The Funeral Service of George Parkinson 1921 – 2010

Doris, Howard, Leslie and Kevin stood at the casket as mourners filed by before the funeral began at 1 pm today. When I sat in the chapel waiting for the service to begin I saw a lovely line on the programme: “Interment to follow in the spring, after the roses have bloomed at the Stavely Cemetery.”

Doris Wood and Leslie Walker shared giving the eulogy and tribute to their father. I usually tell something about what I hear at a funeral, but today the words were so carefully chosen, so beautifully crafted, so lovingly presented that I got lost in the complexity and depth of the tribute his daughters made.

Take the lines, “Dolena and George did not always agree. She grew roses and he grew raspberries.”

Later I was watching pictures flash by on the screen in the cultural hall, and in one picture of the Parkinson back yard were George’s raspberry bushes, nearly six feet high. I looked down to the middle of the table I was sitting at. The centre pieces there were hand-painted, brown and white plaques with careful lettering:

Grandma

grew roses

Grandpa

grew raspberries

Those were the plaques, one for every grandchild to take home – as well as exquisitely framed pen and ink sketches of George, stretched out, sitting on a couch for some. I saw someone, a man, a child on his hip, walk over and take the one he knew belonged to him. A piece of raffia was tied in a bow around each frame.

On the same table as the black and white sketches was displayed George’s watch, the keys to his house and truck and his red jackknife, the blades open, as though ready for use. Two uniforms, George’s Air Force uniform and his Ferry Command uniform, were by the table on easels, the lapels resplendent with war ribbons and metals,

A wreath with poppies was at the front of the chapel, as well as the Canadian flag, hanging on a stand that was leaning a little to the left. If you lived in our ward, you would have heard George and/or Frank Selman talk in church on every November 11 Sunday – not a job either relished but a talk that no one was better suited to give.

Doris described George’s childhood in Saskatchewan – his father was 70 when he married an English immigrant woman and five years later he died, leaving his widow a small five year old child to raise in the middle of the depression.

Leslie told about her dad and mother having her move in with them when she was a young divorcee with six small children. And Leslie told about George’s declining years after Delena was gone. Pulmonary disease meant he had to use an oxygen tank for the last six months. She talked about his hands, about the roughness of them, the oil in the cracks of the skin, the worn cuticles, the hard work they had done in his lifetime.

On the day he died, he read the Calgary Herald, looked for the crossword puzzle to do, took note that his horoscope told him to make important decisions about his family for if he did, nothing else he could do that day would matter, and then he died in the evening while watching the hockey game.

The mourners took the main pews: four children, 17 grandchildren and thirty-six great grandchildren, along with their spouses. After the grandchildren and great grandchildren sang a medley of songs, those who wanted to go to the play room were escorted there and then the eulogies began. I haven’t seen that done before. It made me think about what I would want at my own funeral and the only thing I could add to letting the children play is that perhaps there could be a set of side pews reserved so that those older grandchildren who like to play with their DS’s could both listen in and play their games at the same time.

As I am typing, I am trying to reach for more than the tone at the funeral and wondering which of the words I heard could encapsulate what I felt there today. My deeper thoughts might have begun when Leslie said, we are not rich people, but what we didn’t have in the way of money, we made up for in the happiness that we had when we would get together and have parties. Or perhaps it was when Leslie said that a house is four walls and a roof, but a home is a place where people are welcomed, find solace, safety and comfort, where there is happiness and hope, where there is always room for one more at a table even when it stretches the whole length of the front room.

When I think of George’s wife, Delena, I can remember going visiting teaching there with Erva Sherwood. That is when I heard Delena say that she had been worrying about who was going to sew up all of that material in Fabricland. I knew I couldn’t help her with that. Delena helped me -- taught me how to raise cream puffs to a new elegance by piping the dough through a tube, and how to decorate Valentine sugar cookies with the words “U R Mine” or “I luv U”.

Jim Sherwood said that George was so in love with Delena that when she died, that was the beginning of George’s decline. I don’t know whether that is true or not. I am sure Delena’s kitchen was the centre of the happiness in that home. But George was by her side. Those who knew him would wonder now how many roasts George really did carved to be taken to some other function, or be amazed at the technique with which he could take his knife to a turkey, or wonder if they could match his skill at moving boxes of decorations and desserts from one place to another.

I walked home from the church, wrapped in an ankle-length coat, seeing my breath in the air and the lacy hoar frost on the branches of the copses of trees on the church lawn and I was wondering if it is when the pink Alberta roses bloom in the spring, that George will be interred.

Arta