it might hear us. If there is a conspiracy of silence, the time has come to end it,” he writes. “Let’s stand on the top of tall buildings and shout about death.”
On July 11, 2005, journalist Steve Guest rang Melbourne talkback radio. He spoke eloquently of his agonised exhaustion from oesophageal cancer and begged for the right to end his life peacefully. This unscheduled interview with the ABC’s Jon Faine was one of those moments where you pull over in your car, spellbound.
Dr Rodney Syme was leaving the Voluntary Euthanasia Society when he heard the tail-end of this segment. For 30 years he had hidden his efforts to help people die. In his new book, A Good Death: An Argument for Voluntary Euthanasia, he tells how the late Guest’s courage spurred him to publicise his cause in contravention of the law. Syme gave Guest advice about barbiturates, about dose, about their effects and how to use them because here was an individual tailor-made for an ethical challenge of the status quo. “He had gross suffering that was readily apparent. He was intelligent and courageous. He was media-savvy and had already demonstrated his desire to make his mark publicly.”
I know two women in their 80s who are wedded to Syme’s cause, both of them intent on obtaining the fatal drug Nembutal. They want the comfort of knowing they can check out early if dying becomes undignified and painful. One already belongs to a group that has ties with backyard laboratories manufacturing “Granny’s little helper”.
Wakely identifies our need for knowledge about death as being critical to providing power and a greater deal of control.
The desire for a map and compass sucks us in closer than we’ve been before. Annie Leibovitz’s decision to exhibit photographs of her partner, Susan Sontag, immediately before and after she died excited controversy and curiosity. So did images of the dead and dying that were exhibited last year in Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery. Curator Helen Ennis told Wakely that the show, called “Reveries”, wouldn’t have happened five years ago.
Imagining the cultural lengths and depths that will flow from detailed study of death and absorption in grief invites ridicule and excess. Novelty bereavement cards? Big Brother’s cameras inside a palliative-care hospice? CDs of music to die for and to? A revival of taxidermy? Only the dying can make these gags.
In The New Yorker magazine, American commentator Michael Kinsley leavens his battle with Parkinson’s disease: “No. 14 on the government’s ‘best killer list’ (as it is not called).” He jokes that “the last boomer competition is not just about how long you live. It is also about how you die. This one is a ‘Mine is shorter than yours’: you want a death that is painless and quick.”
Films and books will address death from every perspective until there is no more to know outside of the experience itself. The coming wave includes a memoir from Sontag’s son, David Rieff; Australian author Virginia Lloyd’s chronicle of her husband’s death from cancer; Debra Adelaide’s forthcoming novel that confronts the killer disease through a household advice columnist’s daily musings.
The genre is fat enough to warrant its own session at this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival.Just as we revolutionised childbirth by throwing open the delivery room doors to fathers, grandmothers, indeed whole families, the bedside of friends and family who are dying will usher in different customs and traditions. Small touches may be just as significant as personalised pomp.
Rebecca Burns provided self-addressed envelopes for guests who attended the memorial service for her father, Creighton, a distinguished newspaper editor, so that they might jot down recollections and shed light on foibles or escapades he hadn’t revealed.
In January I attended the memorial service of a much-loved teacher who died tragically in the surf over summer. The crowd was too large for the school’s hall so people overflowed into the canteen, where we watched proceedings on a big screen. His three teenage children gave moving accounts of their dad, whose mates remembered his exploits tearfully. Two guitarists strummed a Slim Dusty song, the lyrics revised to commemorate this big-hearted character. The surfboard that had carried him through the waves leant against the wall.
“Everybody’s dying”, My father says when I ring him the day that John Button and former Catholic Archbishop Frank Little go within hours of each other. Dad’s 86. He’s buried so many friends and colleagues he sometimes feels as if there’ll be no one left to salute his passing.
We’ve talked about his funeral. “I don’t want too much of a fuss,” he shrugged, an elderly man’s version of that teenage refrain, “Whatever”. The question of wine for the wake is just as irrelevant to a lover of big reds who won’t be around to drain his glass.
Yet we still haven’t had the only conversation that really matters. Every time we part, the thought that this might be our last goodbye flutters in my heart.
We both attended the memorial service for Creighton Burns, where Rebecca Burns gave a eulogy in the form of a letter that would never be sent to her father. But she said the essence of its contents had been shared during their last weeks together.
If there’s an upside to terminal illness it’s the opportunity to say goodbye and I love you. Not everyone can muster the emotional fortitude. Last month a friend visited the bedside of a woman whose future could be counted in days yet she kept on fussing over bathroom renovations to a home she’d never visit again.
Across town at another vigil, a lawyer writes his dying colleague a letter so that the sick man knows how much he’ll be missed. The lawyer tells me he’d blubbered through a eulogy for another friend recently. Like my father, he feels as though everyone’s dying.
British funeral directors recruited English poet laureate Andrew Motion to give tips for crafting a finely turned celebration of life. He suggested the eulogist should imagine they are handing a photograph to everyone present for them to keep when the ceremony ends. Wakely notes jn Sweet Sorrow that “baby boomers seem more game than their parents to take on the task”. We’ve been groomed for public speaking at conferences, seminars, workplace meetings, and although this habit of articulating every mood and moment has its roots in America, we’ve our own special self-deprecatory style.
Canberra journalist Jack Waterford told mourners who had come to farewell Bruce Juddery that they were united by a common idiosyncrasy: “we loved, liked or respected” him and “some of us are here to be sure that he is dead”. His words are published in a new collection of Australian eulogies selected by Richard Walsh for their quirkiness, honesty and poetry.
Once kept to a minimum of one or possibly two short, sharp and factual musings, the modern funeral has seen eulogies expand in number and length so that Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop George Pell wants to wind back gushing enthusiasts. He’s reminded lay preachers that reflections on a secular life distract us from a spiritual one.
The celebration of life, the way in which you are remembered, is the ultimate performance review. Do unto others as you would have them say about you at your funeral perhaps holds us to account in a way that religion once did. The modern vision of hell? Empty pews, the threat of not being noticed.
By April I’d been to three funerals. After the services ended, particular eulogies stayed with me for what they revealed about the nature of a father, a friend. James Button telling how he and his brother, Nick, had been to a footy match with their father, the former Cabinet minister, who stood at his front gate afterwards watching his two sons’ every step until they disappeared from sight.
Or Jonathon and Rebecca Burns remembering how, after their mother died, their father set aside his career to look after them, wrapping chicken and avocado sandwiches for school lunchboxes with a hand-drawn heart on the greaseproof paper.
Or one of the teacher’s three daughters, the one he called Bearsy, describing how she always hugged him goodbye with the words: “I love you one million thousand eighty nine always and forever.”
These are the measures of a life well lived. How we’re remembered, celebrated, is the only afterlife we can vouch for here on Earth.