We need this public show of sadness

One of the chief differences between us and the Victorians is in our attitudes to public and private grief. Queen Victoria's was the first big royal funeral, in 1901. Before that, the Royal Family mourned in private. Prince Albert's funeral, for example, or those of Queen Victoria's children were held in Windsor away from the public gaze. William IV's little funeral at St George's, Windsor, was such a shambles that his brother the Duke of Sussex arranged for his own burial at the fashionable new cemetery in Kensal Green.

By contrast with their sovereign, Victorians loved huge public displays of grief. As the old photographs show us, even a shopkeeper or a small businessman would expect a glass hearse, pulled by plumed horses, several mutes and everyone draped from head to foot in mourning clothes and black crepe. Such scenes were a weekly spectacle in any town 100 years ago.

Yet, for many young Britons, the great funeral today will be the first funeral they have ever seen, apart, perhaps, from Princess Diana's; that coffin, draped in the Queen Mother's personal standard, past which tens of thousands of people have walked, will have been for many of them the first coffin they ever saw at first hand. What a wonderful thing it would be if these obsequies made us all - republicans, royalists, atheists, religious believers - reconsider our attitude to funerals.

Ceremonies, because they are more like dance than they are like philosophy, release us; they allow us to bring forth feelings from the deep places of our hearts to say things we did not know we needed to say, to express emotions which are difficult to frame into words in the ordinary course of daily existence. Many lovers get married for this reason. It is not because they think they require the permission of the state or the clergy to allow them to live together. It is because they reach a point at which their commitment to one another needs to be signalled by ceremony, however modest the ritual may be, however small the gathering of witnesses.

When it comes to death - and that is something we are all coming to - we moderns feel especially at sea. This was captured brilliantly well in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Gareth, the exuberant homosexual played by Simon Callow, has a heart attack doing a Highland reel at the posh wedding of Hamish and Carrie.

We are suddenly transported from the Sloaney world of the friends to Gareth's industrial home town. We see his parents, and the world he came from. In all senses we are confronted by reality for the first time in the film. Matthew's griefstricken speech about his boyfriend, made over the coffin, is the most moving scene in the film, and his decision to read "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" made WH Auden ("another splendid bugger") into a bestseller in death, as he had never been in life.

The funeral of Gareth, one of the best things in the film, made many of us wonder about our own funerals; how we intended to mark our passing; whether there were any of our friends who would be brave or articulate enough to try to say something, as Matthew does in the film, which was more than just the platitudes of a paid crematorium parson; whether we wanted the funeral to be in the context of a religious service.

Few of us nowadays believe in life after death. Our metaphysic, our take on the world, excludes the notion of there being some other universe outside this one, some metareality where angels sing or disembodied human souls reunite with their loved ones or their gods. It is this core lack of belief in the future life which has inhibited so many of us from having proper funerals for friends and family. There is also the fact that, nowadays, death tends to happen in hospital. Forty years ago, if you died in hospital, they would assume that your family wanted to take the body home until the funeral. Now, if you die at home, someone comes to take the body away instantly in a plastic bag as if it were rubbish.

In those early hours and days after the death of a loved one, important things get lost in the modern way of death. We need to see the dead face of a lover, a mother, a child before we begin to understand that they are dead. Yet this deep, basic need is denied so many people, either by their own squeamishness or by supposedly caring doctors. There then follows the need to dispose of the much-loved remains. One part of us wants nothing to do with such a gruesome fact - we would rather someone just took "it" away, that the nightmare was not happening. Perhaps this thought is what inspired some of my friends to decree: "No funeral." They gave their bodies to science. But with no ceremony of farewell, it is hard to grieve properly.

Until a supremely imaginative, musical atheist devises a funeral service at which we can all sing and cry, we are better off, truly, with the old rituals of our cult or tribe. For the religious minority, the exact meaning of the words will be of consolation or importance - I know that my Redeemer liveth. I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. For a much larger number of us, these words are important because our parents, grandparents and numberless forebears all said them as they, too, were carried out into the unknown.

Whether we gather in Quaker silence, or with the full musical works of Hebrew or Latin chants, is a matter of taste or family tradition. What matters is that we should recover our lost sense of ceremonial goodbye. It is something which we owe ourselves, in learning to come to terms with the death of those we have loved. It is also, above all, something which we owe to them.