How to Say Goodbye

He made me jump. ‘What?’

He sighed loudly and ran a hand across his sweating brow. ‘Ah, wait. I’ve got it wrong. You’re meant to say how’s life and then I reply with, fine, pause, and how’s death! Geddit?’ He chuckled.

This was Raj’s thing. Since I’d bought the flat upstairs and he’d realised who his neighbour was and what she did for a living, he’d decided to use me as some sort of muse for his fledgling stand-up routine. A way to test out naff jokes and build up his material. It had been going on for years. If you asked him what he did he’d tell you he was a comedian, despite never performing for a paying audience in his life. His proper job was running the Minimart-post-office-deli. Every time a witty, or not so witty, one-liner came to him he’d immediately pull out his joke notebook and jot it down. Often I would ask him when he was going to actually perform this material at a stand-up night, but he’d always insist he wasn’t ready yet. I could understand why he was reluctant.

‘Good one,’ I smiled awkwardly. It was marginally better than when he insisted on saying ‘Good Mourning’ to me, heavily emphasising the mouuuurrning part, then doing a funny thing with his index fingers as if banging an imaginary drum in the air.

‘Oh, I’ve got another too. It came to me when I was helping Rani with the latest stocktake.’ He licked his lips and changed his stance as if standing under an imaginary spotlight. ‘Every year we get sent birthday cards, but how about a deathiversary card? They would really put the fun into funerals.’ He waited for my reaction.

Inside I cringed but, not wanting to hurt his feelings, I forced myself to clap weakly. ‘Ha, yeah, that would be, er, interesting.’

‘It needs a bit extra work that one. Oh, guess what!’

‘What?’

‘No, you need to guess!’

I pretended to look like I was deep in thought, clearly taking too long to come up with a suitable suggestion for this slightly tedious game.

‘Ok, I’ll tell you. You won’t get it anyway. Peter Kay messaged me back!’ He did this funny jazz hands thing and had his mouth so wide open I could see the fillings on his bottom row of teeth.

‘That’s, er, nice. Do I know him?’

‘He’s a famous comedian, Grace. He did that whole thing about garlic bread…’

I was still lost.

‘Never mind. He’s just, like, a big deal on the circuit. And now I guess I am too!’ He paused, the smile faltering slightly at my lukewarm reaction.

‘So how do you know this Peter King?’

‘Kay. I follow him on Twitter.’

I knew he was expecting me to match his levels of excitement.

He paused then scrunched up his face, thinking. ‘Well, he didn’t exactly message me. He liked a tweet. That joke I told you last week, how thinking about burial plots is the last thing you need.’

Twitter had never been my thing. From the looks of his timeline it was just him spamming comedians with some of his material. Also, I knew for a fact that Raj used a younger – and much more handsome – Bollywood actor as his profile picture. He’d shown me one time, when he’d tried to explain about likes and retweets.

‘But hey, when I do go on tour I can now say as liked by Peter Kay!’ He spread his hands across the counter as if presenting a banner.

‘Isn’t that a lie though?’

‘Nah, a bit of celebrity endorsement will do wonders for my career. Trust me.’

‘But won’t this Peter Kay find out?’

Raj shook his head. ‘He’s a busy man, Grace. Far too busy to be worrying about the likes of me. Well, for the moment at least!’ He chuckled. ‘Anyway, what can I get for you? The usual?’ He had thankfully put his joke book away.

I didn’t mind that he found my job such an amusing source of entertainment. I was used to people’s extreme reactions when they found out what I did. Being a funeral arranger is either a serious conversation starter or an awkward conversation killer. It was also one reason why I wouldn’t play the dating game, despite Ms Norris’s kind encouragement. The one and only time that I’d reluctantly agreed to go for a coffee date, just to get my mum off my back, it had ended in complete disaster. It was bad enough that it wasn’t Henry sitting across the table from me. Instead it was a slightly anaemic man named Ian whose eyebrows were so well groomed I struggled to lower my eyes to the rest of his face. When I did, it wasn’t worth it.

I’d been dreading him asking me, ‘So, what do you do?’

Explaining that I work with death on a daily basis is hard for others to get their heads around. I’m sure other people don’t go on dates and discuss the last funeral they went to, but Ian felt he needed to tell me, in detail, all about his grandad, Ron, who’d died in July 2007. I could almost taste the egg vol-au-vents served at his wake. Not exactly pillow talk. I shuddered as Ian and his overpreened eyebrows swam in my head.

‘Yes, thanks, just these.’

I watched Raj place a pint of milk and a small granary loaf into the Bag for Life I always carried.

*

Back in my flat, my coat neatly hanging on the coat stand that Mum had bought me as a moving-in present – slightly excessive to have a whole stand for just me but it passed my practicability test so it stayed. I took my notebook out of my bag and sat down at my small kitchen table to see what I needed to tick off that weekend. It was one of those compact space-saver ones with sides that could flip up if I needed to create room for more people. I wasn’t even sure it worked but it was nice to have the option.

– Check smoke alarms and change battery if required

– Sanitise sponges

– Clean inside the microwave (I made my own all-purpose cleaner using a plant spray bottle, baking soda and water)

– Wash the skirting boards

See! I didn’t have time to be larking about and bungee jumping or whatever silly things Ms Norris expected me to do. I filled my free time adequately, and before I knew it Monday would roll around again. I was very good at keeping on top of clutter in my flat, something that I was extremely proud of. Last year, Linda, my not-so-secret secret Santa, had bought me a book on cleaning that apparently everyone was reading – for what reason I have no idea. I’d flicked through it so as not to offend her, and made some exclamations on the ‘useful tips’ inside, but Linda had never been to my house, so could hardly know that I didn’t need this. Linda’s book had ended up in the charity shop bag.

Before starting anything else, I had something I needed to do. I flipped open my laptop. As I waited for the page to load I thought back to the first time I’d done this, which in turn reminded me of the first time I saw a dead body. It was during my extensive training. The female corpse was lying under a white sheet in a sterile room, with glazed eyes and a gaping mouth. She looked so… well, dead. We weren’t told her name, just that the woman had died of lung cancer in her early eighties. Routine. I vowed then to find out as much about the people in my care as I could. That woman lying stiffly on the cold steel table had a name, an identity and a back story. This desire to discover more about my clients became the motivation behind my quest to provide the perfect funerals for them, and my secret weapon had arrived in the form of Facebook.

I had been working with the family of a nineteen-year-old, Mollie Stevenson, who’d died after being hit by a car whilst crossing the road. Like many nineteen-year-olds she had been obsessed with social media, and her family proudly told me that her Facebook account had been memorialised by one of her friends. Intrigued, I’d created a Facebook profile, never having had much need for one before, and had then searched for this memorial page after work one night. It was like being given an invitation into the private life of this bubbly, happy and sociable teenage girl.

Her whole world was available for anyone to see. There were recent statuses at pop concerts, nights out and pictures of hipster meals she’d tried; endless snaps and pouting selfies with the same group of friends; numerous check-ins at places around town where she liked to go. I made sure to stay as discreet as possible, only looking and never commenting, amazed at the picture I could build up of someone’s life, even once they were dead.

I suddenly had a wealth of information about Mollie and her habits, hobbies and likes, allowing me to get creative with ways we could incorporate this into her funeral. Her mum and dad were understandably inconsolable and, although eager to give her the best send-off, you could clearly see that they were too lost in the tunnel of grief, shock and pain to think of ways to honour their daughter.

Which is where I stepped in.

Over a couple of evenings after work, I trawled through her page, and those of her friends, and was able to imagine the life Mollie had led. Her family were delighted with my suggestions of ways we could make the funeral more personal for their wonderful daughter. Obviously, I never admitted where I’d learnt this information. When Frank asked, I’d told a white lie, saying that my own (fictional) nineteen-year-old cousin loved the same sort of things that Mollie did – the trendy milkshake bar she liked to hang out at, the hula-themed nightclub in town, Arianna Grande. I knew I was stretching the definition of honesty by doing this research, but I was sure it was the right thing to do. It was as if Mollie herself was helping to plan her own funeral.

All the subterfuge was worth it when Mollie’s parents came up to me after the packed-out service, thanking me for going the extra mile. I hadn’t felt a high like it. Guests wore bright floral leis, had ‘One Last Time’ playing as they entered, and drank freakshakes at the wake. We’d managed to turn the desperately sad occasion into a unique tribute to this young woman who’d been taken way too soon.

*

Thanks to Mollie, I had learned that most people lived their lives online, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others to discover even after they’ve died. For every funeral after Mollie’s, I scheduled in time to do my own research into the lives of the people I was lucky enough to be taking care of. After all, you can’t take this day back and repeat it. We all only get one shot at a goodbye. I took it upon myself to make sure that, for my clients, it was the closest thing to perfect it could be.

Of course, this wasn’t without its obstacles. Some people’s Facebook accounts were set to ‘private’, although it was sometimes still possible to view the biographical information they’d listed, as well as their lists of friends – many of whom had public accounts, which made it possible to glean information second-hand. Another hiccup was that many people simply didn’t have Facebook accounts. For my older clients – those who hadn’t become ‘silver-surfers’ – it was a little trickier to track them down online and build up a picture of their full lives. However, they were often in the albums of their family members, mentioned in a status celebrating a birthday or anniversary, or snapped along with their grandchildren.

Aside from Facebook and the other social media sites, there were other online avenues to explore. Google searches yielded newspaper articles, profiles on business websites, features in local community forums. Everyone, it seems, has some kind of digital footprint, and anything I could find about my clients would help to inform how their funeral would play out. This is our last moment in the spotlight, after all, and it’s the personal touches that people remember, even years later. I’ve had families come to me because of the funerals I’d arranged for people they knew, telling me that the extra details had meant so much, and had made sure it was memorable for the right reasons.

I sometimes struggled with encouraging Frank to think outside the box – not that he knew where I was getting these bolts of creativity from. He was a traditionalist at heart. He was fine with families requesting mourners wear Hawaiian shirts, matching colours, or even a quirky memento of the deceased’s hobby, as long as it wasn’t too garish. But he wasn’t as quick to get on board with the extras, like the time we had a unicorn leading the funeral procession. This was something I’d organised for a young girl, Ava Harper, aged just seven, who I’d learned had been obsessed with them. Her recent birthday party had been unicorn-themed, and I managed to find a pure white horse whose owner dressed her up as a unicorn for regular visits to the children’s hospital. Casting her red-rimmed, exhausted eyes on the tastefully decorated horse, I saw her mother smile for the first time since meeting her.

Linda and Frank didn’t know that I used social media to create my personal goodbyes. It probably wasn’t against the rules, but I’d decided it wasn’t something I needed to shout about. It was another reason I tended to do my digging at home, in the evenings or weekends. I had three services coming up that I was struggling to find details for. I was soon lost in the timelines and news feeds of people I would never get to properly meet in real life.