BERNARD HUMPHREYS
WHAT is a human life, at its eventual and inevitable end, but a collection of memories?
Happiness, friendships, achievements and accomplishments, love. All of these things come and go in real time, but stay with us in our memories.
So do the bad things, I know. The failures, the disappointments, the fights and arguments and enmities, the regrets and sadnesses; they’re are all there as well, but in the end they too are part of the picture each of us paints with the one chance at life we’ve been given.
What happens to these memories when we go? Well, I’m agnostic, so all I know about that is that I don’t feel I know anything. I do know, though, that for most of us, nearly all those memories that made up our lives were shared with others along the way, and that at least some of those others will be left behind to hold and cherish them for themselves, and on our behalf.
To me, this is the only afterlife we can definitely have for sure. And while it might not be the sitting-on-clouds-while-harps-play sort of heaven some like to imagine, or even anything the dead can experience at all, it can be a very important part of the life that goes on.
You can see at least a little of this at any funeral, and even at the saddest funeral, but I believe you’ll see much more of it at a country funeral.
I’m now at an age where funerals are more common events in my own life. I’ve struggled to attend a few, to be honest, because I’ve just seen too many people taken too soon and the grief has at times been overwhelming.
A bit more than a year-and-a-half ago, however, I returned to live in Sunraysia after decades of city life and, since then, I’ve attended several final farewells for people I knew in my childhood and youth. They were all sad occasions, of course, but two of them, despite their tragedies, filled my heart with a joy to balance that grief.
Both were for men who died young, still in their fifties, one a relative and the other a childhood friend. I had seen neither for many years before their deaths and of course I knew at their funerals that I would never see them again.
What I did see, though, at these ceremonies in little Balranald and bustling Bendigo, were dozens of other people I also hadn’t seen for many years, between them carrying hundreds, if not thousands, of memories shared with the deceased, each other and, in many cases, with me.
Because these were country funerals, some people travelled huge distances to get there. Some of those I saw on the day, I will probably never see again. I did see them that important once, though, and we did talk and we did remember and we did share. And while there were tears, we laughed a lot as well. Every story, and there were many, was told with a smile.
In each case, our departed loved one had brought us together so we could do that. It turned them into a sort of host. In fact, one of them even planned it that way because he was claimed by a terminal illness that had given him time to organise his own farewell, so he dispensed with the usual depressing formalities and told us to just to have a wake.
We did that, and it was great. It was a great way to remember him, but it also helped all of us still living to remember the times we’d had together, growing up in the bush, being young, being carefree, being mates. A collection of memories.
His life had ended, but not his story. It lives on with us, and it enriches our own.
Now, I’m not saying this never happens at city funerals. Of course it does. I just get the feeling that it tends to be a more powerful thing in the bush. I think that’s probably at least partly because young country people tend to scatter in early adulthood, chasing the goals of their own lives and so wandering far from the places they grew up and the people they grew up with. Anything that brings them together, even if sad, has a spirit of reunion, and reunions of friends and loved ones are invariably good for the soul.
Why? Because of the memories, those which, at that eventual and inevitable end, are the sum of what we’ve been as individuals, but which also made us part of something bigger.
Something that lives on.
