Grief flattened and lost somewhere in the wi-fi

This, I fumed silently as I failed repeatedly to open the live-stream link, has got to be one of the strangest things I’ve done all year. It felt almost like any other night at my parents’ house. I was sprawled on the couch in my comfy jeans, Mumwas fussing over the wi-fi, Dad was pouring wine, and the cat was trying to lick the yoghurt off my sock. Except it wasn’t like any other night.

We were about to attend our first Zoom funeral. Half the family was in New Zealand at dusk, half were in the United States at dawn, and we were all live streaming into a tiny crematorium on an overcast mid-afternoon in England.

Well, we would be if I could get the bloody link to work.

Wearing jeans to a funeral had been the first moment of surreal incongruity that would sum up the whole night. As I tore out of my house earlier my partner had coughed delicately and said, ‘‘Ah, are you getting changed?’’.

I’d thought about it. Obsessed over it actually. What do you wear to a Zoom funeral? Zoom is for meetings in pink pyjama pants. But if I’d been in that chilly, rain-drenched church yard in northern England right now, I’d be zipped into the only sensible dress I own.

I’d fretted for hours over it – is itweird to dress up for your parents’ living room? What were they wearing? Would Imake them feel even weirder if I was the only person who did?

In the end, I’d been so stressed that I ran out of time and sprinted out of the door in exactly what I’d been wearing all day.

Then there was the matter of a Zoom funeral itself.

The two concepts just don’t go together.

Funerals, at least for emotionally repressed Pa¯keha¯ families like mine, are all about sombre formality, then sobbing quietly into the sausage rolls.

But Zoom is all about new corporate casual culture, where you discuss work with your boss while critiquing their taste in soft furnishings.

Trying to squash a funeral into the same virtual box as your weekly meeting feels so weird it’s almost distasteful. Like holding a redundancy meeting in the ball pit at aMcDonald’s playground.

And then there’s the fact that you can’t get the bloody thing to start. No-one’s going to lock you out of the church at a funeral, and yet every Zoom meeting inevitably starts late because someone’s wi-fi is buggered. And even when it did start, it was even weirder still.

FTrying to squash a funeral into the same virtual box as your weekly meeting feels so weird it’s almost distasteful.

irst off, Zoom funerals do not ‘‘feel real’’. It feels like you’re watching the news on your phone. As in, you’re aware that these events are happening, but they’re happening to someone else, somewhere far away.

You know you’re upset, you can feel the messy, throbbing knot of emotions moving somewhere nearby, but you can’t reach out and touch it.

All the tiny things that would help you reach it (the smell of damp, mossy church stone; the crisp, insidious chill of an overcast morning; your aunt who you only see at funerals and her strange, musty perfume), they’re all flattened and lost somewhere in the wi-fi.

In fact, it was so weird that five minutes in I had to close my eyes and lie on the floor. Listening felt better. Or at least less like Iwas watching YouTube.

And as I lay there I realised that real grieving is on hold for now – just like so many of the experiences that make us feel like we’re really living.

Like the tender everyday intimacy of visiting your gran at her care home, the reckless, transcendental ecstasy of drunken raves, or the sticky thrill of unfamiliar air in a foreign city. There’s no room for any of these life-affirming experiences in this deeply abnormal new normal.

Eventually it ended, Iwent and retrieved more wine from the kitchen, and we all sat around and cried into the chips. And then, at last, something felt real.