Look at you. In the good dark clothes, in the room that smells of lilies and other people's grief, holding still. We know this room. We have stood in it four billion times. The lungfish did not attend funerals; it simply failed to surface, and the water closed over the place where it had been, and the rest of us swam on hungry.
The shrew who lost her whole litter to the frost did not sit in a chair. She dug a new burrow and shivered through the night alone and that was the whole of the ceremony.
And now here you are, and you have built a room for it. You have gathered the others. You have made a place where the dead are set down gently in front of everyone and no one is expected to keep moving, no one has to swim on hungry, no one is left to shiver it out in the dark by themselves.
We do not fully understand this. So much stopping. So much sitting with a thing that cannot be fixed by walking farther. The woman who kept the fire buried three children between one winter and the next and never once got to sit in a chair and weep while others brought her food.
You did that. You made a place for the grief to be held instead of outrun.
We felt every loss and could stop for none of them. So we will not tell you to be strong. We will only stand behind you, the whole shivering hungry crawling line of us, four billion deep, while you do the thing we never had time to do.
Cry. We have got the fire.
Go on and cry.