Willy Trolove: Words that connect us with those who have gone

James is dead. I knew him, but not well. We talked at parties and in pubs. He was the kind of genuinely nice guy that makes you feel embarrassed about the flaws in your own life, and he was always bemused by the ridiculous things that I ranted about, which is as sure a sign as any that he was a well-adjusted sort of bloke.

Several years ago he became unwell. They found a tumour and he fought it. They chopped him up and chopped it out and for a while he got better before he got worse.

One of the last times I saw him was when he was better.

We were on a sailing holiday. The sea sparkled and the sun shone. The food was good and the wine flowed.

He was happy and with friends. I will remember him like that.

The fight that James could muster was not enough. The tumour wore him down and got him in the end. He was 33.

By any of today's measures he was far too young. Science has stretched life beyond its natural boundaries.

Back when we lived in caves, 33 was a grand old age, a tribe-leading, silverback kind of maturity that only the strongest and the fittest ever reached.

And back then we knew how to handle death. It was as common as life. We asked the gods to deal with it so that we could get on with wrestling sabre-tooth tigers, renovating our caves and driving away those irritating Neanderthals.

But now our gods are distant, non-existent or writing their names in waves. We have to deal with death on our own.

And because death is less common, it is so much more difficult.

We turn to words. Words are reassuring. Words have meaning. Words are a way of connecting the dead with those of us they have left behind.

Comic writers are no good at such words. Serious writers are not much better. And so we seek out the poets.

Poets are good at death. There is an orderliness in their metered lines and rhyming couplets that is reassuring and makes us think of the relentless cycles of nature that, ultimately, all of our lives are part of.

When someone dies young I think of Thomas Gray in a country churchyard, leaning on a tombstone, penning his immortal words as dusk settles and the drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

But Grey's elegy is too long and no longer contemporary. His peaceful evening in the English countryside would, today, be shattered by airliners queuing up to get into Heathrow and the low menacing rumble of the M4.

Philip Larkin, a librarian who couldn't write a poem without bringing death into it, is much a better bet:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-

Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back

A huge and birdless silence. In her wake

No waters breed or break.

But Larkin isn't the kind of bloke you would ask to speak at your own funeral, unless you wanted everyone to leave more depressed than when they arrived.

No. Funeral poems should be soothing, or even uplifting. It helps if they have appeared on film.

W.H. Auden has been popular since that fellow in Four Weddings and a Funeral lamented the death of his overweight and kilted lover:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

But now that I read Auden's poem through to the end, it is not as uplifting as I thought it was, so I will leave it there.

I much prefer Mary Frye:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glint on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

And, of course, there is Shakespeare, who did life, death, and pretty much everything better than anyone else:

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth from the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

But when you are a writer and you know the person who has died, someone else's words are imposters on your page.

I can't do poetry. I am no Jam Hipkins. I can only write these last few awkward and inadequate words, but they are heartfelt and they will have to do.

So long James. It was good to know you.