Raymond Venus 7th August 1936 - 3rd December 2022
The Man The Myth The Legend - An eulogy to my father
This is the eulogy I wrote and orated at my father’s funeral this week (Thursday 15th December 2022). It perhaps won’t be of much interest to those who didn’t know my father directly but I’m publishing it here for a few reasons.
First; I actually wrote and edited here on Substack - I just really find the whole Substack interface very forgiving - and I appreciate that.
Second; people came up to me after the speech to ask for a copy of the words and I had a sense that there was something in the words that people felt had helped them make sense of their own lives and maybe this extends beyond the people present at the service.
Thirdly; we just don’t speak about death in our society and I find that weird. Understandable, because it’s a hard subject to talk about, but as Glennon Doyle likes to remind us, WE CAN DO HARD THINGS.
Fourthly; and I think this might be my most important takeaway…we don’t need to big people up. People are incredibly complicated and beautiful full-stop. What we percieve as ‘flaws’ are often the fragments of their life they’ve had to tirelessly circle around, wrestle, and runa away from their whole life. Maybe, they never found the strength or the resolve to turn towards their fears or their frustrations. Maybe they were taught, not to embrace the shadow parts of themselves, but rather to drive those fragments out into the wilderness so we, as a society can collectively transfer our guilt outside of us and carthaticly blame others for our own unease.
Anger borne out of fear and a need to feel in control is the key theme. An illusion of control in a world where everything you hold dear can be taken from you at any moment.
I don’t love my father despite his anger. I love him because of his anger and because that was his life’s dharma joust.
What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being. — David Whyte
I guess as working class secular folk, without the sheltering and heritage (theatrics) of organised religion, our funerals tend to be very modest affairs. I think there was one simple arrngement of flowers my father’s coffin itself as the singular embelishment and that’s how he would’ve wanted it. Perfunctuary would be the word. Respectful, dignified, sincere but lacking any real humanity. And it was this humanity I was hoping to bring to the day.
Humanity to me, is just that, seeing the humaness in our lives. The frailty, the ridiculous things we do in order kid ourselves that we have agency in the world. The thread that connects all of us.
There was so much heartfelt praise for my speech and, like a lot of English people we generally find praise an uncomfortable affair - I mean we crave it like any human, we just don’t know what to do with it when its there! However, I found it much easier to actually listen to and accept praise for something which reflected not my life but an others.
People just seemed delighted by the speech and I was utterly relieved because I took a big risk with the framing of his life. There was a chance that if I hadn’t have pulled it off it would’ve ruined the whole funeral!
The customary shaking hands and heartfelt hugs following the service is one of life’s rare moments to meet people unguarded.
Familly Member: “You seemed to take us near the bone, but turned it in the opposite direction right at the last moment”.
Me: “I was worried because I didn’t hear any laughter coming back”
Familly Member: “Laughter!? You do know it was a bloody funeral!”
Humour and earthy humour is very much in the geordie blood. Within the UK, geordies are noted for our friendliness. Very happy to strike up conversations on the street with strangers - to the point my London friends find disconcerting. Coal mining and industrial steel ship building are our heritage. So whilst there’s genuine friendliness there’s also a toughness that’s reluctant to aknowledge emotion when it enters the room. It’s why alcohol is such a huge part of geordie culture…but I digress.
Hearing from everyone afterwards it was apparent people found it hilarious but nobody knew if it was ok to laugh. People were looking all around the room to see what everyone else was doing. And I guess it was this socialy constructed pretense I was hoping to pierce.
Humour was the vessel but the cargo was actually some hard-hitting stuff. I spoke about my father’s last breathless days as the cancer overwhelmed him, I spoke about lives affected by unspoken trauma. Today we have the language of PTSD and ‘trauma informed’, mental health, anxiety but it’s not like these are new things.
I think you can talk about these things with people and I think that it’s a very healthy release for people to hear so long as you can soothe the audience. They need to feel held. Otherwise we run the risk of traumatising people through stories of trauma.
So I also pointed to my father’s miraculose epiphany in the hospice garden, speaking as if seeing a tree for the first time.
Instead of showing up, and going through the motions as a mark of respect or doing what society expects us to do…can we connect to the person who has passed and the people who are left behind in real and meaningful ways?
I think we can…
Welcome all and thank you for coming today on what feels like the busiest time of the year and with the winter road conditions being pretty treachourous.
Raymond Venus was the kind of man who never had a bad word to say about anyone.
***PAUSE FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT 😅😂***
Oh sorry…I’ve read that wrong!
Raymond Venus was the kind of man who had a bad word to say about everyone!
He was, in many ways, an equal opportunities Bollocker.
I REALLY wasn’t sure if I was allowed to use the word bollocking at a funeral…even a geordie one. So I googled it …and we can all relax because the word bollocks appears in the first English edition of the Bible. So we’re covered 😅 👍🏼
My father wasn’t an angry man by any means but he had an agitation inside him that he couldn’t sit with and it would just manifest in ridiculous rants that we, in the family, affectionately referred to as bollockings…
He’d bollock you for leaving a door open and letting the heat out.
He’d bollock you for putting a cup of tea down without using a coaster.
He’d bollock you for showing up at his house on a Sunday and eating all his biscuits
And he’d bollock you when you didn’t show up at his house on a Sunday, stayed home and ate your own biscuits.
To cut a long story short… (This was one of my father’s many catchphrases…but i digress)
Ray Venus was the Governor of The Bank of Bollocking.
They weren’t much fun at the time, but looking back I like to think a bollocking off “me fatha” or “Grandad” or occasionally “Raymond”, was really receiving a blessing… albeit a blessing from an irate geordie.
It was his way of showing love…or at least showing he knew you were in the room.
By the end of this speech, I hope to help you understand why beneath the surface of his life there had been a fight for control and why that fight manifested in him wanting to basically tell everyone off.
As most of you will know Raymond and his wife Jean were blessed with a son who had down syndrome and a hole in his heart. Wor Michael (another legend).
Jean would dread each winter because it was never guaranteed that Micky V’s compromised immune system would protect him from catching something we all take for granted, the flu.
To cut a long story short…
Ray and Jean had been given a very precious but very vulnerable child to raise. Think for a moment how powerless they both must’ve felt in this situation.
With my mother, the worry was clear…it was written all over her face but with my father, it was buried much deeper. The flip-side of feeling powerless is control and Ray’s attempts at control and micromanagement was legendary… 20 years of driving experience and he still came outside, (often in a Harry Potter dressing gown) to tell you how to turn the steering wheel to get off the drive!
Deep down he needed to feel control in a world that he really felt vulnerable and powerless in. It’s perhaps a feeling we can all relate to in today’s topsy-turvy and rather frightening world.
Fathering a vulnerable child was not Ray’s first run-in with feeling powerless…
I had some insightful chats with my father in the last weeks of his life, as many of us did.
Two stories, in particular, stood out to me…I’d never heard these stories before which was quite strange in itself. Normally you hear Ray’s stories a dozen times at least. I won’t go into the details but on two separate occasions as a child, my father’s life had quite literally swung in the balance as he was hung up by his neck. One was a prank gone horribly wrong but the other was far more sinister.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that of all his childhood stories, it was these near-death experiences that were resurfacing now that he was approaching the end. As his breathlessness progressed in the hospice he grew especially scared of going to sleep each night. Fortunately, the hospice were very gracious in letting family members sleep over with him which he much appreciated.
Despite the fear I can tell you that my father had moments of calm and clarity and I’m not exaggerating when I say we had a moment where it felt like we were walking in the garden of Eden as we explored the hospice gardens. Standing opposite the great willow tree he turned to me and said…
“Trees…have a purpose all of their own you know”.
“Trees…have a purpose all of their own”.
Maybe it was the morphine, or maybe it was an insight into the new world he was heading into. We each need to decide that for ourselves.
Anger is a funny emotion…it’s one we don’t like to acknowledge…especially in ourselves. But really you only get angry with people you care about. People you would dearly love to help but can’t quite find the right way to.
It’s not a question of whether anger is good or bad, it’s a question of how anger is used, who it’s directed at, for how long and to what end.
Raymond used his anger to try and manage those he loved deeply. Even though we were pretty sure we could manage ourselves. Although with Geoff that was always open for debate.
On top of his capacity to rant at you in any given circumstance was the fact that he was this larger-than-life character.
Even at the end of his life and, despite how desperately sick and incapacitated he was with the cancer, his large & in-charge character always left you feeling you’d been outdanced and out-stung by Muhamed Ali.
In fact, on some occasions, we would visit the hospice and there was a moment where you couldn’t work out if he was still a patient or he’d actually found a position on the nursing team - management level obviously - a nurse told me he would never ring his own bell for attention but on more than one occasion he struggled out of his own bed zimmer’d his way across the ward floor and pressed another patient’s bell - wether that patient wanted their bell ringing was neither-here-nor-there.
A different nurse told me that in the whole history of the centre, no one has ever phoned up to announce their forthcoming arrival at the hospice… but that was Ray Venus for you. 😅
St Oswald’s Hospice in Gosforth by the way is truly Heaven sent and the people who work there are real-life angels. You don’t really appreciate what these people do until you need them and our family is indebted to them.
Times are hard and not everyone can afford to give to charity but if you feel like buying Ray Venus a pint you can buy him the equivalent by throwing a pint’s worth of change in the St Oswald’s collection. Depending on where you drink thats probably about 4 quid now. Geoff?
It has been been a very tough time for the family supporting my father with his cancer - and I think the family did my father proud by stepping up at different times with their different skills and persoanlities. It really was a team effort. There were surprisingly many lite, funny and just beautiful moments with Ray at the hospice. Moments we’ll cherish for the rest of our lives.
Let me tell you about Ray’s love of food…
It’s well known that in the last days of life people lose their appetite…
Not so with Ray.
His love of food never flackered…
One time Geoff told the catering nurse he’d already had a snack and Ray bollocked him thinking there was a chance he wouldn’t be allowed his evening 3-course meal if they knew he’d been snacking. 🤣
Even better than this was the story my nephews and nieces told, when he woke up to find them all sat around his hospice bed eating Greggs's pasties. Bearing in mind it this was less than 48hrs before his passing…he demanded one of them hand over a steak bake….which he wolfed down in record time. I forget which one of them sacrificed their stake-bake for the team….you’ll have to ask them to find out.
Having such a force of nature as the family patriarch had its fun moments. I liked to observe the strategies that different family members employed in order to avoid a bollocking….because none of them worked. 🤣
As the youngest son, I was largely ignored and could get away with things my older brothers couldn’t…like using the word bollocking at a funeral.
Wor Ray, as the eldest seemed to catch all of the madcap admin jobs my father would need doing. And pretty much every day wor Ray showed up and pretty much every day wor Ray got a bollocking. But these were small micro-bollockings… drip-fed nicely in small manageable daily doses.
Geoff, on the other hand, figured that if you’re going to get a bollocking anyway you might as well make it worth your while. He’d give me father a stiff ignoring to for a few weeks. When my father did eventually catch up with Geoff he receive a mega-bollocking that would last him for a full month at least.
Curiously, it’s these flaws and the frustrating ways he dealt with people and the world that we’ll miss the most.
Why am I telling you all this? Why am I telling you about how ridiculous he could be? Because you can’t understand Ray Venus without understanding that his real essence, who he really was, how sensitive he really was, and what he was actually about was buried under a lot of his hot air.
When we look at his actions and not his words, we’ll see what mattered to him the most…
If you really want to see my father just look to his family. Look at the people in this room here today.
Look at how he worked every backshift in order to provide for his wife and children. Look to the fact he never spent a penny more on himself than he had to because he wanted to make sure his children were always provided for no matter what curve balls would come their way.
Look at how loving and caring his children and grandchildren are.
If you really want to see my father….take a look at his kids and grandkids and how they go on with their own families. Check out how wor Ray (who’s now a granddad himself) dotes on beautiful baby Rose-Jean…Check out how our Ashleigh cherishes her incredible and growing up fast, daughter Jessica…Check out the soon to be a Father, young Geoffrey and how I just know he’ll pour love into his unborn child.
In short, Ray Venus was actually one of the biggest-hearted people I’ve ever met.
Despite his harsh and clumsy way with words my father was all about people. I couldn’t tell you what his favourite objects were. I don’t think he had any. Despite accruing a decent amount of money in his lifetime he never had a flash car…his clothes purchasing stopped sometime in the early eighties. He never had fancy holidays. He wouldn’t even spend money on Sky sports pay-per-view for his beloved boxing.
Now we all joke and say he was as tight as Rocky Marciano’s closed fist - my father’s favourite boxer by the way - but it’s not actually being tight if your plan is to give it all away.
Think of that for a moment. All the wealth he created in his lifetime…every napkin he stole from costco cafe so he didn’t have to buy toilet roll… sitting freezing cold without the heating on (hence the ubiquitous harry potter dressing gown) knowing full well all the money he saved wasn’t for him but for his children and his children’s children.
My father was not only generous with his money (and I never thought I’d be saying that) he was exceptionally generous with his time as well.
For as long as I can remember my father has always donated his time to charitable organisations and voluntary sector projects.
After he retired he was actually busier than he’d ever been during his full-time employment. I won’t mention all his voluntary work but I think my father was perhaps most proud of representing the public on the Gateshead’s NHS hospital public trust panel.
And perhaps his work that has impacted the most lives and has supported the most vulnerable members of society was when he helped set up the Gateshead Carers Association in 1996. Which I’ve googled and is still going strong in 2022.
Of all his voluntary roles, the one we most like to talk about in the family was his Santa Claus spot for Dr Barbados. Somehow he managed to morph from his Victorian “children should be seen and not heard” attitude into Santa’s ho-ho-ho jolly personality without anyone noticing the difference!
Given my father’s lifelong selfless community work I can’t work out how he wasn’t recognised with an MBE or an OBE….but then I remind myself he probably bollocked most of the people responsible for that sort of thing. When I think about it Ray was the opposite of a politician, he didn’t say things that would get him up the ladder…for good or for bad, but he just said exactly what he was thinking. But he never ever held onto anything. Never held one iota of a grudge.
If you were never told off by Ray you were one of the lucky few but I should think that everyone in this room has a decent story to tell about the man the myth, the enigma and my beloved father, Ray Venus.
My dearest hope is that Ray Venus’s stories don’t die with him but they continue to be the glue that holds our family together.
This speech has been a lot like my father actually….a lot to deal with in such a short space of time…..
When you’re in the pub later this week and someone asks you what the funeral speech was about, you’ll probably say… “It was all about bollockings”
In actual fact, this speech, just like my father…was all about LOVE.
The man, the myth, the legend. David your eulogy for your dad was perfect no sugar coating a complicated man who you could love one minute and be furious with in the next. Hope you can take some comfort in the fact that you made me & many who attended smile & titter through the whole service . The planet will be a sadder place without this hard working family man who loved given out a good bollocking Xx
I spoke to Grandad about how it was going to be impossible to find someone who could do him jutice and explain his personality, when the time come, yet that person was right under our nose all along, my biggest worry on that day was maybe we wont be able to get who he was across correctly, however 1st sentence in and I smiled and breathed because you smashed it! Thank you so much!
🎼To know him is to live him and I do 🎼