Lockdown Day 8: Monday 30th march 2020

As the sullen sun struggles to pierce gathering clouds once more, we muster behind the hearse to walk the half-mile or so to the cemetery. The cortege is heavily rugged up for the wan Scottish winter, dark heavy coats, long woollen scarves, shined thick-soled shoes. All except for a couple of student Newcastle cousins still dressed for the Bigg Market in irreverent crop tops and not-quite-mini skirts. Even in death life goes on. Bless the blissful unknowing of youth.

  There is an eerie silence on the busy road as all traffic stops when we file out the churchyard and turn right across the street, a schoolbus pulled up in the queue of vehicles. As the hearse passes, all the children, infants no more than eight or nine, suddenly rush to our side of the coach and peer out the windows. Some laugh, some point rudely or make faces, unsure of their own nervousness, likely closer to death than they have ever been before. We continue on our journey, a final destination achieved for one, still to be reached for the many who pause shortly by this resting place on our continuing roads.

  The cemetery is alive with the rollcall of the centuries, nameless headstones blackened and weather-beaten through hundreds of years’ service, no-name graves of entombed ancestors and a host of supplicants, MacCall, Mackay and Maclean, McDonald and Campbell, Cheyne and Forbes and Douglas, and Sutherland, Lamond and McGregor. Clan MacAlba, sons and daughters of sundered Scotland, a nation split by empire, exile and emigration, risen but riven through industrialisation, war and clearance. Though ties of kinship be shattered forever, bonds with the land stretch eternal for those who lie within this sweetest Scottish soil. Pity those ensnared in far-flung foreign fields, forgotten meadows of Picardy or windswept Heights of Abraham, beneath the unforgiving Sudan sands or desiccating Khyber winds. A world built, an empire won, a sun that never sets, but at what cost? A country lost. The best are spent, only the parochial worst remain to rule the twilight of the enlightened and devolve this sceptred isle to the fetid enemies of the truth. The afternoon blossoms with the fresh aroma of earth and clay, of wet pine trees, of diesel and fresh mown grass, a scent of winter life in a portrait of loss. The unlocked grave beckons as the sun pours now brightly through the dormant branches of oak and ash and chestnut in their seasonal death, accompanying a chill wind from the east. 

  I notice that my cousins choose to stand away from me. This is understandable, even my mother avoids me. I cope with grief through humour. I have blurted out some outlandish statements at past wakes and funerals, some verging on the actionable, one leading to a feud.

Honestly!

But dead people can’t sue, so perhaps I should write a book of reminiscences populated by a host of the dearly departed to deny the lawyers their pounds of flesh. Interesting concept, perhaps someday worth pursuing.

The staccato laughter elicited at these occasions is always tinged with the nervous guilt of relief -still alive, still breathing, still here. Still unbroken, my defence is to find humour in the midst of these gatherings of intermittent grief, to present a traveling theatre of the absurd by the absurdity of this traveling graveside. It is never the unbidden hilarity of the whispered jest that disconcerts the uninvited audience so much as the sight of people actually laughing at a funeral. Those seeking a state of grace must eschew such graceless behaviour. After the interment of one of my uncles, my father wouldn’t speak to me for a month as I had my sisters in tears of less than silent laughter after one particularly bad joke.

It flits mischievously across my mind.
A jelly baby went to the doctor and said ‘Doctor, I need an AIDS test.’ ‘Why? What the hell have you been up to?’ asked the doctor. ‘Fucking All Sorts’ replied the jelly baby.
Not my finest moment.      

  At one point I merely smile across at Sandy and he almost bursts out laughing.
Anticipation. Is. Lethal.

I turn away to avoid creating a scene. As a clan we are all terse and historically hot-tempered. Save for myself. I am centred and untouchable. Although this would not necessarily be a view expressed by attendant others. Today I don’t feel humorous.

  We are not close, but we are connected. Thrown together by blood then strewn across this world by fate. Threads woven tight then broken, a living mantle from Glasgow to Chicago, Cape Breton to California, Singapore to Sydney, Tir nan Og to tomorrow.

  One of my sisters crosses behind the open grave into my line of sight. She gestures she needs a lift afterwards. I nod agreement although I prefer to be by myself with solitude my welcome accomplice in days of somber dreaming. The coffin is lowered gently to rest and the final benediction spoken. Echoes of distant sons and absent others rise on the breeze, their prayers unspoken yet heard, a beginning not an end, celebration rather than sorrow.

And now it comes to me. Now she can be free.
Rejoice in the coming of this night for it heralds the birth of a new day.

  The piper breathes life into a final lament beneath the transported Hebridean sky as we drift through legion headstones. It comes to me just how much I love the skirl of the bagpipes. They stir my blood in unmentionable ways, primordial and wild. A soul-call to arms and eternity, no more fitting tribute, climax or conclusion. Weird? Maybe.
Perhaps today is a day for incisive understanding.
Perhaps.

  I find forgotten roots in these sombre occasions. They steady me. My life unfolds endlessly. Restless I travel on, hoping for the clear skies, open roads and no borders of infant dreamtime. But every time I return, increasingly now for celebrations of lives well-lived rather than the joy of new-born love, I feel that bond, the tie to the land of my birth and kin. Strangely, it frees me.
There is no loss here. I have been strengthened by the knowing of this land and these lives. They are part of me, helped make me what I am. A distant son, it’s true, but still a son of this ancient tradition, son, nephew, brother, uncle, grandson. They were the lands that bore me, the hands that tore me screaming from the womb, the sun that fired my youth, the moon that steered me through dark nights, the gentle shores that led me to the lapping waves of faraway promise, the tumultuous seas and storms of my youth, the winds of change and infant breeze that filled my sails, the adolescent gusts beneath my fledgling wings.

They made me what I am. Whatever that may be.