*
Thanks to Mollie, I had learned that most people lived their lives online, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others to discover even after they’ve died. For every funeral after Mollie’s, I scheduled in time to do my own research into the lives of the people I was lucky enough to be taking care of. After all, you can’t take this day back and repeat it. We all only get one shot at a goodbye. I took it upon myself to make sure that, for my clients, it was the closest thing to perfect it could be.
Of course, this wasn’t without its obstacles. Some people’s Facebook accounts were set to ‘private’, although it was sometimes still possible to view the biographical information they’d listed, as well as their lists of friends – many of whom had public accounts, which made it possible to glean information second-hand. Another hiccup was that many people simply didn’t have Facebook accounts. For my older clients – those who hadn’t become ‘silver-surfers’ – it was a little trickier to track them down online and build up a picture of their full lives. However, they were often in the albums of their family members, mentioned in a status celebrating a birthday or anniversary, or snapped along with their grandchildren.
Aside from Facebook and the other social media sites, there were other online avenues to explore. Google searches yielded newspaper articles, profiles on business websites, features in local community forums. Everyone, it seems, has some kind of digital footprint, and anything I could find about my clients would help to inform how their funeral would play out. This is our last moment in the spotlight, after all, and it’s the personal touches that people remember, even years later. I’ve had families come to me because of the funerals I’d arranged for people they knew, telling me that the extra details had meant so much, and had made sure it was memorable for the right reasons.
I sometimes struggled with encouraging Frank to think outside the box – not that he knew where I was getting these bolts of creativity from. He was a traditionalist at heart. He was fine with families requesting mourners wear Hawaiian shirts, matching colours, or even a quirky memento of the deceased’s hobby, as long as it wasn’t too garish. But he wasn’t as quick to get on board with the extras, like the time we had a unicorn leading the funeral procession. This was something I’d organised for a young girl, Ava Harper, aged just seven, who I’d learned had been obsessed with them. Her recent birthday party had been unicorn-themed, and I managed to find a pure white horse whose owner dressed her up as a unicorn for regular visits to the children’s hospital. Casting her red-rimmed, exhausted eyes on the tastefully decorated horse, I saw her mother smile for the first time since meeting her.
Linda and Frank didn’t know that I used social media to create my personal goodbyes. It probably wasn’t against the rules, but I’d decided it wasn’t something I needed to shout about. It was another reason I tended to do my digging at home, in the evenings or weekends. I had three services coming up that I was struggling to find details for. I was soon lost in the timelines and news feeds of people I would never get to properly meet in real life.
It was only when my stomach rumbled that I checked my watch and realised I should probably think about starting dinner.
There was a game I liked to play, which was to open the cupboard with my eyes shut and pull out a tin, and whatever I landed on was my supper. When I’d told Ms Norris about the game a few months ago she’d burst into such a fit of laughter I was worried I’d have to call an ambulance. It wasn’t right, a woman her age having such a reaction like that. I worried about her health at the best of times. When she’d finally composed herself and realised that I wasn’t laughing along too, she’d tilted her head to one side and gently patted my hand and given me a strange, desperate sort of look. I busied about and made her another cup of tea. She’s not mentioned it again and neither have I.
But I still carried on playing my game.
It was my birthday. I was grateful that so far that morning neither Linda nor Frank had made a fuss. Or even acknowledged it. I’d had a text from my mum telling me she’d give me my present when she saw me next. She was busy travelling around Latvia with a new boyfriend in his retro campervan, so I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d not heard from anyone else, but then I wasn’t sure who I expected to get in touch. The one person I foolishly still wanted to hear from had long forgotten about me.
The first birthday after Henry had left me was the worst. By the end of the day I felt wrung out from all the adrenalin that had coursed through me every time my emails pinged or my phone rang, imagining it was him ringing, him emailing. Of course he hadn’t sent me a card in the post, he hadn’t sent me anything at all, not even a text message. That evening I cried and cried. He was the only person I wanted to hear from on my special day, and I got nothing. These days I didn’t raise any hope of hearing from him, and the acceptance did make the hurt a little easier to bear.
‘Ah, Grace, there you are.’ Frank wandered out of the employee bathroom wiping his hands on his pale grey suit trousers, breaking my thoughts. ‘Team meeting in five, guys!’
He wasn’t going to sing Happy Birthday like last year, was he? I wasn’t sure I could stand that level of embarrassment.
Luckily, as we took our seats around his messy oval table, there wasn’t a cake or candles or streamers to be seen. I was safe.
‘Hope you’ve all had good weekends?’ he asked Linda and I.
‘Oh yes, excellent.’ Linda slurped her tea. She would only ever drink out of the colour-changing unicorn mug that wasn’t dishwasher-friendly. ‘Ladies’ night at the Swan.’ She gave a knowing smile. ‘You should come along one of these days, Grace. Us single gals need to stick together.’
I laughed awkwardly. Linda was at least ten years older than me and fancied herself as a bit of a man-eater since her bitter divorce four years ago.
‘Maybe…’
‘Grace?’ Frank asked. ‘Good weekend?’
‘Yep, just a quiet one for me…’ I coughed as my voice crackled, reminding me that this was the first time I’d spoken to anyone since Raj in his shop on Friday evening.
‘Good. Right then.’ Frank clapped his large hands together. ‘Let’s get down to business. Linda, an update from Coffin Club please?’
Her eyes lit up. ‘I think this was the best one yet! Over two hundred exhibitors from across the world; there was loads on offer. I felt so inspired. You should come along to the next one, Grace.’
‘Er, no, well, I –’
‘Grace wouldn’t go if you paid her, isn’t that right?’ Frank chuckled.
I preferred to stay out of anything to do with Coffin Club, the affectionate name given to the annual Funeral Expo held in London. I’d managed to think up excuses to avoid going every year, until Frank had given up asking me. Linda liked to make a weekend of it anyway; she would meet up with some of her industry friends and gossip about changes to the profession, returning with armfuls of freebies.
Frank, along with my mum, thought they knew why I’d left my life in London behind me. I’d told them the cost of living, pollution, and sheer volume of people wasn’t for me. No one knew the real reason I’d fled the capital, and that was how it was going to stay.
‘Something like that.’ I cleared my throat.
‘As usual, there was showcasing of the most innovative products. Did you know that you can now add QR codes to gravestones?!’
Linda was always like this after the expo, returning buoyed up by ideas and ways we could be more future-thinking as a business,