Man’s body in mortuary for months amid sons’ dispute over funeral, judge says
The body of a 95-year-old man has been in an undertaker’s mortuary for almost five months amid a dispute between his sons over how it should be “disposed of”, a judge at the High Court has said.
Michael Godwin died in a hospital in Leeds last November after returning to the UK for a holiday last August, and had previously expressed a wish to be buried in France.
But his body has remained partially embalmed in a mortuary since shortly after his death, as two of his three sons, William and Jason Godwin, have been in a dispute over whether Michael should be cremated or buried.
At a hearing in Leeds earlier this month, William asked a judge at the High Court to declare he had the “lawful authority to arrange and instruct” his father’s cremation, and that Jason had “no lawful authority to prevent or interfere” with it.
But in a ruling on Wednesday, Judge Jonathan Klein ordered that Michael be buried in England as part of a Church of England funeral, and that William “must extend an invitation” to his brother.
The judge said that Michael, who was a member of the Church of England, had expressed a “consistent wish” to be buried and that repatriating his body to France could cause “significant delay”.
In his ruling, Judge Klein said that Mr Godwin was born in Surbiton, south London, in 1929, and had an “impressive career” in lift engineering.
He had lived in the south of France for more than 30 years and, in a homemade will written in 2003, expressed a wish for his body to be interred in a cemetery in Hargeville, near Paris, which was the home town of his then-partner.
But he also said that the delay in Michael’s funeral meant that his body “will have decomposed in the more than five months since his death” and that “distressingly, it may be in a state of putrefaction”.
Judge Klein continued that Jason wanted his father to be buried in Hargeville in line with his expressed wishes, but William wanted a cremation as the family had “no connection” to the French cemetery.
Ordering an English burial, the judge said that none of the Godwin family “has ever had any other connection with Hargeville” and that it was “unlikely that anyone will visit Mr Godwin’s grave if he is buried there”.
He also said that a funeral in France “will lose some of its meaning or value if none of the likely mourners can speak French”.