Tapu Misa: A long kiss goodbye seems to help the leave-taking

Some years ago, when I was writing for Mana magazine, it was often my lot to write about dead people. It was my least favourite job.

These weren't your run-of-the-mill obituaries - those sombre, respectful and, well, lifeless tributes that you often read. These were supposed to capture the dearly departed as they were when they were breathing, and before they'd assumed that somewhat saintly aura that death seems to bestow.

The direction under then editor Gary Wilson was to keep it real, be irreverent yet sensitive, lively yet respectful. (Oh sure, I'd always mutter. Piece of cake.)

Try telling grieving relatives, as we always did before embarking on interviews, that the best way to show respect to their loved ones was to present them as honestly as possible, rather than paint some sanitised portrait that bore no resemblance to the original (and was dead boring to read). If grandma happened to have been an imperious kuia who bossed everyone around and was known as the Queen behind her back, we'd say so.

They'd always agree enthusiastically. Yes, they'd say, we like your style. We want our nana remembered as she was. But that was always before they saw the draft.

Even though we waited months after the funeral before talking to anyone, and usually only began at the family's behest, it didn't always work out. Sometimes, as hard as we tried, the family just didn't like the picture we'd drawn, and we would end up having to pull the story at the last minute.

Still, when it worked it was the most popular part of the magazine, which seemed strange to me at the time. I'd thought of it as a sign of an unhealthy fixation on death, but I can understand now why some people found them so uplifting. There's something life-affirming about showing that ordinary people, who'd gone largely unnoticed by the rest of us, lived lives that had meaning and purpose.

In fact, if anything, we're more likely as a society to be squeamish about death, preferring to keep a safe distance from the messy business. It's not easy being around other people's grief and loss, and being reminded of our own mortality.

A friend of mine was astounded recently when a woman she knew died suddenly, and she found that none of their mutual acquaintances had any intention of going to her funeral.

It was true they weren't bosom buddies but they'd all been in the same group for years, and one of the others had even gone to school with the dead woman's husband.

When she asked them why they weren't going, they said they simply didn't like funerals. Funerals were so depressing.

I guess it's hard to make funerals entertaining, though some people seem intent on trying. A few months ago the Catholic Church in Australia was shaking its head at some unseemly trends that were lowering the tone of many funerals.

Church leaders complained that some funeral-goers had become unruly, and there'd been all manner of undignified goings-on in their churches: raucous music, dirty jokes and even beer bottles opened at the altar. One spokesman blamed the trend on the "collision between the church's rites and people's expectations in memorialising someone important to them who has died".

I guess the Mongrel Mob members who abducted their dead mate from his tangi a few months ago were taking the same tack.

According to a letter to a Wellington newspaper written by one relative of the dead gangster, Alfie Parker, 38, about 30 Mobsters "stormed on to the marae, wearing boots, swearing and drinking beer", then took their friend's body away to a nearby pad, where he was guest of honour at what police described as a wake. By all accounts, it was quite a subdued affair.

I guess it's a matter of taste. When my aunt died recently, my mother and her sister wore their brightest clothes to the small suburban church, and giggled their way through their combined eulogy. (And all this after I'd lectured my children on the importance of assuming a respectful attitude.) If I hadn't seen them crying on and off for a week beforehand, I might have thought them heartless.

It was a different style to the funeral of Uncle Mosese, a composer of note in the Tongan community. His was a much grander and more formal affair, with thousands paying their respects as he lay in state, among them some of the best choirs I've heard, and all singing music he'd penned.

We took our children, after struggling to find enough black clothes. They'd seen plenty of people die on television, but it was something else to be awed by the sublime singing, and to see the all-night vigil that preceded Uncle Mosese's burial, and the Tongan custom that required close family members of the deceased to wear the ugliest, most tattered mats round their waists as a sign of their mourning.

American funeral director Thomas Lynch would have approved. In the New York Times recently, he lamented the lack of ritual and ceremony of American funerals.

"The loosened ties of faith and family, of religious and ethnic identity, have left them ritually adrift, bereft of custom, symbol, metaphor and meaningful liturgy or language ... Many Americans are now spiritual tourists without home places or core beliefs to return to. Instead of dead Methodists or Muslims, we are now dead golfers or gardeners, bikers or bowlers."

Lynch says that seeing the images of millions filing past the body of Pope John Paul II may have given pause to many Americans for whom "the presence of the dead at their own funerals has become strangely unfashionable", the corpses having been "buried or burned, out of sight, out of mind".

Well, that's not the case in Polynesian funerals. We like to keep our dead close by until the bitter end, literally plonking them centre-stage, and acting as if they're merely sleeping in the sitting room, while family and friends wander in and out, laughing, chatting, crying as the mood takes them.

It's a long kiss goodbye, but it seems to help the leave-taking.

Which got me thinking about how I'd like to take my leave. Do I want Amazing Grace or What a Wonderful World? About the only thing I'm sure of is not to allow a stridently evangelical cousin to give odds on the likelihood of my going upstairs, as he did at the funeral of one relative. Apart from that, I'm glad it won't be my problem.