Eulogy

Thanks to fellow bloggers for their support in my time of loss. Much appreciated. Some of those comments spurred me on and helped me to deliver a eulogy that the vicar described as the best he had ever heard. I didn't want that. No personal praise. I was doing it for mum and for the congregation who had come to say goodbye to her - more than two hundred. I held my nerve, there beside the coffin bedecked with beautiful white lilies. My knees shook slightly and at one or two points my voice quavered but I held on to the task and did her proud.

Here are two of my farewell paragraphs:-

"As well as being “feisty” mum was also very kind. She would help anybody out and was a soft touch when tramps or gipsies called at our door or when she saw beggars in the street - she couldn’t walk on by. She gave generously to charities and was especially keen on the Salvation Army, the NSPCC and Oxfam. She always looked beyond her own garden gate to the world beyond.

She loved plants and where ever she travelled she was always taking cuttings and trying to propagate them. She knew the names of hundreds of plants and to tell you the truth it could be a bit irritating when you were in a park or garden centre with her as she reeled off Latin names. It was just one of her passions. She was also an avid reader and solver of crossword puzzles and even became obsessive about collecting those little labels that you get on bananas."

We drove on up to the East Riding Crematorium at Octon, along winding lanes past bulging dykes and ploughed fields where flocks of seagulls were already gathering to see out the winter. We followed the hearse at twenty five miles an hour. I saw a young rabbit recently killed in the road.

The CD gave us "The White Cliffs of Dover" as the curtain closed on mum's marvellous life - a life of love and goodness, of passion and participation, endeavour and energy. The last words of my eulogy back in the village church had been "May we cherish her memory". I felt privileged to deliver that speech so that mum's passing was not only marked by the hollow words of a God-addict vicar but also by the true words of one who really knew her and loved her. It was one of the finest things I have ever done or ever will do again.

East Riding Crematorium high on the Yorkshire Wolds