At my father’s funeral, I sat with my arm around my mother and the feeling of holding her near is almost all that remains of the service in my mind. Now I wish I had spoken, even though I had little to say. I had never before been to a funeral and didn’t know what happened at them, except vaguely – there was a Mass, I understood, but what prayers or rituals were added in I didn’t know. I was unaware that family members often spoke. I had no knowledge of burials except for cinematic ones, where people circled a hole in the ground dressed in black, weeping. This seemed unlikely to happen given that my father would be cremated, and also because I had never noticed anything but…