The need for ritual to mark a death has been with us since before religion came along. It is hard-wired into the human psyche to yearn for something more when a life comes to an end, whether for the person who has left us, or for ourselves. The genius of religions – consciously or not – has been to develop whole theologies and funeral rituals around that urge.
So successfully that in our secular times, while notions of heaven and hell are increasingly neglected, a funeral still retains a special power in moments of pain and loss. In the case of Queen Elizabeth, whose Christian faith was as deeply felt as it was lived, her own hand in the planning will have been precisely to address those needs in all who watch, rather than seek her own greater glory. The arrangements have given as many people as possible time and space to reflect physically as well as emotionally on her death by just being, often in reverent silence, in the presence of her coffin, whether in Westminster Hall, at St Giles’ cathedral, or from the roadside as it passes by inside a hearse, or on a gun carriage.
For it is nigh on impossible, because loss and grief comes to us all eventually, to stand next to a coffin and avoid thinking about death, the one inevitability in life – the one thing that we all have in common, but a subject that is the last great taboo. William, now Prince of Wales, has spoken this week of how walking behind his grandmother’s coffin on its way to Westminster Hall brought him right back to the death of his mother Diana, Princess of Wales, above.
However much we feel in the peak of life, with full diaries and every possibility in front of us, the ritual of attending a funeral – or watching one on our screens on a day set aside as a national holiday for us to do so – is both an unconditional invitation to reflect on our own mortality, and an opportunity openly to recall those who have gone in our lives, to mourn them afresh. We will remember, as we watch her children and grandchildren try to hold back the tears, how we have done the same in similar circumstances.
And grief for those we loved, and whose death leaves a space never filled in our lives, never ever goes. We just get used to living with it, learning to shed our tears for lost parents, siblings, partners, children, friends, in private rather than in public.
The Queen’s funeral will lift that veil for a day at least. No-one will ask us why tears are rolling down our cheeks – mercifully, since I find it even more upsetting to explain. Whether it be the moments of stillness, when the coffin stands alone, or as a single instrument plays from the choir loft, with the resonant words of the eulogy, or the hymns, there is plenty there to trigger our thoughts and memories.
In that sense the Queen will become an everywoman for the grief that we have locked inside. She will offer the final act of a long life of service in allowing us to let it out in a reverent and respectful setting. When one of those great Christian hymns is being sung the effect will be all-embracing in the hope that is summoned up, real, imagined or plain delusionary depending on your views, that this is not the end.
Peter Stanford is the author of How To Read a Graveyard: Journeys in the Company of the Dead
