Half life
Important speeches
Carole Morin
There's nothing like a good funeral. The sight of all those black backs reminds me of my wedding. Dangerous Donald's old girl- friends turned up at Chelsea Town Hall wearing black dresses and hats, dabbing their tarty eye make-up with Kleenex as they watched him promising to love me forever.
Women don't wear hats to church any- more. The photographers outside Mike's Mayfair memorial service rushed me because I looked like I was in disguise behind my unfashionable mirror shades.
All the seats in the stalls were taken when I made my late entrance. On the balcony, I had a good view of atheists who kept their eyes open during prayers. I'm more of a nosey-parker than an atheist. When I have my wee chats with God, I don't want anyone eavesdropping.
Everyone in St George's seemed to have been affected by Mike's death, and not just because it reminded them of their own mortality. He had had an editing job other people envied, wasn't quite middle-aged, and died in mysterious circumstances. Death is always mysterious. That's what helps make it dramatic and exciting, as well as sad and scary.
There's something missing at a memorial service — the coffin — which is another reminder that you're never going to see the person again. At a funeral, there's always the worry it will be an open casket. I'll never forget being taken in to say goodbye to Grandfather Money, lying in his oak coffin wearing a new blue suit. 'Kiss your grandfather goodbye,' Maddie insisted, holding me over the corpse. I made a smacking sound with my lips, just managing to avoid the formaldehyde.
Speeches at a death do are usually more passionate than at a wedding. Eulogies can be blackly comic, when the bereaved friend at the lectern struggles to praise the stiff and ends up letting something slip — 'He drank three bottles of wine every lunchtime, and don't forget his martini habit — but it never interfered with his work!' (He wasn't an alcoholic — and I'm not either!) The man sitting next to me bore a frightening resemblance to a contestant on Blind Date. Too embarrassed to sing along to the hymns, he looked like he was going to blubber when the jazz quartet played `Amazing Grace'. Unless the priest is really excellent, music is more stirring than prayers. I'd rather listen to my Mick Harvey, Intoxicated Man, CD than chant the Lord's Prayer; though I'm always sorry to leave a wake. '
I couldn't wait to get away from Evelyn Lau's reading at the South Bank the following evening. Lau, a retired 24 year old Chinese-Canadian prostitute, writes best-selling minimalist books about sex. The crowd she attracted to the Voice Box was dominated by seriously mundane women with hair on their chins. The decadent street kids she writes about were obviously too busy enjoying their thrills to sit still for an hour in an audience of literati.
The lights were left on while Miss Lau converted her seductive speaking voice into the drone writers use when reading their work aloud. She looked more like a bright, pleasant, student than an expert at sucking scrotum. Too much of a pudding to pull off the junkie superwaif look, seeing Miss Lau in the flesh makes you less suspicious she's writing autobiography and more impressed by her imagination. The problem with something that's supposed to be sexy like watching a clever young prostitute expose her soul — is that expectations are too high. Whereas something solemn like death produces a heightened atmosphere that rarely fails to excite.
An unexpected early death disturbs peo- ple in the same way as reading the end of the book without bothering with the middle does. Survivors of puritanical childhoods have had it drummed into them that you must never start a book without finishing it. Never confess to skipping the middle unless you want to provoke outrage. There's always at least one puritan in the room.
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