Poems For Funerals – Do We Need Them?
My father’s death left me raw, unable to function and grief stricken in the fullest sense of the words – I was eighteen years old and bereft. I still have the memory of how desperate I was. One of the worst things about it was that I did not know what to say at his funeral. I needed to say something but I couldn’t put the words together. It still causes me so much pain that I couldn’t speak to say what he meant to me, and what he still means to me. When I was asked for my opinion on poems for funerals my initial reaction was to say ‘No, I don’t like that idea. How morbid can you get?’ But then I was taken back all those years to that dreadful time and I realized how selfish I was being. If I had been able to get hold of something that was already written and that would maybe express some of my feelings, how much better would I have felt? How much better would I have coped? How much better would I feel now – over thirty years later? Sadly, I will never know. There are those folks who tu
