I was banned from my father's funeral

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3 days ago

As a child I was terrified of my dad dying. He was wild and filled with creative turbulence, but he was my rock. After my parents separated when I was 11, I lived with him in a household that was chaotic and exciting in ways you'd expect in the artistic London of the 1970s. There were lots of girlfriends and I didn't always know where he was or when he'd be home. But we played piano duets and cooked together, attempting the Russian émigré food of his childhood.
Peter Zinovieff was a pioneer in electronic and computer music, and his studio was in our Putney house – apparently the first home with a computer. He worked with rock stars like Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Ringo Starr and Kraftwerk, who used his EMS synthesisers. Contemporary composers like Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze were family friends and concocted astonishing pieces using early versions of sampling. Whoever was in the studio that day was invited to lunch.
Later, things went downhill. Money problems and messy relationships were exacerbated by alcohol addiction. But we always remained close. I supported Peter through the worst times and was relieved when he finally settled down, stopped drinking, married for the fourth time, and restarted a creative life that had been dormant for decades. He and his wife came to stay; I went to stay with them. We spoke frequently on the phone. He became a grand old man of electronic music – a nicely unlikely oxymoron.
Then, when my father died in 2021 aged 88, I learnt that his home-made will excluded me, my siblings and anyone but his wife from attending his funeral. The ashes would go in her back garden.
The shock of this rejection was awful. Why would he ban his children? A lack of imagination for our feelings? Or was he protecting his widow from the line-up of ex-wives, lovers, friends and relations – some hurt, some angry – who had also played a part in a long life that was, to put it politely, 'complicated'?
I expected to feel grief for my beloved dad – but not to be devastated by the absence of a funeral. After all, who enjoys a crematorium? Yet I longed to go where his body was, to take part in a ceremony, to wear an item of his clothing, to be with others who mourned him. It was visceral. We are animals who congregate around the dead. Even elephants do it.
But I also realised I was far from the first, or only, person to suffer this way. 'Missing, presumed dead' provokes a hell worse than bereavement for those left waiting. And the Covid lockdowns robbed countless people of the chance to say goodbye. The sick died alone. Funerals became forlorn affairs where hugs were banned. Sterile screens replaced the warmth of drink and food that normally revive mourners after a burial or burning.
Who could forget the image of the tiny, stoic Queen sitting alone at Prince Philip's funeral, obeying the rules?
I asked the celebrated psychotherapist, author and podcaster Julia Samuel (Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass) why we need death rituals. 'Funerals allow people to grieve together and to mark and honour the person they love. But the task is also to face the reality of the loss. The funeral forces you to know that the person is dead, something that needs to be acknowledged by the five senses.
'You see the coffin or the open coffin, you smell the flowers and candles, you hear the music or sing, you taste the food and drink afterwards. You return to these memories later and they help you to root yourself in the reality. If you don't see the person and you have no funeral, it's like with missing soldiers in the First World War – there's a surreal sense that they haven't died. You know it but you don't feel it.'
'Death is the great exposer,' Samuel has written. 'It forces hidden fault lines and submerged secrets into the open.' I witnessed this firsthand.
My siblings and I didn't all grow up together, and each of us has a different story to tell. We'd rarely met as a group – there's only one photo of us all. It's 1992. Peter is roguishly sprawled across our laps. He's been drinking. We're grinning, though I can sense the anxiety beneath it.
I'm the oldest, with two younger brothers, then three sisters with a different mother, and our youngest half-brother, who would die of an overdose at 27 – six years before our dad.
The dramas of Peter's life didn't end with his death. They continued, shifting the tectonic plates.
Our stepmother was unequivocally committed to carrying out his wishes, so we didn't gather in Cambridge as we'd expected. Instead, we met on video calls. I was at home in Greece, the three sisters in Vancouver, New York and London, one brother in the Hebrides and another in Brighton. During the on-screen gatherings, our framed faces blurred from technical glitches and tears. A two-dimensional box set of grief and bewilderment, we wept and laughed and, over the next wretched weeks, we became family in a new way.
When the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's father died, she wrote: 'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger.'
In our own conversations and reckonings, there was rage – especially about our dad's drinking and its terrible consequences, his lack of support, his ruthlessness towards his children, and his blinkered approach to romantic relationships, which could make him forget everyone else.
It was impossible not to talk about his marriage, in his 50s, to a girl of 18 – now the devastated mother of our dead brother. We also examined our dad's childhood traumas and the possible epigenetic impacts.
His own mother was largely absent – the Russian 'Red Princess' I later wrote a book about, a British communist tailed by MI5, who saved Jewish lives in France while interned by the Nazis.
When Peter was 18, his father was killed in a train crash and his stepmother banned him from the family home.
But we also acknowledged our dad's magic: his ability to draw people together and inspire incredible creations; the adventures up mountains or camping on deserted islands; his fascination with both the sciences and the arts, which fuelled his brilliant imagination.
He was a huge influence on my childhood and youth, encouraging me to read, write, play music and paint. It seemed entirely normal that, aged 12, I should sit beside him in his porch study on a remote Hebridean island, working on my own projects.
While he wrote an impossibly complex libretto (complete with an invented language) for Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus, I drew stage set plans in felt pen. One of these was later used for the opera's CD cover.
In the weeks before my father's cremation, I became increasingly distressed at being persona non grata around his death. There was no proper explanation – but we were to be kept even from his ashes.
Amid the outrage and humour of the Zinovieff siblings' video calls, someone joked about staging a heist to steal the ashes in Cambridge. 'Or get there first at the funeral home.'
I wrote notes every day; it helped, even when misery made reading peculiarly difficult. That writing eventually led to a novel. I imagined the escapade an unlikely group of resourceful siblings might undertake if banned from their father's funeral.
Unlike Peter, the eponymous hero of Stealing Dad is a London-based Greek sculptor, and his sixth wife is nothing like my stepmother. His many scattered offspring bear no resemblance to me or my siblings. We didn't 'steal Dad'. But sometimes, in dreamy magical thinking – as American writer Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking – it feels as though we did. I enjoy the blurring.
At the time of the cremation, I was on a Greek island. There seemed little point in returning to England, although a few friends and family gathered for prayers in a Russian church in London.
Instead, I climbed a mountain with my husband and dog, sat outside a Byzantine chapel and sobbed over the double loss – of my father and his funeral.
Greeks found my situation hard to comprehend. Most follow centuries-old Orthodox traditions; funerals are a community matter and the ample memorials (at three, seven, nine and 40 days, then yearly if wanted) offer a continuing structure for powerful emotions. The bereaved congregate again and again, processing their loss, saying prayers and distributing kollyva – a 'food for the dead' that has been eaten at gravesides for millennia.
The anthropologist Kate Fox (Watching the English) was also kept from her elderly father's cremation last year. However, she believes his intentions were generous – to spare his family the 'chore' of travel to the US and the ordeal of a 'sterile Western-style ceremony'.
Robin Fox was not alone in requesting no funeral; perhaps David Bowie set a trend. Some don't want 'a fuss'. Eschewing ritual and religion might seem to 'keep things simple' in our increasingly secular society. Others donate their bodies to science. But these minimalists ignore the needs of the living.
Like me, Kate Fox felt a void. 'Why did you feel deprived?' I asked. 'Because I'm human! The earliest known Homo sapiens from 120,000 years ago buried their dead. Archaeologists look for this ritual as a characteristic of being a 'proper' human. Look at the controversy of whether Neanderthals put flowers on graves and whether the small-brained Homo naledi [200-300,000 years ago] held burials.' Robin Fox was an influential anthropologist who forgot about the 'fundamental biological human need to matter to people and them to matter to you'. But his daughter was helped some months later, by her (and my) old lecturer at Cambridge.
Emeritus prof of anthropology Alan Macfarlane hosted a day of ceremony, discussion and dinner at King's College, inviting family, colleagues and admirers. 'Did it work?' I probed. 'A hundred per cent. It was a social marking of my father 'mattering'.'
I'm still sad that Peter's friends, colleagues and relations weren't given the chance to come together and make it clear that he 'mattered.' Sometimes I've felt irrationally dejected for not doing the often tedious tasks that follow a death – what Rev Richard Coles calls 'sadmin' in The Madness of Grief. I even feel a sting of envy when friends complain about the arduous sorting through a deceased parent's belongings.
Caroline Lucas, former Green Party MP, says, 'We are rubbish at dealing with and talking about death… the last taboo.' We need to become 'grief-literate.' Yes! And talk about plans in advance. If we don't like the standard funerary fare, we can create our own death rituals – traditional or alternative; sacred, humanist or invented.
Plumed horses and marching bands, Buddhist sky burials or 'cryomation' machinery. Gatherings in woods, at riverside ghats, or in brutalist-designed crematoria. These processes help guide us along grief's painful, unpredictable road. Without them, we are unmoored and alone.
'No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,' wrote CS Lewis after his wife died. 'I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach…'
Eventually, after a very long year, our stepmother gave us some ashes. All six siblings congregated on the Hebridean island our dad had loved. My cabinet-maker nephew, Tom Zinovieff, crafted a handsome oak box, which we buried on a peaty hill with the world's best view. Peter used to point there when we were young, saying, 'That's where you should bury me.' We lugged river stones, fossils and flowers as decoration and, since then, I've discovered the heart-soothing process of 'tending a grave'.
We mourned the absence of our seventh member, our youngest brother, gone much too early. There followed a fierce conflagration on the beach with some remaining ashes and, by the time we'd eaten a picnic, slugged some whisky and drunk bonfire tea, I felt transformed – drained, but with a new sensation of peace. I don't believe in 'closure' but the rituals had worked. And they had a distinct flavour of the best aspects of my wild dad.
Stealing Dad, by Sofka Zinovieff (Corsair, £20), is out now
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