Lady in Mink

shovelling sh*t. Beloved is nothing if not to the point.

I should have had a camera handy,” he said, standing at the kitchen window, looking out, when I came in. Millie and I had been for a short walk and afterwards I grabbed a couple of hand shovels to clear up a small accumulation of detritus left by her over several days. She uses a particular area in the garden for her morning evacuations and normally I clean up after her the same day. But on cold winter mornings I like to forget. Hence the lady in mink hunting little piles this afternoon.  Hunter’s gumboots, a wooly hat pulled down low,

thick gloves, and Aunt Josephine’s mink coat completing the outfit, I was as warm as toast.

So, Millie walked, sh*t shovelled, birds fed, kitchen bin taken to the compost, meant my outdoor duties were completed for the day. I was glad to get back in. My, but that wind is cold.

As cold as a non-Quaker feels at a Quaker funeral. I had my first experience of a Quaker funeral service, which is not so different from an ordinary Quaker meeting, I understand. It didn’t help that we got lost in a maze of muddy lanes and arrived at the last minute. At one passing place (English country lanes are sometimes only a car width wide and need special passing places every so often) I imperiously flagged down a black car to ask directions and realised, horror-struck, that it was the hearse which had delivered my friend’s mortal remains to the chapel where the service was to be held. My friend’s husband, who is artistic to the point of lunacy, had given us directions which we seriously misunderstood.

Long silences were interrupted by a handful of people who felt moved to stand up and speak a few words, otherwise there was nothing except quiet contemplation. Even for a very infrequent churchgoer like me it seemed terribly bleak, lacking the comfort and reassurance of ritual. Afterwards we stood around in the biting wind (no mink coat this time) and watched the coffin lowered into the grave in silence. It was a green burial, in a field surrounding the chapel, there were no head stones, no flowers; no formal words were spoken. One of the bearers held a bowl of earth and a few people followed the family and threw a handful on to the coffin.

My friend, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for the past twelve years and whose death was, finally, a blessed relief, was a Quaker herself and she would have known many funerals such as hers. Personally, the thought of a humanist service and green burial appeals, but I would certainly like to have a little more fuss made over me, no matter how insincere. As is due to a Lady in Mink.