More from my mother's funeral service

Barbara Webb, the extraordinary reader from Wombourne church who worked with me to develop the service in accordance with Mum's wishes, has sent me the words that she spoke on the day. Barbara knew my mother well, and her words are a fine tribute.

I am not a Christian, but I have a lot of time for the spirit of philosophical inquiry that Barbara brings to her religion, and indeed her outlook on life. Barbara helped us give our mother a wonderful send-off; thank you, Barbara.

Introduction

This service has been built around Judy’s well-thought out wishes, to such an extent that I feel that she has invited us to celebrate her life by sharing much of what she found good in it. Even during the last weeks in Compton Hospice Judy was very much in charge.

The manner of her illness has meant that she was able to talk with and share many thoughts with Bethan, Julian and Justin, drawing the family closer together which was, I am sure, her dearest wish. Those bonds have been strengthened and will not break, even though the Atlantic separates her sons from her daughter much of the time.

As most of you here know, music played an enormous part in Judy’s life, especially over the last years. That is reflected in the service sheet which contains the full details she requested. Music, I know, touched Judy at the deepest level, and in her choice of music for this service she has chosen two pieces and asked us to sit quietly as they are played. So let us do just that, not only remembering Judy but allowing the music speak to deeply to our hearts, freeing emotions that words simply don’t touch.

Address

Judy had a lot of time to decide the details of her funeral. She asked me over a year ago to co-operate with our Rector Paul. And she knew that the tone of the service would be 100% Christian because it was only a couple of months ago that, being Judy who tackled things head on she asked to be sidesperson at a local funeral in this church … which it so happened I took. Yes, she knew this would be a 100% Christian funeral.

Judy was a thinking person, who didn’t take what she was taught for granted, and there were aspects of the Christian faith which she found difficult. She questioned, and I believe that God will welcome her with open arms because of that. Some of us come to him as unquestioning simple believers, others seek more concrete answers, but fortunately God loves us all. just as we are.

For her own reasons Judy struggled with the concept of resurrection, which is the bedrock of the Christian faith. In fact most faiths allow for some form of existence before, outside or beyond the span and confines of a human life, so there must be a widespread, deep–seated, instinctive belief in humankind that death is not the end but the start of something new. Our problem is, of course, that only one Man came back from the dead to prove it and tell us about it, Jesus Christ himself. Apostle Paul tackled this head on in his letter to the Corinthians. “If the dead are not raised, it follows that Christ was not raised; and if Christ was not raised, your faith has nothing to it. If it is for this life only that Christ has given us hope, we Christians of all people are most to be pitied.”

But Paul didn’t stop there. He must have been a tremendous orator and I can hear him thundering “But the truth is, Christ was raised from the dead”. Paul believed totally in the resurrection, and so do I. The Christian hope of life after death is the heart of our service today, and from what I have heard from her family, I believe that, as Judy drew nearer to death, her life story made sense to her, and she was finding the peace which God alone can bring.

God doesn’t ask us to understand; he asks us to trust in him, and live our lives in hope, inspired by his love, the love he expressed in Jesus Christ, the love he lavishes on us every day. Our job is simple; we are to accept that love and use it to love our families and all those around us, as agents for God, spreading his peace in the world.

Judy, as we say after most of our services, may you rest in peace and rise in glory. Amen

Eulogy for Judy Hyde

It was my mother's funeral today, and I gave following eulogy. As you will see from the order of service, the piece of music I was referring to, which immediately followed my address, was the Officium defunctorum (Requiem) by Tomás Luis de Victoria.

Thank you all for coming.

Many, many people have helped out in the months that Judy has been ill. I’d like to thank a few people in particular.

• Gill and Robert Green, my brother Justin’s in-laws, for putting up with a full house for the past few months;
• Pamela’s mother Barbara, who has been sending a card containing a few words and a pasted Snoopy cartoon, three times a week for two years;
• Elaine, who was like a sister to my mother;
• Adrian and Judy, quietly and selflessly helping out;
• All of the staff at Compton Hospice.
  

Lots of people here! In addition to her family, there are:

• Friends from her young married life with Adrian, in particular from Dudley Kingswinford Rugby club;
• Teachers from Westfield and Bobbington;
• People she knows from courses at U3A (University of the Third Age) Latin, Italian, history;
• People she knows from music courses at Bromsgrove and Wolverhampton University;
• Members of Wombourne & District Choral Society;
• Friends from her passion for Early Music, there are recorder players, harpsichord players, and for all I know, players of crumhorns, racketts, and hurdy gurdies;
• And of course members of the church and the community in and around Wombourne, that Judy was an enthusiastic part of.

So many people! I had always thought of Judy as a quiet woman, and I think she did too. But that reserve was balanced by a drive to do what she loved, to get out there and play music, or do what she needed to do.

I think everyone who has been with her over her struggle with cancer over the past months knows about that determination. She just kept on going, kept on doing the things she loved.

I’ll give a couple more examples.

When I was 5, Judy and Adrian got divorced. It must have been very hard for her, bringing up two young children, but of course we were too young to notice. We moved into a new house, and of course she was working full time to pay the mortgage. She wanted her children to have swimming lessons and piano lessons, play rugby, and join the scouts, so she needed to learn to drive. She created a mantra ‘learn to drive in 75’. She had driving lessons from a friend with her two children sitting on the back seat. She was such a nervous driver, and she devised a way to calm her nerves before her driving test: have a swift gin and tonic, and cover the smell by eating mint imperials.

And by the way, she still keeps mint imperials in her car. Justin found a Tupperware container in the driver’s door the other day. Even after all her struggles to eat high calorie food and gain weight, they still had a hand-written label on the lid: “Mint imperials, bought 26th September 2007, 11 kilocalories each”.

Another example of that determination. In the mid 90s, Mum announced that she was going to Uganda. The reason for that visit was my sister Bethan. We never knew that we had a sister. In those days, if you were a young unmarried mother, you weren’t given much choice. Judy’s mother’s first concern was to save the family from embarrassment. I think Mum was shaken up by this. She didn’t think she would ever see Bethan again. When Bethan contacted Mum, she and her family were doing development work in Uganda. I had been to Uganda as a student, and I knew that it was a difficult place to travel in, let alone for a sixty year old. OK, said Mum, and jumped on a plane to meet her daughter.

In the last few years of her life, Judy had a flowering. She had always clashed wills with her mother, and she said that when her mother died, she ‘came out from under a cloud’. These last ten or fifteen years were the best times of her life. After she retired, she took a music ‘A’ level, then a music degree, and got involved in all kinds of activities, including early music, but also other studies with U3A. Her sons, Justin and I, completed our studies with good degrees, and embarked on careers in computer software that she never totally understood, but was nevertheless very proud of. We both moved to California, but the family remained in close touch. Bethan and her family became part of Judy’s family, and she saw me and my brother settle down with women she liked. Just after my wedding to Pamela in California two years ago, Justin and Caroline had Zachary, and that gave her great pleasure.

I’m proud of everything that she achieved in those years. It was nice to be on the receiving end of all that love. I love you too, Mum.

The final healing happened this April. Judy took my father Adrian and his partner Judy to a weekend course to Benslow in South Wales. She lived for these courses, and knew that this was going to be her last. And she was pleased to be introducing her music, which she loved so much, to new people.

I’m going to leave you with a piece of music. Music was of course a passion of Judy’s life. She felt kinship with people who shared her passion for music. When she found a perfect piece of music, she could of course tell you intellectually why it was perfect. This particular piece, the first movement of a requiem written over 400 years ago for a Spanish princess, was the apex of polyphonic Renaissance choral music. But it’s quite simply a beautiful piece of music. That’s what she would like to leave us with. Please, sit back, reflect, and enjoy it.

Mainz community meet up is just one week away

Just one week til the Pentaho community meet-up in Mainz, Germany, that I blogged about earlier.

If you're coming, please register. (Just so we know how many beer glasses to have on hand!)

Plenty of other information about the event on the Pentaho wiki.