A Painful Funeral

A crem funeral followed a few days later by the burial of the ashes in a little wooden casket.The crem was no worse - and certainly no better - than most of them, and the burial site was in a de-consecrated churchyard in a very beautiful position, mountains behind, salt marsh in front, huge skies. Ancient beautiful little church. A favourite place of he who had died, since childhood.

Why do I single it out? Because the young man who'd died was in his late thirties, and his partner was also a young man in his late thirties. Hardly unique, but I had seldom seen such raw grief. The family of he who had died were neither rich nor sophisticated, not particularly eloquent, and united in their grief with the surviving partner.

The funeral was a "good" one, insofar as the big and important things were said, the death was faced and directly addressed, the life was, as we like to say, celebrated.

I remember one critic of the life of the composer Benjamin Britten saying that homosexual men were in fact would-be pederasts who sublimated their desires by accepting as second-best a relationship with an adult male (the arrested development/neurosis view, one might say.) Others not entirely sympathetic to a tolerant view of homosexuality have written of it as though it were simply a matter of promiscuity and easy satisfaction. (Underneath this view may lie a prejudice that homosexuality is not the "real" thing.) And it might be natural to think that a tolerant view of sexuality and gender is more likely amongst city-dwelling middle-class well-educated people than amongst working-class small-town not especially well-educated people.

All this crew, on the evidence of this funeral, were talking nonsense.

I have seldom seen such pain, from the partner every bit as much as the family.

I'm straight, as it happens and for what that's worth, so this isn't a heart-felt personal appeal, based on my own sense of identity, for enlightened views of gay sexuality.

Except - perhaps it is. I speak as I find.

I have seldom seen such raw grief at a funeral.