Words: Jeremy Miles. Pictures: Hattie Miles
A few weeks ago a friend of mine posted a piece on social media lamenting the inevitable shortcomings of the 21st century family funeral. He described the curious post-cremation experience of seeing his mother’s ashes sitting in a neat pile in a garden of remembrance.
They had been left to allow mourners a brief moment of reflection and contemplation before being raked into the adjacent flower bed. His son commented, with some accuracy, that it looked as though someone had upended last night’s barbecue.
And there you have the problem. No matter how hard we try to honour the memory of our loved ones there is invariably a feeling that perhaps it could have been done just a little better.
Having had to deal with the deaths of both my parents in the past two years I know only too well how true this is. Both were cremated but things were difficult when it came to making formal arrangements and providing a fitting farewell with two funerals.
Ken and Joyce had been married for 72 years and were both in their nineties. Their final months were spent in a care home. Many of their closest friends and contemporaries had died and of those those that had survived a distressing number were simply too old and frail to attend.
Those who could were still faced with the fall-out from Covid. There were backlogs, delays and restrictions with rail strikes and traffic snarl-ups to negotoiate.
We are also a very small family. There were no aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces or nephews. My brother Simon lives in California with his family which had made it impossible for him to travel during the pandemic. He did managed to visit mum and dad twice in their care home in the months before the end which was a consolation.
I eventually persuaded him that flying nearly 6,000 miles for a funeral attended by hardly anyone would be pretty pointless. We decided that after the formal cremation service it would be best if I kept the ashes until a suitable time could be found when Simion and I could get together and host a lunch celebrating their lives.
We would then scatter their ashes in the sea off Folkestone, the town where they were both born, educated, met and spent the first eight years of their married life. It was home to us too of course and it is where my mum had asked for her ashes to be returned to. Dad had been more dismissive, commenting: “I don’t care. I’ll be dead.” He would definitely have liked the idea of being with mum though.
Ken and Joyce were a popular couple in their day with a wide circle of friends. They went on to live in Hampshire, spent years in Hong Kong and travelled the world before moving back to the UK to settle in Surrey from where dad commuted daily to work in London.
Over the yeas though Folkestone was always regarded as home. They stayed in touch with their old friends for as long as they could but sadly by the time they reached their 90s they had outlived almost all of them. We decided to hold our little ritual farewell from the town’s Harbour Arm casting the ashes into the sea off the very beach where we had all spent so many childhood summers.
The Harbour and the adjacent fishing industry were also inextricably woven into the family DNA with fishermen, lifeboat crew, customs officers, harbour employees and even a suspected smuggler all featuring in the family tree. It was a good plan which eventually came together in June last year but inevitably I suppose there were a couple of things we hadn’t thought through.
When I had asked the funeral directors to hang onto the ashes until we were ready to collect, I hadn’t realised just how bulky and heavy a couple of urns containing the remains of two grown adults would be.
I also discovered that there are all kinds of rules and regulations that dictate where you can and can’t scatter human ashes these days. Just to make sure I undestood I was given a whole bunch of paperwork outlining the dos and don’ts.
Basically, in the UK you don’t need permission to scatter ashes on your own land or over a body of open water but if you choose someone else’s land, officially at least, you need permission and there may be fees. I’m not sure everyone sticks rigidly to these rules but we didn’t want any trouble.
So even though the English Channel had initially seemed like a good and problem-free choice, by the time we actually got the ashes to Folkestone we were having doubts.
For a start there was far more ash than we had imagined. We had spooned a jam jar full of mum and then dad into a bio-degradeble parcel which we intended to throw into the sea. But what to do with the rest? We decided we would simply have to pour it off the Harbour Arm.
It wasn’t quite as easy as we had anticipated. Those two urns weighed a lot and we used a wheeled suitcase to trunde them from the car park up onto the Harbour wall on what had turned out to be a blistering hot summer’s day.
As we lugged the case into place it slowly dawned on us that we were in possession of a bag of human remains. Legitimate though our mission undoubtedly was, it didn’t feel like a good look and as we walked past CCTV, security and goodness knows what else we felt distinctly uneasy.
Even though not a soul challenged us – I guess a lot of ashes get scattered from the Harbour Arm – I was beginning to feel that what had seemed such a simple, innocent and harmless commemoration was about to turn into some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare.
We needn’t have worried. All was fine though perhaps a little different from the send off we had imagined. For a start it was a summer’s day of the sort that mum and dad had probably never seen in their lives. So much for a homecoming.
The Folkestone beach we were looking at was more like the Med than the often blustery rain-lashed scene remembered from our childhood with its memories of shivering behind a windbreak and wondering how long we could hold out before putting a jumper on.
The location was perfect, almost dreamlike in it’s sun-baked, blue sky perfection. There was even an added extra. As we watcbed our parcel bob beneath the water and the rest of the ash gradually wash away, the unmistakable throb of a Merlin engine became apparent, gradually getting louder as what appeared to be our very own Spitfire flypast hove into view, the iconic fighter plane sweeping in from the nearby White Cliffs of Dover.
It would later turn out that what we were witnessing was a practise flight in preparation for the birthday celebrations of the then new King just a few days later. What could be more appropriate for a couple who grew up and fell in love in this front-line town during Word War II?
It was the kind of summer day they always dreamed of and though it was tragic that the heatwave was almost certainly a symptom of how much damage the human race has inflicted on our precious planet, in those moments it served as a blissfully beautiful backdrop for a very special final journey.