When Melosina Lenox-Conyngham's parents died, she and her family wanted to respect their desire for no-fuss funerals. The DIY route was tricky but satisfying.
My mother disliked the pomp and circumstance of funerals. She wanted a simple burial, with a horse and cart rather than a hearse. When she died, however, horses and carts were no longer in common use, so we tried to obey her wishes in other ways.
We had a hearse and undertakers, who are always suitably dressed for the occasion and far more sombre than the relations. A church trolley lurked in the background, so the coffin could be trundled down the aisle like the in-flight food on an aircraft. We chose the plainest possible coffin, forsaking varnish and figured sides. We refused a "corpse-covering veil" - a euphemism for a shroud - and eschewed the advertised embalming, which promised Mother would "appear to us in as close to a lifelike appearance as possible and make our last memory pleasant". But we found, when we received the substantial bill, that we had failed to cancel the swansdown lining.
When my father died, two years later, we were determined not to employ an undertaker. Our clergyman was supportive, and he advised against the use of handles on the coffin, as they are only there for show. I thought of Lady Bellew, who many years ago in Kilkenny took evening classes in woodwork. While other students were there to build utilitarian things such as bookshelves and pipe stands, Lady Bellew went just to build her own coffin.
We were not that industrious, but someone in the business owed us a favour; otherwise it would have been difficult to find a reasonably priced coffin, as some undertakers seem to operate a closed shop with coffin makers.
Our coffin came without screws. My brother considered them too ornate. Consequently, there was much searching at the back of the garage and in the cupboard in the greenhouse, where one of us had saved some long screws. Perhaps it was my father's spirit that guided us to the famille-rose snuff jar in the dining room.
We laid out my father in the coffin. It was not really my father but a frail body with skin like paper, his elegant hands seeming more like claws, his eyes, once so very blue, now closed and the nose more sharply prominent than it was in life.
Would he have thought it lese-majesty to be eased into his coffin by his children? He would certainly have preferred us to a stranger. But it would have annoyed him to be unable to give directions on how we could have done it better.
We chose the hymns and, with the help of the rector, printed the order of service. The verger's husband dug the grave - which has to be almost two metres deep - and my brother went to an upholsterer for webbing to lower the coffin with. Luckily, he spotted just in time that they were about to give him elasticised webbing, and changed it to the standard kind.
The coffin lay on two chairs in the drawing room until the next evening. In this interregnum, friends came with condolences and sympathy, with cakes and with biscuits for the open house after the funeral.
The brother-in-law's Volvo, on duty as a hearse, took the coffin to the church, which looks over Dundalk Bay from the shadow of the Cooley Mountains. St Mary's is an ancient, plain building in the form of a crucifix with a tower at the west end. Its exterior has pale plaster that makes it seem like a lighthouse in the landscape.
The bell tolled as we came through the gates. It is known as the hurry-up bell, and we had often scuttled up the aisle after my father, who hated being late.
We picked flowers from the garden where my father had laboured alone for the past 20 years, growing vegetables and soft fruit and creating a dramatic slope of blue delphiniums, irises and white scented double narcissi, as well as the more ordinary herbaceous borders. Our wreaths surrounded the coffin, which rested on trestles rather than what is known as a reposal table.
At the funeral we sang his favourite hymns: Oh God, Our help in Ages Past; Praise, My Soul, The King of Heaven; and Be Thou My Vision, a hymn that has been translated from Irish and is sung to a tune of folk origin called Slane.
From the door of the church we could see the Hill of Slane, where in 433 St Patrick had lit the first paschal fire, to celebrate the triumph of Christianity over paganism.
A grandchild read the lesson from the 15th chapter of Corinthians: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
At the end of the service the coffin was carried out by his descendants, nephews and a neighbour plucked from the congregation. My relations were taller than the neighbour, who had to hold his hands over his head like a caryatid, but my father was not a heavy man, and they negotiated the short walk to the family plot through the graveyard of tombs surrounded by iron railings, headstones and mausoleums.
The coffin was lowered into the grave, with some trepidation about the strength of the webbing. A board was placed over the opening, onto which we laid the flowers we had carried from the church. The clergyman intoned: "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life . . ."
After the crowd departed two neighbours filled in the grave. Later we returned to tidy it up. It would be a few months before the ground had settled enough to put up the carved slate headstone. When it arrived we dug a narrow, wide hole, about 60cm deep, and put bricks at the bottom, as a foundation, before positioning the stone. My father would have been pleased with the artistry of the mason's calligraphy. He would, I know, have preferred this more permanent memorial to a conventional funeral.