So, I asked Mark as we walked out of the cemetery, did you feel a sense of personal catharsis?
Not really, said Mark. Me neither, said I.
Funerals, as has no doubt been said before, are quiet odd things. They provide a space for ritual, a place to do what needs to be done in the company of others. A focus point. And probably many other things. But while they have these defined procedures and structures, they’re really about emotions, and those are so much harder to predict.
In a perverse way I’d been looking forward to Andy’s funeral. I’d put my feeling of being lost and confused down to not really being in the middle of things, stuck up here in Birmingham while those closer, physically and emotionally, were dealing with it as a group. Not to say I envy them in the slightest, please don’t think that for a minute. I was just looking for an explanation. I was expecting, hoping, that by being with others who were feeling what I was feeling, who knew him in aspects of the way I knew him, that I would have some kind of emotional moment to break the numbness, probably involving crying or something.
But I didn’t.
Okay, I nearly did. Having queued up for what seemed like hours to write in the condolences book (there were a good 200 people present) I suddenly realised I didn’t know what I was going to write, so I wrote a short note to Andy himself, and a brief moment happened. It’s perhaps interesting that this happened when I was on my own with everyone else keeping a respectful distance.
What I realised, though, was that while I’m really glad I went and while it was really good to be with other folk and talk, however stiltedly, about Andy, this is something I need to deal with myself, slowly, over time. And once I realised that I felt a lot better.
Maybe it was cathartic after all.