I’m Italian. I remember the death of my grandfather, since I was a child. My grandmother took us to see his dead body lying on the bed. It was expected, but I still remember that to me he didn’t look like my grandad, I suffered terribly for his death. After the funeral we had lunch as a family all together: my grandmother had made homemade pasta soup. I still remember the sense of guilt, and the silence around the table, when my granddad had died. How could we be at the dinner table just after the funeral? This is just to say that for me an English funeral is easy: a celebration of life rather than suffering for the person’s death. We don’t scatter ashes for the person to be still with us, we bury the body: the body needs to be there, buried, to remind us of the pain of death and loss.
