Driving me up the wall

My brother - saints preserve us.  My dad wasn't religious as such - he used to be, he may well have believed in something but not that I was aware of and my mum and I were pretty much convinced that he wanted a humanist service.  My brother who appears to have gotten "all religious" on us has produced an Order of Service that you could bury a Pope with.  Never have I seen such utter drivel and I've gone through this with him a number of times and I've just found out he's fannying around with it again changing the wording and the music.


So I had to ask him was this the template that the Funeral Director and the Vicar gave him - then he got all defensive and said he'd got it from the Internet and he read the bible which may come as a surprise to me :-)  A bit rich as I thought I was reading most of the New Testament when I read his order of service.  SO he hasn't spoken to the Vicar (which he wanted) or the Funeral Director.  He has pages and pages printed out and has run it down to the very second on a timetable FFS!!  Give me strength.  The Crematoriums have books that they refer to, the Vicar agrees the service with the family and we can choose the music and the hymns and what we would like but not tell the vicar what to say!!


I don't know what he is thinking about here at all he just needs to leave it up to the Vicar.  Dad wanted a poem (one not several) and so we can request that.  He's cut and pasted it and not even attributed it to the author!  He doesn't even know why I suggested that he should.  What I actually hope is that the Vicar just goes and talks to my mum and she can discuss a nice simple ceremony with him/her and we can choose the 3 tracks and we have some spare if needed but it's just a nonsense and completely over the top for a simple in and out ceremony, that is all that my dad would have wanted and also all that my mum wants.  I might suggest that he sets up a Celebration of Life Service that he and he alone attends - no one is interested in this fake and completely out of step idea.  Bloody hell, I know he has a stake in this, of course he does, but you'd have thought he would just accede to mum's and by default therefore, dad's wishes.  Bloody idiot.  It's like walking on egg shells with him - he's just gone way over board on all this stuff.  I've told my mum to write down her express wishes and put those in with her will and then there's no doubt.


I know he doesn't like my dad's wish not to have a memorial stone, a plaque or any such device, he just wants his ashes scattered at the Crematorium and that's it.  He wants no shrine to come back to, no one having to remember anniversaries or birthdays.  It's over and done and everyone needs to get back on with their lives.  There's the rub, he wanted to make sure I got back home to my family and my girls so did my mum.  I was so concerned that I couldn't be there but they said that it was their choice to move away and once I had finished school, got a job, got married, moved house, got my family, that they didn't expect anything more than the start in life and that I was to concentrate on my family.  Pretty level headed stuff - pragmatic stuff, a realistic attitude.  My kid brother wouldn't get this even if you sat down and explained it to him.  


I don't have many dealings with him because of this diametrically opposite view on the world and life.  I don't hate him or anything like that but I don't like his life choices or anything else about his parochial existence, is attitude, his interference, his self righteousness and  his imposition on to others.  He is the worst type of convert who takes great joy in ramming something you don't want to do down your throat and having no ability to see any other view but his own.  


I will try and compromise and work this out with him but he is trying my patience and my mum's too.  Luckily he is at work all this week and so hopefully mum can meet the vicar on her own and agree things with him.  As long as we get dad's poem and a few bits of music in place the rest of the crap he's put forward can go to hell in a hand cart as far as I'm concerned.  Things are going to be fraught enough on Friday without the doom and despair and sickly sweet vomit inducing crap my brother is suggesting we put in.  


Silly isn't it that I might fall out even further over something as serious as my father's funeral.  Mind you, it wouldn't be the first time in the past 11 months he's come up with some hair brained shit.  He was after all the person who suggested it was my dad who was being selfish for not having a 13 hour operation that had a 50:50 chance of prolonging his life - at the age of 81!  Also the idea of bringing my dad home when it needed a team of nurses around the clock to look after him in hospital.


I do hope that after Friday he takes a break - he hasn't had a holiday in 10 years I think, and just chills out.  Right let's take a deep breath and see if I can chat to him a little bit more about whether he really wants his Eulogy in the Order of Service too.  It's the sort of thing that I write when I'm emotionally challenged and then delete 5 hours later after I've had time to think about it :-)  It's a pathetic piece of emotion soaked drivel full of insecurities, stuff cut and pasted from the internet and should be consigned to be written on toilet paper in my humble opinion of course.   I think he feels some sort of guilt and need for confession.  The test is, would I say this to his face if he were here?  The answer is NO I wouldn't say half of it as he'd have thought I'd gone "soft in the head".  That's the mark of it.  I'm writing the family tribute.  That's the test I'm applying.  Would it be suitable in a place of worship, would it be decent at a funeral to say it, would it convey our feelings about him (expressed whilst he was alive - not what we didn't have the guts to say to him when alive) and does it reflect what he was like because many people wouldn't have seen dad for 16 or 17 years or only at Weddings and Funerals (maybe).  I doubt there will be more than 20 at the very most there and 15 are close family and of those there are only 9 of us who actually knew him in the last 10 years of his life.  Everyone else wouldn't have seen him for a long time although they may have spoken to him on the phone.  My friends haven't seen my dad for 20 or so years since my children were christened I guess.  


You also have to remember that is also true of my brother as many haven't seen him for that length of time either....