I’ve played the bagpipes for about 25 years now with the Fairbanks Red Hackle Pipe Band. Twenty-five years is a lot of band practices, a lot of competitions, a lot of parties, a lot of parades, and a log of gigs, especially weddings and funerals. Lately it seems I’ve played solo for an unusual lot of funerals and memorial services.
Part of this is perhaps because the more we play the pipes for events, the more of a public presence we have in town, and the more people think of the pipes when they’re planning weddings (long lead times) and when they’re planning funerals (short lead times-like “can you play Amazing Grace for my father’s funeral tomorrow?”). I’m the published point of contact for the band, so mine is the phone that gets called. And since I’m the one who’s retired and apparently has tons of free time on his hands, I’m the one who winds up playing most of the solo gigs, especially weekdays. But I like it. I like weddings, and I’m coming to like funerals too.
In the past few weeks I’ve played pipes for four memorial services. One of them was for five soldiers at once, who were killed when their Chinook crashed in Iraq. As a vet myself, I’m glad to play for soldiers. I don’t even charge. Sometimes those who are planning the service, usually under stress, want upbeat tunes: jigs, hornpipes, reels, marches. Like an Irish wake. Sometimes they want the slower music: haunting slow airs, retreats, or laments. I might suggest a piobeaireachd, the classical pipe music. And always, Amazing Grace. Today, he asked for the old, slow, sad tunes. He’d lost his brother, and he was heartbroken.
At the service I played today I found myself paying particular attention. The man who had died was not at an age to disappear from the midst of the living suddenly and unexpectedly. He had a wide circle of friends and family, and they obviously loved him. The church was full and more. As men and women got up to talk about the deceased, I found this was a person I would have liked to know. People talked about the good work he did, contributing to the well-being of strangers. A vital man, lots of interests, doing Alaskan things: photographs of snow machines, fishing, boats, friends, children.
There were also, to me, this stranger in their midst, allusions and hints of mystery in the comments. Not what was said so much as what was left unsaid. Hints of a recent long period of unhappiness and tragedy in his life, details not forthcoming. A young daughter, the apple of his eye, not at the service. Why? The obituary indicated he left a daughter. It couldn’t be that she, too, was dead. No mention of the child’s mother anywhere. Was he ill for a long period? A life full of love and friends, tragedy and mystery.
So now, late at night, I’m feeding my dog bits of apple, which she loves, and thinking about the service today. How it was the kind of memorial you might want for yourself, and you hope you’ve been kind enough to your friends that they’d want to come and talk about you like this. There was a bottle of single-malt Scotch and a potluck for afterwards. I was thinking that I’ve learned a good deal about my community over the years by playing pipes at funerals. Weddings, too, but nothing like you learn from the emotional comments about the people who lived in your town. Maybe it has to do partly with the power of the pipes themselves and their impact on people. But as a stranger going to peoples’ funerals, a hired mourner, I’ve learned, I think, a lot about people and how they respond to death. I’ve read that in some Mediterranean cultures, on Corsica and Sicily, it is the custom to hire old women to cry and tear their hair at funerals. Hired mourners, much like me, just a different instrument.
