I paid tribute to my nan by singing at her funeral

The note seems to come from somewhere else, not from me but through me. My depression falls away and a clear note rebounds off the church’s stained-glass windows and straight back into my open palms.

"On the day we lay my grandmother to rest, I sing." Source: Getty Images

On the day we lay my grandmother to rest, I sing.

Death makes me itch, stage fright even more so. In my clacky heeled boots and green silk skirt – clothes I will never again wear without smelling the floral perfume of the funeral home’s hushed interior – I pace. I pace alone in front of the seaside church, hands slick enough to leave hot wet prints on the funeral program, and ponder the implications of a quick getaway.

Nonnie Frances and her granddaughters, Claudia and Isabelle, in 2001. Source: Supplied

My relatives gather inside, drawn together for the first time in what feels like years. Strange, I think, that someone’s sudden absence can make us re-evaluate the fabric of our family tapestry. As if their departure makes us want to knit together the holes that time and distance have left in the drapery of us.

I am 17. I am afraid. Death has touched me before, but never so closely.

Nonnie Frances and Claudia, 1997. Source: Supplied

My grandmother stares back at me from the funeral pamphlet, her face encased in a decal of glossy stock photo roses. I see you, she seems to say. You promised me, and you wouldn’t break an oath to a dead woman, would you? No backing out now. My name is printed on the shining brochure, right alongside hers.

Frances on her daughter Elizabeth’s wedding day, 2000. Source: Supplied

The song I am to sing trills through my synapses, a metronome I have set in motion many times before. I’ve practised, rehearsed, sweated over the treble clefs and vibrato of the tune until it sears itself into my dreams. I wake up with the notes still coursing through my veins. I know this song. This song knows me.

Frances with friends on a night out, 1955. Source: Supplied

“Songbird” by Eva Cassidy. A precious lilting song, all the more haunting for the fact that it sounds like goodbye. I remember reading about the singer’s own slow descent into death, and can’t help but feel like she’s here with me, urging me on. Do it justice, girl. Do me justice.

Inside the church, I sit with my mother as her hands tremble around the eulogy she wrote. At the pulpit, she battles through the words, choking on tears that come as soon as she returns to the pew. Finally, she lets herself fall apart. I hold her, but it’s not my turn to crumble. “My mother was a warrior woman,” she says in her eulogy. “My hero.”

Frances in nursing school, 1950. Source: Supplied

I walk to the front of the church on legs shaky as a newborn deer. My heels are muffled by the carpet’s benevolent squidge. I run hot hands along my skirt, wince at the sweat stains that mar the emerald silk. I turn. Blood rushes through my ears, pulses behind my eyelids, and I wonder if I will pass out. My grandmother watches from the enlarged portrait beside me, and her cornflower blue eyes urge me on. I see you. I’m with you.

No music accompanies me. A capella they call it, but it just feels like a betrayal. No net to catch me if I fall. I open my mouth. For a brief moment, nothing comes out but a ghostly puff of air.

Frances having drinks with daughter Elizabeth in 1983. Source: Supplied

Then, miraculously, a note. A note that seems to come from somewhere else, not from me but through me. A clear, crisp, ringing note that rebounds off the church’s stained-glass windows and straight back into my open palms. Another follows. I am singing. I am singing.

Singing with a clarity and gravitas I’ve never known and always been too fearful to grasp. I’ve sung my whole life, but never for others. Never in the spotlight.

A family portrait of Frances, partner Richard and their daughter Elizabeth, 1969. Source: Supplied

A life of crippling self-consciousness melts away. I pay no mind to the years of high school bullying. I ignore the shadowed figures of depression and self-hatred.

I focus only on the notes that flow from me like the river I swam in as a child; the river I would float in for hours as nail-polished fingers pruned. The river whose rocky bed I would sink into and play at mermaids as the surface turned the world into milky light as I opened water-logged eyes beneath the foam.

Nonnie, Isabelle and Claudia in 2010. Source: Supplied

I focus on the notes, and my mother, who vibrates with pride. That’s my girl, her eyes say. To my little sister beside her, electric with love, looking up at me like I am an avenging angel.

I focus on my grandmother.

I will not remember the years of dementia that haunted her waking hours. I will not remember the time she turned to me in a moment of rare lucidity; “There’s something wrong with my brain.”

Nonnie and Claudia in 2001. Source: Supplied

I will remember instead the baby clothes she knitted for me, the ones I will keep for my own daughter. I will remember the vines of wild raspberries that grew in her back garden, and the way she would let us pick them, laughing as we closed our eyes in delight at the sun-drunk taste. I will remember her downy pepper-grey hair that grew back thick and lush after chemotherapy, the way she fought cancer tooth and nail and came out swinging.

Nonnie Frances having a day out with Elizabeth at the botanical gardens, 1967. Source: Supplied

I will remember the old grumpy black cat she loved so much, who would be soft only for her, who would sit on her lap as she re-read Harry Potter on that old floral couch we will never throw away. I will remember the ancient jar of boiled candies she kept in the pantry just for us, and the way her thin hands felt, clasped in my own.

Author Claudia. Source: Supplied

I will remember her love for music, and the promise I made to her in those last terrible days: “I’ll sing for you, Nonnie. I swear.” I will remember the way the notes let me drift from my body, up into the rafters of that little seaside church and higher still, into a world where fear does not touch me.

Into a world where I might emerge from the cocoon of myself. Into a world made of light.

Claudia Weiskopf (she/they) is a Naarm-based author, copywriter, editor and artist. She writes character-driven young adult fiction with themes of magic, queerness, mental health and the natural world. She was a Frankie Magazine Good Stuff Awards finalist. Find her at claudiaweiskopf.com or follow her on Instagram @potplantprincess. 

This is an edited extract of an entry to the 2022 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition.