Tim Dowling: can I keep it together at my father’s funeral? No chance

On the morning of my father’s memorial service my brother reads me his eulogy, for practice.

“Yeah, it’s good,” I say. I don’t read him mine, because I don’t know how many recitations I have in me. What if it’s just one?

After that we go to the copy place to have 100 orders of service printed off. We spend an inordinately long time trying to choose between two shades of off-white.

“This one,” I say, holding up the sample for the man behind the counter.

“Great!” he says. “Sorry for your loss.”

At 3pm we begin to unfold chairs in the courtyard outside the Moose Room – named for the stuffed moose head over its fireplace – confident that the rain will hold off. I haven’t visited the Moose Room, or the library next door, for years. Everything seems smaller, except the moose, which is enormous.

By this time, with so much to think about, I’m confident my emotions will remain in check until after I read my eulogy. Then the firefighters turn up, in uniform, in their fire truck, and tears begin to spill over my lower lids. It turns out I am highly susceptible to displays of civic ceremony.

My brother reads his eulogy. My nephews read their own words of remembrance. My eulogy contains a bit robbed from the speech I gave at my father’s 100th birthday almost three years ago, in which I reminded people just how old he was: born in the middle of Warren Harding’s presidency; not just before the advent of television, but before radio. As I speak I try not to look at the fire truck.

There are baby deer gambolling among the headstones, and eating the flowers left by other mourners

Next morning, on the way to the burial, traffic heading out of town is backed up: someone is using a cherry picker to trim a hedge on the bend by the church. We text each other about the obstruction, but for most of us it’s too late to go around.

When my brother and I arrive at the cemetery four soldiers are already waiting – two young, two old – to perform certain offices to which my father, as a veteran, is entitled. There are baby deer gambolling among the headstones, and eating the flowers left by other mourners.

“It seems so unreal,” I say, watching them.

“They’ll leave when we start shootin’,” says one of the soldiers.

My father’s ashes have been placed in a wooden box that once belonged to his father. There was some back and forth about this with the cemetery people – they have rules about what you can bury – but I wasn’t part of this and it now seems to be resolved: the box is there, on a draped table in front of the headstone where we buried my mother 26 years ago. I have not been back here since that day.

My brother has issued us with a bare-bones guide to the order of events. He is going to welcome everyone and then say some words, and then at some point my sister and I will read poems. This is all I know, so I’m unprepared for the moment when the two young soldiers salute the wooden box as the two old soldiers fire rifle volleys from the hill above us. Then one of the old soldiers plays Taps on a bugle. It turns out I am also very susceptible to this sort of thing.

After that the two young soldiers unfold and re-fold an American flag with great ceremony, before presenting it to me.

“Thank you,” I say. But the young soldier doesn’t let go of the flag. Instead, he looks straight at me and says, “On behalf of the president of the United States, the United States Army and a grateful nation …” It turns out I am susceptible to a lot of stuff.

Only after I have wobbled my way through my poem do I begin to take things in properly. The burial attendees are mostly family – immediate, cousins and in-laws – along with the carers who looked after my father in his last months. This was nice, I think. And now it’s almost over, and then there’s a lunch.

At some rehearsed signal two gravediggers pull up in a truck and peel back the expanse of green rug spread over a neat square hole pre-dug into the ground. I cannot risk eye contact with my brother or my sisters at this point, because I know we’re all thinking the same thing: there is no way that box will fit into that hole.

The gravediggers exchange glances: they also appear to have concerns. One of them lifts the box and places it on top the hole, where it sticks like a cork in the neck of a bottle.

I will always be extremely grateful to the other gravedigger – the one who carefully knelt down, placed both palms on the lid of the box, and pushed with all his weight.