Why do we still carry the coffin ourselves, when a trolley would do?

The short answer Because being spared the weight would be a theft. The trolley would carry the coffin more easily than six aching shoulders—and ease is exactly the wrong thing here. Bearing the weight yourself is the last physical service you can do a person, and it’s how the grief gets down out of your head and into your body, where it has to go to be borne at all. We don’t carry them because we must. We carry them because to be spared it would be to miss the one thing left to do.

The longer answer

The first surprise is how heavy it is. You get under it with five others, the box comes up onto the shoulders, and the weight is immediate and serious and far more than you’d braced for—a grown person and the oak besides, borne on bone that will ache tomorrow. And walking with it is nothing like carrying a heavy thing normally. You go slow. You match your step to five other steps you can’t see. The whole of your attention narrows to the shared weight and the next few feet of floor.

There is a trolley. There is always, now, an easier way—a wheeled bier that would roll the coffin down the aisle smoothly and spare every shoulder in the church. And the fact that we mostly still refuse it, still get under the thing and carry it ourselves, is worth sitting with, because it cuts against every other instinct of the age, which is to remove weight wherever weight can be removed.

But this is the one place the weight is the point. It is the last thing you will ever do for them—the very last—and it’s done with the body, because there is nothing left to do with words. You cannot help them now. You can only carry them, a little way, from here to the ground, and the ache of it is not a cost to be minimised but the whole substance of the act. Grief kept in the head goes round and round and finds no door. Put it under a real weight and walk twenty slow steps and it comes down at last into the shoulders and the breath—into the body, which knows how to bear things the mind only spins on.

That’s why the trolley feels faintly obscene even when it’s sensible. It solves the wrong problem. It treats the weight as the difficulty, when the weight was the mercy—the one remaining way to serve a person past all serving, and to let your body do the grieving your mind can’t finish.

Whether they know they were carried, I can’t tell you; I suspect not. The carrying was never only for them. You set them down, and your shoulders sing, and something in you has been let out that would otherwise have had nowhere to go. It may be so. It may not.