The Pallbearer
A poem about being called on to do this final duty for my father, who had written and campaigned on ecological issues all of his life.
The Pallbearer
It turned out being slightly taller than others is not great when called on to be a pallbearer. Why so heavy? His ninety years had shrunk his body wasting away to very little, his mind still there, until it just wasn’t any more. His spark, his soul, his essence, whatever we call it: going, then gone, all too obvious, all too final. The mystery of why a thinned-out body was so heavy remained, surely the wicker casket wouldn’t add that much? And what was it that we were carrying? In what sense was it him? Funerals are for the living, they say, and I believe; these remains may as well be a prop but somehow need to be authentically ‘him’ to work. The heft of the casket bore down on my shoulder through my body to my paralysed left foot. We four, with our burden, paced slowly out past the congregated, the driftwood of a lifetime of engagements, left behind when his tide ran out for the last time. I welcomed the pain in truth, so slight compared to the pain of dying, of leaving. We walked my father’s coffin out into light and fresh air, and lowered him into the earth he wrote so much about.
First published in Write Under the Moon
This is beautifully held. There’s such a quiet steadiness to it, even as it carries something so heavy.
I read this on the day my mother died, after weeks of illness, and it landed in a place that already felt raw and very real.
What really stayed with me is that question of weight. Not just the physical weight of the coffin, but the deeper question of what is actually being carried. That line, “in what sense was it him,” feels like the centre of the poem. It captures that strange dissonance of grief so precisely.
I also thought the image of “the driftwood of a lifetime of engagements” was stunning. It says so much about what remains, what gathers, what is left behind when someone’s life recedes. It feels both tender and unsentimental at the same time.
The physicality throughout is very strong too. The shoulder, the body, the paralysed foot, the welcome of pain. It grounds the poem in something real and immediate, and makes the act of carrying feel almost ritualistic, something endured and honoured at once.
And the ending lands quietly but deeply. Lowering him into “the earth he wrote so much about” feels like a return, not just an ending. It brings the whole piece into a kind of gentle closure without resolving the mystery you hold at the start.
This feels like a poem that understands both the practical and the unknowable parts of death, and lets them sit side by side without forcing an answer.