Before and After Book
The Natural Death Centre
By Sophie Fiennes
Our mother died on 28 December 1993. She lay still and silent and soon turned cold. Water molecules rise to the surface of the skin after death, so most of the wrinkles and lines which had etched their way across her face in life were now pressed out. Her skin seemed smooth as stone. She wore a white cotton nightdress and was surrounded by linen sheets and pillows. Her eyes were closed. All anxiety seemed to have drained from her face, although one eyebrow was raised fractionally at a small angle, leaving her with a plaintive expression.
The permanence of her death hit like a great blow to the head. She died of breast cancer and she was 55: a dynamic, emotional, fiercely alive woman. A celebrated friend, who had reared seven children and managed to combine this with a prolific creative life as a highly original writer and painter.
"I think the most upsetting thing about death", my father said later, "if it's someone you love and you've been very close to, is that you get used to looking into somebody's eyes. You have jokes together, you live together, you love together, you talk together and you look into those eyes countless times. Day in, day out. And then suddenly when they're dead - there's nothing. That point of contact is suddenly shut off."
"When we got married, she wanted to be married in a field and not a church," he recalls, "so she was certainly iconoclastic and unconventional. I thought a funeral with the maximum involvement of her family, who were deeply indebted and close to her, would be a good thing for everybody. It felt important not to dodge out of the business of grappling with death. If you love somebody in life you shouldn't abandon them in death."
With the extraordinary understanding and co-operation of the MacMillan hospice, we were able to lay her out, bathe the room in candlelight, and stay with her from 5.00am till 2.00pm. My mother had asked that her body be left undisturbed for several hours following her death. It is a commonly held Buddhist belief that the separation of spirit from earthly body is a gradual process which continues after that moment at which the heart stops beating. I shall never forget the intensity of spirit - for want of a more precise word - in that room during the hours following her death. Then her body was swaddled in the linen bed-sheet and taken to the hospital mortuary.
My father told me: "I have witnessed some spine-chillingly awful cremations, and have a deep dislike for black vehicles and black-coated men, who are professional in their way - they are doing a service - but I feel that their piety is rather fake. When I knew she didn't have an enormous life expectancy, I wrote to the Natural Death Centre and asked for their handbook. So I had realised, having read about it beforehand, that you can 'do it yourself'."
She had said she wanted to be buried, but everything else was "what ever you want it to be". We wanted it to be an intimate, true and spontaneous expression.
The Catholic priest was called and my father duly summoned for an interview. "Was she practising?" he inquired. "She practised her faith," my father replied (although baptised a Catholic, she was eclectic and had explored various religions). The plot of ground in the cemetery was conceded for the sum of £65 and it was agreed that my mother's uncle, a Benedictine monk, would give the funeral and burial service.
A local builder knew a carpenter who made coffins for undertakers in the area. My mother had loved the colour blue, associating it with tranquillity, so it felt only appropriate that her coffin be painted blue with wooden handles. We then spent some time deliberating on the perfect blue tone, and my father took to fixing the logistics: "I told the carpenter we wanted it painted blue. He said, "well what colour blue?" I gave him the British standards colour chart number. He charged £175. He made it, painted it and we collected it."
On digging the grave: "You can find out who the local grave digger is through the vicar or priest. It is a very expert job to get the size exactly right, so there is not an unnecessary amount of earth removed, so the sides of the grave are sheer. It is important that both sides of the grave have planks on them to spread the weight because if you have four men lowering the box they put a lot of weight on the sheer edges. The grave digger asked for £70 and did an absolutely superb job. I was struck by how skilled it was."
The grave digger supplied the planks and hessian tapes which are threaded through the handles and underneath the coffin from one side to the other. The handles do not take any weight. He also gave instructions to one of my brothers on how to control the slow release of the tapes.
The coffin was 6'2" and would not fit into any of our cars, so we borrowed a Volkswagen camper van from friends. My sister tied blue and white ribbons to the handles of the van, a white damask table-cloth was spread over the velour foam seating and my father and brothers drove to the hospital mortuary. "People had said to me, you must be prepared for a change when someone has been in sub-zero temperatures for a few days. You mustn't be shocked if they don't look the same. This was absolute rubbish," my father affirms, "she looked just as wonderful and beautiful as she did when she died." The coffin had been lined out in white brushed cotton with a small pillow. They laid her in, screwed down the lid, and then drove her to the church.
My brothers carried her: two on either side, with the edges of the blue coffin resting on their shoulders and their arms linked underneath. "The coffin was extremely heavy," one of my brothers recalls, "I thought of her saying "Darling, can you make me a cup of tea, can you chop some logs ... " Burying her seemed like a natural extension of my relationship with her; being involved at the completion of her life, right to the end. It definitely felt ancient and empowering."
She was buried on New Year's Day. An Irish piper played a lament as she was slowly lowered into the ground. The grave digger looked on from behind a yew tree and, following the committal, neatly replaced the earth. We scattered great bunches of flowers over the fresh soil; they formed a deep, dense, soft mattress of colour and pattern.
Death is the condition of life: terrifying and yet inevitable. I do not know if it possible to be truly prepared, but being open to the experience allowed for a greater sense of its absolute naturalness; being active and involved in its essential earthiness was cathartic, yielding a certain strength. Burial of the dead is a ritual, and as with all rituals, each participant emerges transformed.
