What to wear to a funeral is now a question of some import. There used to be a time when the answer was obvious: black, black, and more black; with a white shirt for the men. But now . . .
The last funeral I attended was in Catalonia and was an event that followed hard upon the death itself. In Catalonia you would expect the funeral to be celebrated on the next day after the death and the cremation on the day following. Done and dusted in a few days. The time between the death and funeral in Britain is mystifying to my Catalan family. Some things really are different.
But the funeral I am preparing myself for is in Britain, and it has been a couple of weeks since the death. This period has allowed time for all the paperwork to be done. In a positive sense, it does allow a sort of finality to inform the proceedings: the ceremony being the final step in the bureaucracy of death.
My Catalan partner also does not understand the concept of the post-funeral refreshments, or ‘coming back to the house’ as the last social gathering associated with the death.
But getting back to what to wear. I am assuming that the old necessity for black as the dominant colour is a thing of the past – but I am not comfortable with a complete reversal of expectations in an explosion of colour. I have opted for dark blue trousers and a paler blue short-sleeved shirt, and I have a suitable tie to go with the ensemble. My assumption, however, is not fact, and I am waiting for more specific guidelines to inform my final appearance.
In my opinion, I couldn’t care less what people wear as long as they are comfortable and ‘tidy’. Presence is the important factor not sartorial elegance!
My cousin, Katy, has been reading through the book The Absent Artist which combines my poems with drawings from two old sketchbooks by Ceri Auckland Davies. The book was a collaboration, which turned into a memorial when Ceri died in his sleep. It is his funeral that I will be attending.
My cousin asked if I had any paintings by Ceri and when I responded she asked if I could send her photographs of them when I had time. I will do so, but I told her that signed prints of Ceris work are still available, for example here:
https://www.albanygallery.com/artists/ceri---prints-auckland-davies
and I urged her to look through them. I did so myself and I remembered seeing preparatory drawings for some of them; seeing one or two in a half-finished state; hearing about new departures in subject matter and admiring some of them before they were sent to the gallery for exhibition.
In other words, in looking through the range of Ceri’s work, I was drawn into remembering the painstaking preparation, the drawings, the charcoal studies, the photographs, the sketches, the sheer hard work that went into each and every one of his artworks. And there they all were: beautifully produced signed prints, waiting to be bought and displayed.
https://www.redraggallery.co.uk/print-ceri-auckland-davies
It is easy to say that Ceri’s art mocks death. My house has a collection of his work; I see his art every day. But I’m also conscious that what I see is as much as I am going to get. Yes, Ceri has a substantial body of work, but now he is gone, that body of work is finite.
So, there is a strange sort of pleasure-pain in looking at Ceri’s work. Ceri was a painter of the here-and-now, he aptured the momentary beauty of wild nature at particular moments in the day and night. With painstaking layers of tempera, he was able to give depth and body to the curve of a wave, moisture on rippled sand, a tree in full bloom, the movement of dappled sun on a mountainside. And the hand that painted all those things paints no more. But the evidence of his work is hanging in houses and galleries and is living on. And he will continue to be my daily companion on my walls and in my mind.
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