leisure
NO FUNERAL, THANKS.
After an urgent call from the Gibraltar Cardiologist’s office, Peter ponders the rather macabre issue of what should be done with one's remains, when the clock chimes.
BY PETER SCHIRMER
F
or almost a century, Cape Town’s leading firm of undertakers was Human & Pitt, a partnership established in the 1870s between a local Dutch entrepreneur and a newly-arrived English settler who had worked for a mortician in London. They prospered – and though eventually adsorbed by a country-wide group – their apposite names provided a source of jokes or momentary amusement for generations of school-children; while a local academic and poet saw their apt naming as a ‘fine example of funeral humour’… In truth, there’s nothing funny about funerals, and few Westerners enjoy them – other than, perhaps, coffin-makers and morticians. I certainly don’t, though as a journalist I have reported on several, of prominent people, in various countries and of various faiths. Even when accompanied by singing and flowers and a local belief that death should be celebrated as a blessing, they’ve felt unduly morbid, and unnecessarily costly 72
to the corpse’s family… or nation. So I will not be having one. And, contemplated for years, that’s finally official – duly signed and sorted, in a trilingual encounter which had all the makings of an episode in a third-rate sitcom. This was never a spur of the moment decision. Though it was finalised only this week because, at 85, and lungs battered by 60-a-day habit for more than half those years, I face two separate heart operations, either of which could prove fatal. But over several years of ‘No Funeral’ thought, I always faced the same eventual question: Without a funeral, and thus no coffin, nor a burial or cremation, how does one dispense with a cadaver… preferably in a useful way? Probably the logical answer was obvious, but somewhere in my subconscious I was not quite ready to come to terms with the actual end itself, for I found ‘obstacles’ to making a final
Without a funeral, how does one dispense with a cadaver? commitment. My abused liver and other overworked or run-down organs were long past their sellby-date and would be useless as transplants. Harmful rather than helpfully life-giving. That sort of thing. Then, five years ago, while thumbing through an illustrated history of Dutch art – and with nary a thought of funerals or cadavers in mind – Rembrandt came to my aid in the intense light and deep shadows of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp painted in 1632. The cadaver at the centre of the work even shared my beard. I, or rather what was left of me, could be used to help future doctors or surgeons to study anatomy. It was an option GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE MARCH 2020
