I’ve had some interesting conversations recently about funerals. A friend went to the funeral of a neighbour who died in his forties, and remarked how well the man’s wife ‘held it together’ – particularly since the couple’s two young children were there. This rang a bell with me – I, too, held it together when we cremated my husband Michael ten years ago. It was important to me that the event, which felt like a sort of performance I was hosting, ran smoothly and met everyone’s needs and expectations. Late in the evening of that day, sitting with close women friends, I managed to squeeze out a few tears, but even that made me feel at once terribly exposed, and at the same time almost as though I was playing a part which everyone expected of me.

Grief is complicated and unpredictable – sometimes you simply don’t feel sad when it might be ‘appropriate’ to do so, sometimes a very tiny thing can overwhelm you with a wave of blinding tears. I have tried always to be true to my feelings as I was feeling them, but now I wonder if it could have been rather different.

The friend who went to the funeral – she is Scandinavian – thought it a good thing that we manage to be composed at funerals, in order to, as it were, ‘hold the space’ for everyone there. But there are other ways of holding the space. I was talking about my book last week to a group of social work students, and a Kurdish woman told me that when someone in her home village dies, there are a group of women whose job it is to lead the mourning. They gather in the home of the bereaved, dress the windows of the house in black cloth so that passers by will know immediately that there has been a bereavement, and  then sit and cry together with the family. I saw something similar on a documentary set in Papua New Guinea – a village elder had died and women from all the surrounding villages  gathered in the family’s house, where they sobbed and wailed almost non-stop for several days. I found it very moving to watch – it made me want to cry along with them.

Imagine you had the chance to sit in a room full of people crying for you, crying with you for your loss?  It might feel embarrassing and overwhelming at first, but my goodness wouldn’t it encourage to you get all those feelings out – all the grief, the despair, the anger. And what of the women (and it is usually women) who come to cry, the emotional ‘helpers’? Seems like this would be a great cathartic opportunity to sob out their own sadness, their frustrations with life, their fear of dying.

I can’t imagine it catching on in Britain any time soon, although this article about ‘mourners-for-rent’ suggests the beginnings of a new direction (albeit as a way of padding out the genuine funeral goers to make the deceased look well-loved.) And of course I can think of many people who would shun such a public sharing of their pain, seeing it as distasteful, or simply be constitutionally unable to participate – I include myself in that latter group. But I can’t help feeling we have lost something very fundamental with our insistence on maintaining a good front, while secretly we are dying inside.