The Right Way To Go

SORRY, pal. Wrong funeral.’ Having erupted into our grief, the kilted intruders —already stotious—erupted out again.

- Kit Hesketh-Harvey

It rather ruptured the moment, as we sat listening to Schubert’s String Quintet: that sublime adagio Arthur Rubinstein once called ‘The entrance to Heaven’.

Their confusion was forgivable, however. Outside the chapel—one of several adjacent—the hearses were stacking like Ryanair above Stansted. It was a Monday, after a cold snap, and Edinburgh’s crematorium was teeming. The waiting-room is a 1970s brute, much like the bus terminal at St Andrew’s Square, and reeked of Jeyes Fluid.

We’d had to start late, gazing miserably at the coffin as its hearse stood idling under threat of a parking ticket. The naffness of this production line of colliding obsequies was dispiriting. She had been so utterly un-naff.

I want you in charge. Family only. In Scotland. It must be in Scotland.’

She was more than a century old. She’d had a magnificent, monumental life, achieving selfless marvels with the American fortune into which she had married. It was typically resolute to plan her last rites in every bespoke detail and to summon me in time to prepare them.

She was dismissive of my tears. She’d been my friend and lynchpin for decades, but she had been central to the lives of others, too.

‘Why me?’