Noisy Desperation

I don't know why it is but when you talk about a fight at a funeral people tend to smile. It's as though we recognise that someone has broken a rule, that we all know, a taboo, that funerals are not places to have a fight. They are places where people in great solemnity remember and give thanks... except that's not what we are left with when someone dies, is it... we are left with real, raw anger, just beneath the surface.
So it was today when I conducted the funeral of a lady in her fifties, a nice lady by all accounts, a loving slightly crackers rock to those who knew her. Those who knew her proceded to fall appart in front of me, crying, talking, sobbing and finally fighting each other, outside the church, inside the car, and at the crematorium.
My instinct was to tell them to behave and try and restore the peace, which is what we attempted and largely succeeded to do, but part of me wanted to rant along with them at the shock of their situation and the scandal of lives in tatters.
It makes me ponder the lives of those around me who to quote I think Bernard Levin: "...are leading lives of quiet and sometimes noisy desperation."
We are no where nearer making a community until we are able to share our depair, our desperation and our hopes and fears, however messy and noisy that feels to those who watch, or take funerals for that matter.