The final curtain

MY grandmother died recently. She was 101, and she'd started sleeping a lot; a sign, I've learnt, that the end is near.

MY grandmother died recently. She was 101, and she'd started sleeping a lot; a sign, I've learnt, that the end is near.

Her funeral wishes were beautiful in their austerity, but singular. Just her son and daughter were to be present as she was lowered into her husband’s grave at Kurri Kurri. No church, no priest. A tall blue sky above and a bush taut with sound around her. Not her childrens’ loyal spouses, nor any of her grandkids; we were to remember her in our own way. Dad, as the new head of the family, was firm despite protests; we’re all close. “The services aren’t what they used to be when they were big community events,” he said. “It’s what she wanted. And none of her friends are left.”

Lexi was a sharp old thing. She did it her way, as she’d done all her life. So as she was being lowered into her grave I was sitting on a jetty with a Thermos of tea, her favourite tipple, and her beloved deco teacup, remembering those old, broad, Hunter Valley vowels. The way she’d call a scourer a “scratcher”. Movies, “walkie talkie photos”. The gramma pies. But most of all her lightness as the ageing took hold – and the hooting laughter with it – as if growing old was a process of becoming more light-hearted, and wondrous, at the simple, ravishing beauty of so much around her.

She didn’t want an unknown priest. I get that. I’ve been to funerals where grief is compounded by anger at the seeming indifference of the religious figure before us, as if they’re thinking more about the roast dinner ahead than the people around them; an insult I didn’t want inflicted on Lexi. I’ve been angry not only for the person who’s passed away, but the church itself. It’s a captive audience. Often many in the congregation rarely go to church and this is the moment for the big sell. So, do it! Embrace the mystery of the institution you represent; win us over. We may have read Richard Dawkins but we could, possibly, be partial to a bit of seduction. If your institution is to survive it must engage. It’s a vast marketing business, guys. What you’re selling is your future, your survival.

What I do love are the family and friends who speak, because despite the sadness it’s fascinating, enriching, to hear of a life distilled to its essence of goodness. Rabbis often end a memorial service with “may his memory be for a blessing” – i.e. what lesson can we learn here? A man I was in love with: to live vividly and with passion. A school mum: the tonic of her joy. An old school mate: the gift of her friendship, the grace in her living. A near neighbour: the shine of him near the end, as if his last years were spent in a perpetual state of chuckle. So many aphorisms I’ve picked up during services and jotted on scrabbled tickets and receipts: Never suppress a kind thought. Be generous of spirit because it’s bloody hard, for all of us. Pick up that phone. At the end of our lives the question should be not what we have done, but how well we have loved.

Lexi loved well. And like choirboys reaching a heartbreakingly higher purity just as their voices are about to break, she became piercingly perceptive towards the end, telling me what’s what. “I did it my way,” she sang, delighting in it. I wished I’d recorded her. Voice lodges longest in memory, can plunge us searingly back.

“People living deeply have no fear of death,” the author Anaïs Nin said. Lexi had no fear about living deeply, no fear about doing things her way. That was the lesson I learnt from a life driven by love and laughter; the sound of which I will carry forever in my head. She wasn’t bound by what other people thought of her, right to the end – and with that, achieved an extraordinary lightness of being.