In Victorian England, it was common to hire professional mourners. These people, known as “funeral mutes”, presented at funerals like mythic figures in black capes and peaked top hats, holding staffs. Often in pairs, and always in silence, they did what they were paid for: composed their faces into masks of sorrow, as if to relieve the real mourners of the task. The tradition of the funeral mute is now lost to time but the diversity of such rituals persists across places and cultures, revealing truths about how a given culture views not only death but life itself.
I’d known this on a theoretical level already, some years ago in the advent of my grandmother’s death. But it was in the midst of throwing rose petals on her coffin, in my parents’ country garden during the informal service we’d planned, when I realised on a visceral level that funerals offer far more to the living than simply the chance to gather together in grief. In the months that followed, I found myself in a funereal mindset, preoccupied by a scale of loss that eclipsed previously held worries. Life on this planet felt increasingly precarious to me, which induced an existential anxiety that sometimes left me dizzy. It left me longing for the kinds of symbolic frameworks that are now absent from so many of our lives – except, perhaps, when it comes to funerals.
This was how I came to find myself scrolling through the pages of a funeral listings site called Heaven Address, noting the times and locations of public funeral services that I might attend as a stranger. I hoped that, in doing so, I might learn something. Obviously, there were ethical questions to consider. In the end I arrived at a list of resolutions: I will not attend services small enough for my presence to be conspicuous; I will not sit near the front; I will not join any cortege.
I set out on a Saturday for a service on the Victorian coast, trying not to anticipate exactly what, if anything, I might discover, while feeling a strange affinity with the dour-looking funeral mutes I’d seen in old photographs. The service, for an elderly man, was at a funeral home chapel with cream carpet and a discreet, insulated air. Mourners spoke in low tones over refreshments and filed in and out of the chapel, where the image of a smiling, snaggle-toothed man was projected on to a screen. Eventually, the mourners were invited to each take a rose to place on the coffin. Apart from this simple ritual, which I left to the real mourners, there was to be no formal ceremony, and so I walked back into the day, thinking of how the atmosphere had felt as controlled and anonymous as a showroom.
The next service was held at a Catholic church on a rainy morning. The air inside was chill; as I took my seat at the back, I noticed no one had removed their coats. After the priest opened the service in both English and Polish, the man’s daughter rose to the pulpit. She spoke of a proud man who had worked hard to build a life in Melbourne after being liberated from a labour camp in Poland. He had been a keen gardener, and generous. He had informed her, in his final days, that his nextdoor neighbour should have his orchids.
I don’t recall the final song at the end of the service but I do remember the way the sound seemed to lift and suddenly carry the procession of figures through the aisle and toward the open door’s oblong of daylight. I watched the pallbearers, their faces pressed into masks and giving way as they walked. The family followed. Last was the daughter, holding out a photo of her father in a gilded frame, her face trembling as she followed his body.
As the crowd followed the procession out and the music faded, I confronted the fact that I, a stranger there, had cried. It was a trespass, an impropriety – I had not known the dead man or his family. My rational self was appalled. But the force of the funeral had acted on my body.
A thought occurred to me as I sat there, the kind of thought that feels new only because the body has caught on to what the mind already knows. The purpose of a funeral, in its gathering of witnesses and in its formal ritual, is to stage and structure a communal movement of emotion. It is a space for love and grief in their deepest concentration to collect, to be measured, to be witnessed and, at last, moved through the body. It is our chance for a final, formal act of love. It is a means of delivering ourselves toward the new world without someone. And it is a reminder to the living, to live.
Ruby Todd is the author of Bright Objects, published in Australia now (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) and in the US on 16 July (Simon & Schuster)
