Hey, paps, instead of people grieving, you could take photos of...

The good people on Twitter don’t start to wake up (and by wake up, I mean tweet, obviously) until around 8:20am. This means that, in the 14 minute wait I have between my two morning trains, I end up reading the Metro. It’s light, to say the least (it has a fucking Pet of the Day feature), but it gets me through and lets me know a bit of what happened whilst I slept, or what happened the day before, or the day before that- ever current and totally relevant

Last week, in just one edition, I saw a picture of the grieving family of murdered school teacher Ann Maguire, closely followed by a photo of a tearful Camilla Parker-Bowles attending the funeral of her brother. I felt really sad and really angry. You know how hangry is now apparently a thing? Well I felt really fucking sangry.

About as sangry as I felt when I saw the photos of Phillip Seymour-Hoffman’s children standing watching their father’s coffin pull up to his funeral, as their mother tried to stretch her arms around all three of them.

I know that every news story must be accompanied by a photo. We like photos because they allow us to get ahead of what’s been written below - if we can get away with finding out news without having to actually read any news then that’s great. A photo of people wearing black, standing outside of somewhere, crying means that someone has died, most likely the person who’s name is in cold black letters above the photo.

But really, do we need to see it? I mean…really?

Until quite recently, the only funeral I’d ever been to was my dad’s funeral. It was the second-worst day of my life.
I have no clue what time the funeral actually was, I don’t even remember the day, but it must have been past 3pm, as kids were pouring out of my school as we crawled towards the crematorium. As they walked, ran, cycled, body-popped (I definitely remember that- crazes take longer, way longer, to filter up to the Midlands) their way past the car, they all looked in. Not a discreet I’m-flicking-my-hair-and-turning-my-head look, but the kind of obnoxiously obvious look that you do when you’re sixteen or younger.
It was horrible. The fact that I knew that people had seen me wearing my new black coat and that they knew why I was wearing my new black coat made the day seem like it was actually a thing that was happening. It was all a bit “If a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” If you’re so heartbroken that you’re about to vomit up the pieces and no one sees you, then is your Dad actually dead?
Probably should have just stuck with the tree thing, there.
So, that was horrible. I can’t even imagine how awful it would be to see a group chubby, unshaven, poorly-dressed middle aged men (I’m going with the clichéd image of a pap, I actually kind of think that Michael Moore looks like a pap, so imagine lots of Michael Moores) hanging around to take pictures of the whole thing would be.

And I don’t think they should be hanging around to take pictures of it. They should take pictures of the following three things instead-

1. The sky
There’s a lot of talk about the sky when people die. Even the most ardent atheists, unless they're a compassionless prick, find themselves saying “Oh, I’m sure he’s up there watching now, laughing” with a raise of the eyebrows when they’re faced with red-rimmed eyes, or the despondent face of someone who’s mid-grief.
I feel like the sky stands for the confusion that goes on in your own head when someone dies.
Most of the time, I don’t think I really believe in God, and consequently heaven, and I definitely didn’t want to as I sat in a grey room, listening to my mum crying and waiting to be told that my dad had died, but the idea that, with no God and no heaven, he was going to be nowhere- totally gone, forever, was unbearable. It kind of still is, I quite like the idea of my dad just being somewhere, hanging out.
So, a photo of a sky, doesn’t have to necessarily be a sad sky, would say someone has died to me.


2. The food
If you can be at an event and not get so excited about the buffet that you struggle to hide it beneath a mask of nonchalance then you, sir, are a better man that me. I love a buffet, apart from if it’s after I’ve just said goodbye forever to a loved one- then I can only really manage a couple of cheese straws.
A shot of the leftover food, the plates and plates of beige food, with a bit of compulsory cucumber, that are left sitting on a table whilst everyone tries to be normal for at least an hour pretty much sums up a funeral for me.
Although, now that I’ve written it, I realise that The Pap would have had to break into a wake for this to happen. Whilst I’m sure that wouldn’t stretch their moral code too much, I do not approve. Don’t do this, paps.

3. Themselves
How about, pap, you take a photo of yourself? Hoist up that massive camera and take a selfie, so that we can all see Phil, aged 39, clad in grey, navy and a baseball cap. We can finally see who’s been loitering around trying to snap a shot of some children who can’t even get their head around the fact that they’ll never see their parent again and who’s going to, once they’ve got a photo of everyone looking sufficiently sad, is going to sell that photo to people who are going to publish it everywhere, so that it becomes a thing that said children can see whenever they want, or don’t, as they grow up. How about that, huh?

We don’t need to see what photos of people attending a funeral. We don’t need to see what grief looks like- we’ve all felt what grief looks like and that’s enough.