Writing on the eve of a funeral isn’t easy. Although I suppose it would be more difficult if it were my own.

I have plenty of thoughts about funerals, about death, and about how we the living respond to such situations, but it has become apparent these past few weeks that most of the people in my immediate vicinity do not much care for my reflections. Their grief is magnitudes greater than my suffering (which is not inconsiderable). There is no room for my cool logic or stoicism. Confound it Tom, why can’t you just cry and be miserable like everyone else?!

Well, tomorrow I suspect they’ll get their wish. I tend to be one of the weepy people at funerals, at times bordering on inconsolable. I once broke down completely after saying goodbye to an auntie I barely knew. Having laid hands on my dearest friend Zowie’s coffin, I couldn’t bring myself to withdraw it and had to be escorted from the venue in floods of tears. I fully expect to be a blubbering wreck once the unhappy moment arrives, 14 hours from now.

When I attended my first funeral aged 18 (the aforementioned aunt), I was a young adult suffering from obdurate and frequently overpowering abandonment issues. As death really was the ultimate form of abandonment, I found myself utterly incapable of facing up to it. A family tragedy in my early 20s added to my torment and left me in a state of perpetual paranoia that anyone and everyone around me could potentially drop dead at any moment.

I’m deeply relieved not to be that person anymore, although it’s ironic that my change in outlook was precipitated by the unfortunate manifestation of my deepest fears. Two close friends gone, one unexpectedly kicking the bucket on my birthday, the other receiving a diagnostic death sentence that hung over her for three gloriously defiant years, before six months of ghastly, irreversible decline.

These experiences forced me to change my tune about death, to wake up to the reality that we are all dying and the end result of our brief time on this planet is utterly unavoidable.

As it turns out, no one wants to hear this on the eve of a funeral!

Arguably the most beautiful of all James songs, ‘Five-O’, contains a line about death that I feel is gloriously well-judged: “If it lasts forever, hope I’m the first to die.”

Maybe some people consider the idea of ‘going first’ to be inherently selfish, but I think this argument runs counter to human nature. After all, every person fortunate enough to accrue a reasonable number of years will end up on the receiving end of loss, most likely multiple times over. Such experiences take their toll. Eventually, don’t we all deserve the opportunity to be at peace?