‘We’re still alive! Sometimes, it takes a funeral to remember that’

A friend recounted this anecdote at a funeral, and now I’m going to steal it. Well, a friend of a friend, really. Jake, a musician, who recently became a plumber as well because even rock stars have to eat. So Jake is working with this other guy, a 19-year-old kid, who’s complaining about the cold.

Credit: Simon Letch

“It’s cold,” the kid says.

“Yeah,” says Jake. “It’s the first day of autumn.”

“Autumn?” the kid says. “What’s that? Leaves ‘n’ shit?”

That was at the first funeral I went to this year. There were a number of others. Time was passing. Leaves ‘n’ shit were falling.

I don’t mind funerals. I mean, I fear them, but I don’t usually hate them, even though they’re almost always disappointing. How could they not be? What can the living say to Death that’s worth saying? Words? Which ones are worthy of someone’s existence and sudden non-existence?

We file into these places – churches or gardens or rooms – like obedient school children. We don’t know what we’re doing or what to talk about or how loudly to speak. We worry about our clothes (are they the right ones?), although we’re secretly quite pleased with our clothes. We look pretty good, we think. Look at us! Beneath our nice clothes, we’re baffled or guilty or heartbroken. We’re struck senseless by rage or grief or panic, but we’re still alive! Sometimes, it takes a funeral to remember that.

One funeral I didn’t go to, but which I thought about this year, was the funeral of Thích Nhat Hanh, the great Buddhist teacher, who died in January at the age of 95. I like to listen to Thích Nhat Hanh in the mornings. Breathing in, I know that I’m breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I really have a lot of emails to write, but what am I going to cook for dinner? There’s a good reason that Zen teachers whack their students with sticks: it’s cheaper than a funeral.

But I’ve been thinking and maybe the kid was right, after all. The seasons are changing. One afternoon recently, it hailed so much the whole suburb was covered an inch deep in dream-like snow. It was hail, sure, but it may as well have been snow. It looked like snow and the children made snowpeople and jammed the freezer with dirty snowballs. No one had ever seen anything like it. This was in Melbourne, in the outer-inner north, Wurundjeri country, where it hasn’t snowed since 1882. In the morning, it was still there, huge banks of it, as if proof were needed: no, it wasn’t a dream.

Maybe there’s a season for coming face to face with yourself, and with what you’ve done to the world.

And what is autumn anyway, or winter for that matter, since the four seasons (like Vivaldi) are something of a European imposition on a land that has always been more nuanced?

“There is a season,” said the priest, “for everything under heaven.” Frost and bark-harvest season. Fire season. Flood season. Cyclone season. A season to be jolly. A season for plague and drought.

As I write this, it’s spring, although it feels like mid-winter; it will be summer when you read it. The other day, I walked down by Merri Creek in Melbourne, where the flood waters had receded. It stank. The grass lay flattened in ash-coloured mud, and the trees along the bank, mile after mile, were strung, like evil Christmas trees, with garbage. Speaking of leaves ‘n’ shit, I thought. Maybe there’s a season for coming face to face with yourself, and with what you’ve done to the world.

My friend, Amy, a student of tantra, reminded me that, from a certain perspective, even these scraps of filthy plastic are sacred, that there is no moment that isn’t imbued with glory. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be disgusted. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help to clean it up. It just means that – at a certain point – it’s no longer a question of whether things are for us or against us. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said another Buddhist teacher, “I must tell you, there are no reference points.”

Words start to feel kind of clunky round about here. “If you say God exists,” Thích Nhat Hanh said, “you’re wrong. And if you say God doesn’t exist, you’re equally wrong. You cannot use your notions of being and non-being to describe God.”

Which has left me wondering about my so-called profession: namely words, and notions.

An actor and voice coach came to speak to the class of fiction writers I teach. He showed us how to sit and stand, and how to speak from our guts instead of from our heads. He asked us to think of every word as onomatopoeic, as somehow embodying the thing it referred to, rather than simply, coldly symbolising it.

A word, he explained, is a journey of syllables around the mouth. Then he asked us to memorise and speak aloud a single haiku. The one I recited was by Masaoka Shiki, who died in 1902 at the age of 34.

A haiku is just three lines and I read these ones very, very slowly over a period of 15 minutes. So, I thought, overwhelmed, this is what words can do, occasionally, when we ride out to meet them. Not for the sake of the dead but for the living, it felt like a funeral.

My life –
How much more of it remains?
The night is brief.

In memory of Max Riebl (1991–2022).

Miles Allinson’s latest novel, In Moonland (Scribe; $30), was published in September last year.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.