Whether or not you believe in the afterlife, death remains an impenetrable mystery. One moment a person is making jokes and comments and observations about life; the next he is gone. What has happened to that store of wit and wisdom acquired over a lifetime, to that particular way of understanding and looking at things, to that unique muddle of thoughts and feelings that every individual has? Even if someone has gone to heaven, it is difficult to imagine that he has taken these things with him. If he did, they would hardly be compatible with eternal rest.
By my brother John’s bedside when he died, aged 87, on New Year’s Eve were a few books he had just been reading, among them works by Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann in their original languages and a new book, Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin. What was the point of him reading these books, one might ask, when whatever he had learnt from them would simply vanish? The answer, I suppose, is that reading them could have given him pleasure and stimulation at the time, and perhaps that’s enough. But it makes you realise how little you can ever really know about anybody when they die so full of secrets.
John’s funeral was held last week in Northamptonshire in a village church so cold that the congregation breathed out mist when they sang. John’s lifelong affection for Germany and its culture was reflected in the first hymn, ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, sung to Haydn’s famous tune for the German national anthem, and in two Schubert Lieder sung by an outstanding young German baritone, Benjamin Appl, who also ended the service with a magnificent rendering of Bach’s ‘Bist du bei mir’.
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