A slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes

The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes, over the sensations of which we have very little control. Donne looked at it, saw it, and did not blink. He walked straight at it: no explanation, justification, so cheerful sallies. There was just the clear-eyed acknowledgement of the precise anatomy and scale, the look and feel, the reality of ruin.

K. Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022), 69

Their role is to sit in the pew and watch it taking place

An Anglican requiem mass (he [Julian Litten], unlike Cola, believes in life after death) will take place at All Saints, King's Lynn, at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday morning - 'Wednesdays are always good days for funerals. If anyone wants to come up from London, they can catch the 9.44 and will be in good time.'

From the balcony of the church, a trumpet, trombone, kettle drum and choir will play the Prelude to Charpentier's Te Deum - and the funeral will begin. It will be done properly, soberly, tastefully, which is to say in accordance with tradition. ... 'There will be no eulogies,' he sneered. 'Nobody standing up and talking about me. No ghastly child reading a poem and bursting into tears. No member of the laity reading any of the lessons. I think it's tish. Rubbish. It's got nothing to do with the English funeral. Their role is to sit in the pew and watch it taking place.  

P. Ross,  A tomb with a view (2020), 31

Marriage is memory, marriage is time

This will not be a story in which the death of the husband or wife becomes what amounts to the credit sequence for a new life, a catalyst for the discovery that (a point typically introduced in such accounts by the precocious child of the bereaved) “you can love more than one person.” Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time. “She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger. 

J. Didion, The year of magical thinking (2005), 197

There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought

Christmas, the end of the year. I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense,” C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. “It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier post across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”

J. Didion, The year of magical thinking (2005), 194

One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage

One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage. In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable. At the time she undertook her book of etiquette, there would have been few American households untouched by the influenza pandemic of 1918. Death was up close, at home. The average adult was expected to deal competently, and also sensitively, with its aftermath. When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California, you bake a ham. You drop it by the house. You go to the funeral. If the family is Catholic you also go to the rosary but you do not wail or keen or in any other way demand the attention of the family.

J. Didion, The year of magical thinking (2005), 60

A child of impossible perfection

Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. It has always seemed impossible to him that some act of his gave her life, some unthinking thing that he and Liz did, on some unmemorable night. They had intended the name to be Henry for a boy, Katherine for a girl, and, Liz had said, that will do honour to your Kat as well. But when he had seen her, swaddled, beautiful, finished and perfect, he had said quite another thing, and Liz had agreed. We cannot earn grace. We do not merit it.

H. Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009), 152

There is nothing like a morning funeral for sharpening the appetite for lunch

There is nothing like a morning funeral for sharpening the appetite for lunch ... We had been burying, I am sad to say, my father and I mean no disrespect to the dead when I suggest how greatly preferable the aftermath of a funeral is to that of a wedding.

A. Marshall, Life's rich pageant (1984), 1

We are also asking him to witness our dying

The doctor is the familiar of death. When we call for a doctor, we are asking him to cure us and t relieve our suffering, but, if he cannot cure us, we are also asking him to witness our dying. The value of the witness is that he has seen so many others die. (This, rather than the prayers and last rites, was also the real value which the priest once had.)

J. Berger, A fortunate man (1967; 2016 edition), 70