If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986. (Yes, St Valentine’s Day. The patron saint of bathos.) ‘Deliver me from all mine offences,’ the choir sang, doing Psalm 39, ‘and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.’ Ted Hughes read the bit from Ecclesiasticus about now praising famous men. Where these orders of service used to be religious brochures offering blasts of Christian devotion, they are now ‘celebrations’ of the life, posthumous animations of the career, and summaries of the person behind the personality. In the old days, they might have been organised by a church verger in consultation with the family, but the tendency now is to have them authored by a committee of the sad and a PR guru.

There was Bach for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge both his customary admiration for the truly great and his anxiety about not being great himself. And why not? Shouldn’t the person being toasted be allowed to express her ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one suffer death, or is it just life’s ultimate experience?) Howard’s memorial was held at the Savile Club in Mayfair and concluded with the airing of an interview she did on the Today programme. There were appreciations and reflections by Hilary Mantel and Martin Amis (read by other friends) but her order of service concludes with the penultimate sentence from her memoir, Slipstream. ‘I’ve slowly learned some significant things,’ she wrote: ‘the importance of truth, which, it seems to me now, should be ... treasured when any piece of it is found.’ Saying what the truth of one’s life was, and curating the manner of its glorification, may well be the last big decisions in a life of indecision.

When my father died, his dream of posterity blossomed, and the things he wanted to be true about himself suddenly found theatrical expression. He was never politically active, but the route to his funeral was lined with Scottish flags. He was never particularly religious, but someone who felt they were following his wishes – isn’t that a mourner’s task? – demanded that he be accorded a full requiem mass. He got the poem he wanted and his coffin was carried out to a song invoking all the colours of the rainbow. When I read it now, I see his order of service was a publication chiefly for people who hardly knew him, and, when all’s said and done, that’s fine, isn’t it, even appropriate, if what mattered to the person in question was cultivating the admiration of strangers? A lie can confirm a truth. Who can blame a dying person for enjoying their own finale, getting their own way one last time while seizing the opportunity for a bit of good publicity?

On 7 April 1983, there was ‘a meeting to honour the memory of Arthur and Cynthia Koestler’. The order of service opens with a suicide note. ‘The purpose of this note,’ which Koestler signed in June 1982, ‘is to make it unmistakeably clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person. The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded over a considerable period.’ Koestler went on to say that he had Parkinson’s disease and leukaemia. ‘I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind,’ he wrote, ‘with some timid hopes for a depersonalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension.’ Cynthia, his wife, died the same way, and some of their friends worried that she had been bullied into it. The speakers at their memorial included Hugh Casson and David Astor.