Days to Remember: 9. The danger of parking outside the Church (Part 2)

The relatively unusual experience of a minister is to travel in a hearse while fully conscious (before the later single trip more universally undertaken).  Nobody who has spent any time in local church ministry is short of funeral stories, though public blogging is not the most pastorally sensitive way to disseminate them.  I will stick with just one from my time in Wycombe.  It's about that busy street outside the church where, on the snowy night previously reported, people nearly died. 

 

The service was over.   It is a few hundred yards to the town cemetery and the easiest way as minister is to take the hearse there and walk back.  I sat in the rear seat, my head adjacent to that of the deceased.  

 

She'd had just a tenuous connection with our premises through another church. As best I recall, apart from the family and friends only our church funeral functionaries (me included) had been present.  The funeral directors, unusually, were from out of county.

 

 

'Nice cars these hearses,' I often thought, 'shame about the function.'  In went the ignition key.  A kind of electronic whirring but nothing resembling an engine sound.  And again.  And again.  I thought, 'This is going to be interesting.  I wonder what they do when the hearse won't start?'  Unfortunately it turned out that the driver was also thinking, 'I wonder what I do when the hearse won't start?'   The Funeral Director was pulled away from the family gathered by the other funeral car to be told the news.  He then seemed to think, 'I wonder what you do when the hearse won't start?'

 

It became clear that in their home town they would have had a spare car as a rule.  They were not in their home county, never mind town.  They started ringing local funeral firms with whom they were connected.  These helpful funeral firms were being helpful by helping other people have their funerals.  There is a limit to the number of available hearses of course.  Hope dwindled. 

 

A few minutes later and a phone call came in.  One of the local companies had a spare hearse in a town a few miles away.  We sat, we waited, with reasonable dignity the transfer was eventually made.

 

I figured that the person (perhaps not quite the right word) for whom this was the least traumatic was the one whose head silently reclined a few inches from mine in her coffin.  RIP meant Rest in Peace for her, and Ring in Panic for everyone else.