A death is not the life that preceded it, but is a part of it.

I have been standing over the bodies of the dead to tell the story of their lives for twenty years now. It is an incredible honour, and fraught with risk.

More often than not, I never met these people, yet I take it upon myself to try and offer words of comfort and explanation as to what has happened, to try and excavate meaning from what are often times of bleak sadness.

And meaning is often absent, certainly as an explanation of why a life has ended, particularly if the circumstances are tragic.

Bad things happen to good people for no reason, and sometimes there is no link between the lives lived and the end met. The random nature of our physical world means the universe is often blindly indifferent to our individual circumstances, but still we search for answers, someone to blame, usually ourselves.

In such circumstances, to say anything that isn’t crass or insincere is a struggle, unless you develop a binocular way of looking at a life, with the narrative arc of it overlaid against the death which ended it. As a community struggles with such events, there is a need to balance the focus between these two visions. A death is not the life that preceded it, but is a part of it, and both need to be welcome at a funeral.

I have no religious authority behind me. What I say needs to be accepted by all who hear it as the truth, even if it is jagged with shards of sadness. It is often clear what is the right thing to say at a funeral, it is whether I or anyone else has the courage to say it. I know when what I have spoken is received as the truth by a gathering. There is a moment of tenseness, a sense of the collective attention being seized, followed by a sense of reassurance that yes, this is the true nature of the person who has died, this is the truth of their story.

But being around such unvarnished truths day after day can take its toll. Without the promises of religion our lives can feel empty of meaning and it is to trite to say that love is the answer to our existence, even though I half believe that to be true.

What I can say for certain, is there are moments in our lives in which everything comes sharply into focus, in which things clearly matter more than in the rest of our daily existence.

These shared moments of clarity can often be painful, but there is liberation in the sharpness of it. This is what gives my life meaning, those fleeting moments of shared reality, when I have spoken aloud what everyone is thinking, when we all feel as one, even if that feeling is painful.

In that moment of shared truth, we are not alone.