Please Wear Something Bright, Dave Would Have Hated a Sad Room

The invitation said: please wear something bright, Dave would have hated a sad room. It arrived by group text four days after he died, from his daughter, who is thirty-one and had also by then chosen the venue, the playlist, the catering, the photographs, the order of speakers and the phrase celebration of life, which she used because she could not think of what else to call it and because every website she looked at used it too.

She did all of that in four days, while not sleeping, and it was lovely, and I watched her do it and thought: this used to be somebody else's job.

I have been to eleven funerals in six years — the age I am, the family I have — and the American ones divide cleanly into two kinds. There are the ones with a script, mostly religious, in which everybody knows where to stand and what is said next and what to bring, and the bereaved are handled, moved gently from one fixed thing to the next by people who have done it before. And there are the ones where the script has been replaced by a curated event that expresses the individual, and in those the bereaved are the producers.

The claim I have arrived at, and I hold it more firmly every year, is that personalisation moved the labour of grief onto exactly the people least able to carry it, and that the old script — hollow, repetitive, frequently insincere — was a kindness precisely because it asked nothing of them.

Watch what the new form actually requires in the first ninety-six hours. Somebody must choose the music, which means somebody must have a view about what he liked, which becomes an argument, because his wife and his daughter have different views and neither of them can afford an argument this week. Somebody must write and deliver a speech about a person they cannot yet think about without stopping. Somebody must find photographs, which means going through photographs. Somebody must decide the tone — is this sad or is it a celebration, are we allowed to laugh, is there an open microphone — and every one of those decisions is a small referendum on who the dead man was, held at the precise moment nobody is fit to vote.

A script makes all of those decisions in advance, badly and permanently, for everyone. That is the whole point of it. Its indifference to the individual is the feature: it does not require his family to have a position on him four days after he died.

Now the objection, which I take seriously because I have made it. The old script was religious, and a great many people are not, and standing through a service that describes your father in a vocabulary he never used is its own kind of violence. It flattened people into a formula — every man good, every woman devoted, everyone now at peace. Personalisation was a correction to a real deficiency and it restored something true: this was a specific person, who had a specific laugh, and here is a photograph of him losing an argument with a lawnmower.

I grant all of that. What I notice is what happens next, which is that people improvise, and what they improvise converges. Go to four celebrations of life and you will get: the slideshow, set to two songs; the phrase he would have hated a sad room; the daughter apologising in advance for crying; the open microphone that runs eleven minutes too long because of one man who did not know him well; the request for bright clothing that about a third of the room quietly ignores. It is a script. It is simply a script nobody wrote down, which means every family has to reconstruct it from scratch under the worst conditions of their lives, and be judged on the result.

And they are judged. That is the part that keeps me arguing about this. There is now a quality dimension to a funeral. It can be well done or poorly done; it can capture him or not; people say afterwards that it was beautiful, and they mean it, and the compliment lands on the daughter, which means its absence would have landed there too. Nobody ever left a Catholic funeral in 1974 saying the family had really nailed it. There was nothing to nail. That was the gift.

I found out what this costs at my father's, where I was the one holding a laptop at two in the morning trying to get the slideshow software to stop putting a star-wipe between the photographs. I had a eulogy to finish. What I actually did for four hours was fight a transition effect, because that was the only part of the situation that could be solved, and I have since learned from three other people that they did the identical thing, in the identical small hours, with the identical relief at finding something in the week that had a right answer.

At the celebration of life for Dave, a man I had never met stood up at the open microphone near the end, after the eleven-minute one, and said he had worked nights with him for two years at a plant in the next county and that Dave always took the worst machine without being asked, and then he sat down. Six seconds. The room went completely quiet in the way rooms do when something true has been said, and I watched the daughter's face, and I thought: that is what the script used to guarantee. Not eloquence. Just the certainty that at some point in the afternoon somebody would say the thing, so that she would not have to.