(Laughter IS a good medicine)
MUSING
A friend of mine stopped drinking, overeating, and chasing women, all at the same time; it was a lovely funeral.
Actually, funerals are one of those rare occasions when one gets the chance to muse. I mean, given the sorts of conventional funerals we usually suffer in this country, you can’t very well show slides of the departed in those compromising positions, memories of which will forever endear the guy to his buddies? Nor can you allow yourself to focus on the dismally grey rituals associated with the Western way of despatching an acquaintance and saying a last farewell. So, funerals are one of the rare occasions when one gets the chance to muse. Musing is a skill little practised in South Africa where a state of full alertness is obligatory if you are to avoid being mugged, hijacked, robbed, reconciled, forgiven or married in a moment of lax concentration. Musing is to ponder, in tranquillity; to gaze thoughtfully, but inwardly; to be in a state of abstraction. (I salute the thesaurus; incidentally, what is another word for thesaurus?)
Musing is that delightful condition of withdrawing attention from what surrounds one, as the mind is given release, freed to pursue whatever thoughts happen to materialise. Musing moments are those when one is most intimately alone (have you ever wondered why, if sex is supposed to be so intimate, we are expected to share it with someone else?), yet at one with oneself, when one becomes disengaged so that whatever thoughts drift into consciousness, they are considered dispassionately with oneself as a detached observer.
Standing at the open graveside while a religious worker mouthed his piece, my musings included nothing about poor Yorick, or the condition of mortality. My first drifting thought was how my philosophy exam, many years ago, had been a piece of cake, which was a bit of a surprise as I had expected a number of questions on a sheet of paper. While the man in the dark suit droned on, a series of questions strayed into mind to puzzle my speculative nature– why is it always the men who haven’t had a date in 6 months who know what it is what women really want? Why is it always the men who can’t pay their credit card accounts who have a plan for dealing with the national debt? Why is it that animal testing is such a terrible idea? Is it because they all get nervous and give the wrong answers? And, wafting in from who knows where, why is abbreviation such a long word?
Musing is a state of being there and not being there (I’m suddenly struck by the realisation that, perhaps, this explains the distraction of most of my ex-students; perhaps they are all major-league musers?). This, I now realise, is a very Zen thing. The Dalai Llama, when he visited, was asked how many Buddhists it would require to change a light bulb; he said two; one to change it and one not to change it.
As the first clods of soil were spaded into the grave, the inscription on a nearby tombstone, which declared, I Told You I Was Sick, caught my eye. But, by then, I was on a roll (musers, you see, learn to snatch and cherish those few moments which afford the luxury of deep thought), and my mind disengaged again and I pondered, what was worse- ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
The greatest joy of musing lies in the fact that the mind rests from the usual, frenetic focus on specific issues, apt for the pressing needs of the moment. Musing relaxes mental tension and releases the mind for free speculation, a state in which, I can well believe, some of the great intellectual discoveries have been made. While the mourners began their farewell dirge, my mind drifted to something I had seen but not then noticed while driving to the cemetery. I had passed the Jehovah’s Witness Assembly Hall and only now, in my reverie, was I struck by the fact that must be where they make them. Having passed also, the public swimming pool, my further musings took me to thoughts of synchronised swimmers, those lovely maidens in rubber hats and identical cozzies; if one synchronised swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown, too?
The bleak bleats of the congregation began to intrude into my abstraction and I took to considering funerals, death, and the perplexing relationship we have with this area of our lives. Sages, throughout the ages, have given considerable thought to the processes of exiting existence (Is there life after death? Living in KZN, is there life before death? ). Lately departed George Burns, that lovely old comic who lived to almost 100 years, confessed that he had been around for a while and that when he was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick. Another intriguing thing about funerals in my home city is that when you read the local newspaper and browse through the death notices, you discover that everyone in Durban has died in alphabetical order.
How different groups cope with funeral arrangements is a source of fascination, too. Jews, for instance, bury their dead before the next sunset, which is sensible. As my Aunt Frieda used to say, “they aint going to get any better”. It is an interesting point that for three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off. Closer to home, my Uncle Ernie’s funeral cost R46,000-so far. We buried him in a rented tuxedo.
The mention of money brings me back to my particular funeral. The dead man had been a heavy gambler and a number of the mourners were his racetrack buddies. The undertaker (a man who takes a turn for the hearse?) had handled the delivery with decorum and just the right degree of solemnity. The minister spoke the obligatory words about the departed, relying on notes from the family to lend his sermon a sufficiently personal note. He explained that there were no last words from the deceased-his wife had been with him to the end. Warming to his task, he slowly intoned, “Our friend Freddy is not dead. He merely sleeps,” and a voice from the back of the chapel called, “I’ve got 500 that says he doesn’t wake up”. This led me to muse about my own grandfather’s funeral. He was an inspiration to us all and, on his deathbed, he sold me the watch that I still wear today. In the greater scheme of things, I guess, he was a very insignificant man, actually. At his own funeral, his hearse followed all the other cars. But, it was a memorable funeral, a fully catered funeral. It was held in the main MOTHWA hall, with a full boere orkes and, as the central feature on the buffet table, a tasteful replica of him in chopped herring.
As I stood at the grave side of my current funeral, one of the mourners turned to me and voiced one of his own spiritual insights and musings: “Do you realise that every time I draw a mortal breath, an immortal soul passes into eternity?” I asked him if he had ever tried Clorets and turned my thoughts to the human struggle to find significant words which would be chiselled (or, sandblasted) onto the gravestones chosen to stand as final reminders of the unique individuals who would never more be seen. Even animals are being memorialised by devoted human companions who survive them. I recall the stone raised to salute Fluffy, in the pets’ cemetery; “He Never Met A Man He Didn’t Lick”, and I remembered my old maths teacher’s epitaph, “Boy, Have I Got Problems!” Horror movie supremo, Vincent Price, once said “They’ll have to bury me before I retire, and even then my tombstone will read, I’ll Be Back!” Modest Hollywood hunk, Paul Newman, has said that it might very well appear on his tombstone that “Here lies Paul Newman who died a complete failure because his eyes suddenly turned brown”.
Of all my musings on the topic, however, one important message persists: if you don’t go to other people’s funerals, they won’t come to yours.