AND FINALLY The comfort of being united in a nation’s grief

DO YOU ever feel sometimes that you just don’t know what to do with your sadness?

In the past week, I watched all the ceremonials throughout the British Isles and felt such compassion for the sorrow etched on the faces of our late Queen’s children. Then we went to visit a very old friend, alone in her house now her wonderful husband has ‘gone before’.

I recalled all the happy times we’ve shared since first meeting when we were both just 34, with very young children who played together. We’re grandmothers now, and in my melancholy mood I wondered which one of us would attend the other’s funeral.

Back home the phone rang . . . and a quiet, stoical wife (a newer friend) warned me that her husband — such an admirable man — is very near the end of his days.

Back watching our late Queen’s coffin, draped in the glorious

Royal Standard, I found it impossible not to cry.

The solemnity of the cortege. The bowed heads at four corners of the catafalque. Every sort of person, all races, all ages, needing to be there, to be ‘part of history’. The powerful sense of gratitude, loyalty and loss.

Of course, within a 15-month period I had also mourned both my parents, and we know that a significant ‘public’ death triggers memories of private sorrow.

Among those crowds gathering for the Queen’s coffin there must have been so many souls who felt strangely comforted by a collective grief and shared mourning. We are, indeed, all in this — this life — together.

Meanwhile, beyond my TV set, the autumn sun was as warm and golden as the colours in the Royal Standard. Our trees are heavy with fruit. Delicate webs gleam as the spiders get busy in mating season. But the swallows have already departed. Leaves have started to turn, the nights are chilly and the dew is as heavy as a sad heart.

So it goes on: autumn; change; slow decay; the steady, inexorable pageant of death which nothing and nobody can avoid.

Oh, but the children! Beautiful to watch the Prince of Wales accept a wee Paddington Bear. To hear young voices reading out sweet messages to the late Queen. To see babes in arms and the faces of little ones as cheeky as my own grandchildren, waiting for a Queen they’ll barely remember through the years of good King Charles.

A mother says: ‘It’ll be something to tell the grandchildren.’ And that is what it’s all about: the unstoppable cycles of the seasons and the ages of humankind. But also the powerful awareness which brings deeps consolation — that service and love are as endless as this country of ours is great.

Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, london W8 5TT, or email bel.mooney@ dailymail.co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.