My husband Peter died four years ago, so I have some experience of organising a funeral. Like Caroline’s memorial, Peter’s was a non-religious event, but conducted by a friend who is a priest.
He began with the reading from Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven...”), which, describing as it does how we are all part of the natural world, seemed to me equally appropriate for Caroline.
My friend also recommended the Wendy Cope poem "My Funeral" (its warning ignored by some of Peter’s friends who talked for so long that we were indeed very late for the crematorium!)
"I hope I can trust you, friends, not to use our relationship
As an excuse for an unsolicited ego-trip..."
Time was the biggest challenge in writing this episode: how can you encapsulate nearly forty years of life in twelve and a half minutes?
I wanted the inevitable sadness of the occasion to be leavened by lots of happy memories, so I spent hours trawling through the archives, searching out amusing incidents and anecdotes about Caroline.
When it came to music, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”, seemed to embody who she was when she first arrived in Ambridge in 1977, and Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”, to capture something of the joy she found in simply being alive. On the other hand, I could not ignore the awful suddenness of Oliver’s bereavement, and there is no more heartrending expression of loss than the aria “E Lucevan Le Stelle” from Tosca.
The episode was as much in memory of the actress Sara Coward as of the character she played. Before she died Sara started a campaign called SM:)E, which finds a poignant echo in Christina Rossetti’s beautiful poem, “Remember”.
"...Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad."
