2 January 2012 – The Good Funeral Guide

Love letter to self

The Co-operative Funeralcare has helped generations of families through difficult times, providing care support and reassurance when it matters most.

The Co-operative Funeralcare has become the country’s leading funeral director because of the high quality of care we deliver through our people working at a local level, who are backed by resources and expertise that only a trusted national organisation can provide.

The Co-operative Funeralcare offers a genuinely local funeral service backed by the strength and reassurance of a unique, caring organisation. Our top priority is to provide the best possible services for our clients and to invest in the communities that we serve.

It must be true; it says so in the Northwich Guardian.

Ashes

Ashes at the funeral home
six hundred still to be collected
small boxes, cardboard, filed in rows
a kind of shell grit for the chickens
fifteen years six hundred still
that somehow somewhere should be scattered:
sown like seed across a paddock
thrown as gravel upon water
or set there upon the mantelpiece
and added to at parties
or dug perhaps in some well-loved
old gardner’s acidic corner
that needs a spot of lime
or tossed aloft like hard confetti
at weddings in the park
where at the end he might have sat
or stowed in brass behind a name
the cemetery as mail exchange
and postbox minus key.
How is it that they cannot face this morning’s meeting long deferred
this grey irrelevance of ashes against what dawn and memory bring
so vertical and three-dimensioned
though growing slowly blurred?
They cannot bear to sign the book
a woman at the counter holds
so long inured to tears.
And some themselves
who would have come
are patient on the shelves.

Geoff Page is an Australian poet. You can read more about him (and more of his poems) here.