Over the weekend we had my Nan's funeral. Sunday a church service, Sunday night the Wake, Monday the funeral followed by the burial. All in all we had a mammoth two days of grieving. Hard at points, emotional throughout, but worthwhile and at times even an uplifting, empowering experience. It sounds strange to say that, but I genuinely feel that way.

Nan and Grandad\'s wedding photo

To death do us part. Nan and Grandad on their wedding day 57 years ago.

My Nan was a deeply religious woman, so everything had to be done properly. The service on the Sunday night was fairly short, it ended, so it seemed to me, rather abruptly. The priest told us to stay in the church with the coffin for as long as we felt necessary and to think about Nan. The priest had asked us to help Peggy on her way to heaven by praying for her. So I knelt down and started going through the motions. While I knelt there I was thinking “I should pray for her because that's what she wanted, but I don’t believe in God, so who am I praying too and where am I helping my Nan too? Then I started to think she’s been dead for a week! Shouldn’t she have arrived wherever she’s going now? Did she fly with Ryan Air?” It was at this point, as I sat there tying my mind into tighter and tighter theological knots, that I started to feel like my head was going to explode and I started to cry.

As the tears rolled down my face I looked up at the back of the church. It was a clear, bright day and the sun was starting to sett. The light was pouring through the stained glass windows at the back of the church onto the coffin. I was reminded of the line from a Flaming Lips song:

"the sun doesn't go down, it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round”

It's a song called ‘Do You Realise’ and it's pretty much the only popular culture song to deal with the subject of non-heroin related death.

I took it to mean that the universe is a big and mysterious place and humans are small and simple. From our perspective many of the layers of complexity in the universe stay largely beyond our comprehension. It was at this point that the tension on the knots in my head started to ease off. Nothing is going to change the fact that Nan is dead, but perhaps from another perspective, she lives on through her legacy. I can’t possibly comprehend all the ways in which her life continues to influence the way the world is today, but she’s there working away, because the things she did, and the people she influenced while alive continue her influence in her absence. If the universe was an equation, once you’ve been born and lived some, you can’t be erased from the sum.

That evening at the Wake* I started to realise just how many peoples lives Nan had touched. The fact that she had procreated with gusto, eight children, nineteen grandchildren, meant that her genetic legacy was secure. But it wasn’t just that she had given birth to us all, it was that she had been there for each of us and we'd all picked up something from her.

Most of the memories might seem insignificant: the doughnuts she bought me, the tat she kept in her living room, the dinners she cooked us, the games we had played, the way she encouraged us, the Way she scolded us, the time she got drunk on Bacardi Breezers at Christmas and danced in a grass skirt bought for a seven year old. Each one of these little things left it’s mark and I started to realise that you really do effect those close to you a great deal, often with even the very smallest of actions, and the ramifications of those actions, they make your legacy.

The next day when I woke up it felt like Groundhog Day. The funeral was in the morning so we had to be up and out. The first thing I can remember thinking was “am I still at a funeral”, but there was none of the head swelling of the day before. It was emotional, but in a good way. I’d had my epiphany of sorts and now I just wanted to be there for my Mum and my family, do the right thing and honour my Nan’s memory. We went to the church and then the grave and the sun shone and it was nice. My Nan was buried in the same cemetery as my Cousin; who by coincidence had died eighteen years previously, to the day, from complications following an operation. She was buried within earshot of Fratton Park (Portsmouth football club’s ground).

To be surrounded by such an immense and supportive family with all the ritual of the service was really worthwhile. (Apparently incense is an antidepressant.) Throughout the service the priest mentioned peace, “may she rest in peace”, often. I felt that this peace was meant not just for her body but for all those mourning, I think I found it. I’m lucky that I’ve got such a supportive family and a Church to go to. I’m lucky that I can take strength from something which on the face of it seems so desolate, but I do, and I can, because it’s what Nan would have done and what Nan would have wanted, and that is exactly how her legacy lives on.

*It is traditional to have the Wake before the funeral, apparently the name Wake comes from Awake, because you stay awake all night with the body.