The celebrant’s smile dips occasionally, but for the entire service never completely disappears. There are so many people here I know, friends, friends of friends, anonymous familiar faces, total strangers, all dressed up in our smartest clothes. I keep an iron grip on my friend L’s hand, and she on mine, as we watch the family walk up the aisle, our lost friend’s two young children walking towards something I cannot — literally cannot, cannot permit myself to — imagine.

The last funeral I went to before this was a woman in her nineties, a great-grandmother, a brilliantly intelligent professional, her life shaped by sacrifice and generosity. I am there for her grandson, one of my oldest friends, but during the service I remember so much I had forgotten, or never appreciated: how on more than one Christmas Day I had turned up on her doorstep, mid-afternoon, and she had sat me down with her family and fed me, without ever asking me anything or questioning my presence, just offering consummate ξενία; how we would all stay for days there, on holiday from school and university, drinking the family booze and filling their ashtrays, eating all their leftovers in 2am feasts; how she always knew who I was but never made me feel I owed her more than a polite hello, something that, as a teenager, seemed more valuable than gold. All through those years, more than a decade of my giddiness and misery, she had provided a sanctuary so perfect I had never even registered it. Her own family, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all had something of her goodness, remembering and greeting me though another decade had passed, at least, since I’d seen many of them. What a life, I thought, what richness and jewels and precious treasure she had collected, and been given. To live more than ninety years and know the good you have wrought must be nice, I thought.

This week, this funeral, we drive to the wake, L in the passenger seat, her ex and their son in the back. Her ex says, Do you know she was like? One word. Really good. Her son says, That’s two words, Dad. We collapse into that post-funeral hysteria which is already familiar — chattering teeth and unstoppable laughter — and I think, What a life. What a life.