I worried and worried, and then my friend came up with the answer. The United Synagogue have created a visitors’ centre at Bushey Old Cemetery, using a prayer hall that isn’t needed any more now that most burials take place at Bushey New. For a few hundred pounds, we could hire the space, and order in food from Daniel’s of Temple Fortune. The US would provide tables and chairs, and a waitress.
I have to admit that I was a little dubious. Yes – it all sounded wonderfully convenient. A five-minute drive, or a short walk, rather than a long schlep. Plenty of parking, and no need to pick up food, it is all delivered straight to the cemetery. But really, did I want to hold a tea party in a cemetery? I associated prayer halls with chilly gloom. Would it all feel a bit creepy?
My brother and sister were keen, so we agreed, we’d go ahead. But my niggling worries were still there – right until the moment when we walked through the visitors’ centre doors. After the service in the prayer hall at Bushey New, which was downright freezing, the visitors’ centre was warm and comfortable, a large space made smaller with a dividing wall, a sofa and as many tables and chairs as you need.
Friendly staff from the US greeted us, and I’m sure we had at least three waitresses serving hot and cold drinks and handing round the platters of food.
There was ample space to talk to guests, and no feeling of rush or panic. In short, it was the perfect solution, and we were very grateful to everyone concerned. We were only the fifth family to take advantage of this new centre, and if you’re planning a stone-setting I’d recommend booking it up.
Looking back a few weeks later, all my anxieties seem faintly silly – it was, after all, just a cup of tea and a few pastries that I was worrying about.
But a stone-setting packs an emotional punch that you don’t always realise when you’re planning it. Looking at my parents’ graves side by side, I realised that this was the very last thing I would do for them, the end of an era latterly filled with hospital appointments and dashes to A&E, shopping trips to locate woolly jumpers and Waitrose toffees; painstaking explanations of how to operate mobile phones and TV remote controls.
“Mum and Dad would have approved,” we told each other after the guests had left and we emerged into the sunlight.
That meant the world to us, and we will always be grateful to the United Synagogue for having the idea, and making it so nice and so easy to do the right thing.
