My son went to his first funeral before he’d even been born.
It can be quite an interesting feeling, to stand by a coffin while an unborn life punches you in the bladder from the inside. To find something suitable and formal and sombre to wear over a stomach the size of a fairly decent microwave. To say goodbye to someone dear to you, while a stranger pulses away beneath your skin.
But I believe that having children at a funeral is a great benefit—no matter their age. I recently had the honour of joining one of my oldest friends to mourn the death of her father. In the small chapel, where we listened to stories of his life and love, almost the whole of the front two rows were taken up by children. From breastfeeding babies to teenagers; they sat and listened and tucked their hair behind their ears and cried and looked at the windows and ate breadsticks and simply were.
When I was young, I think there was an assumption that children at a funeral weren’t appropriate guests. This was born of a somewhat old-fashioned cocktail of beliefs: that children are too noisy, that young people are too innocent or that kids would be frightened by too much talk of death. In my experience, children are in many ways far more comfortable and competent at considering death than their adult counterparts.
When the whole world is new, and everything must be learned, death is just another part of the great, magical, strange, complicated jigsaw that we must find the right piece for. Just as you learn that fire is hot, that beetroot juice is purple, that seasons lengthen and shorten days, so you discover that hearts one day stop; that brains drain of blood; that bodies turn cold. I remember taking my son to a museum where there was a small display of bones and explaining to him that after death, much of what we consider to be “us” simply rots away, melts back into the earth, feeds beetles and roots and trees. What starts as a heartbeat ends, eventually, in bones. For weeks after, he thought deeply about this. I could tell because he would occasionally turn to me, half way through a baked potato or a bath, and ask me something like “what makes your lungs work?” or, “when you die, what happens to your eyes?” As someone who was present at the death of both of my grandparents, and who has touched the dead skin of other people I have known and loved, I felt fairly well-equipped to answer these questions honestly, calmly and in the moment.
When my Maori uncle died, his body was laid out, as is tradition, for a number of days in the marae. During that time, people visited, ate food, talked; while his grandchildren did their homework, played and read. Sitting just a few feet from his body, life in mourning took place and those children, well, were children. I thought of them, as I sat in that English graveyard a few weeks ago, and watched the babies and grandchildren created, in part, by the man we’d lost. They behaved impeccably. By which, I mean they behaved as themselves. The baby babbled and fed, the smaller children played with the hems of their clothes, the older boys looked to their parents or down at their hands. I was so glad they were there; not only because they deserved their right to grieve and say goodbye alongside everybody else, but also because they were a reminder that while lives are finite, life is not.
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