Most people cannot get to most funerals. Work, distance, cost, health, a border, four days' notice. It is not a failure of feeling, and the guilt attached to it is out of proportion to the fact.
What matters is doing something deliberate instead of letting the week pass.
Say you cannot come, plainly
Do not go quiet, and do not over-explain. A family reading a long justification has to manage your feelings on the worst day of theirs.
I'm so sorry — I can't get back for Thursday, and I hate that. I'll be thinking about all of you.
What to write to the family when you cannot come
Three messages, depending on when you are writing. Each is a few lines long and none of them expects a reply.
As soon as you know the date, to tell them without explaining yourself:
I've just heard about Frank, and I can't be there on Tuesday. I'm thinking of you and your mother. I'll ring you at the weekend, and I'll come and see you both as soon as I can.
On the day, at the time of the service:
It's half two, and I'm thinking of all of you right now. I couldn't be there, but I'm not anywhere else today.
When you only hear after the funeral — the most common case, and the one where people write least:
I've only just heard, and I'm sorry I missed the service. I'm not going to pretend I have the right words. Mostly I wanted you to know I'm here, six months from now as much as today.
These are starting points, not scripts. The rest of what to write in a sympathy card applies here too, beginning with the simplest rule: use their name.
Send something to be read on the day
This is the single most effective thing available to you, and hardly anyone does it.
Write a paragraph about the person — an actual memory, not condolences — and ask whoever is organizing the service whether someone could read it, or include it in the service sheet.
If there's a moment for it, I'd love someone to read this. If not, please keep it for yourselves.
Your words are in the room. It is not the same as being there, and it is much closer than a card.
Ask whether it is being streamed
Many funerals now are, and many families forget to say. Crematoria and churches increasingly offer a link. It costs nothing to ask.
If you do watch, tell the family afterwards that you did, and mention something specific from it. Otherwise they have no idea you were present.
Mark it where you are
At the same hour, do something. Leave the desk. Light a candle. Go to the nearest water. Play the song. Sit with a photograph.
This sounds sentimental and is mostly practical: the hour of the funeral is hard wherever you are, and having somewhere to put it helps.
Do the thing nobody else will do
The funeral is crowded. Week six is not, and week six is worse.
- Send something in a month, when the cards have stopped.
- Call on the anniversary.
- Visit when you can, even a year later, and ask to go to the grave.
- Send a photograph they do not have. Families run out of new pictures of someone very quickly, and a photograph nobody in the family has seen is the most extraordinary gift available.
Absence at the funeral is forgiven quickly. Presence six months later is remembered permanently.
If the family is spread out
Where most of the family is far away — which is now the usual case rather than the exception — the practical problem is that everyone holds a fragment and nobody holds the whole.
One shared place that any of them can open and add to solves a surprising amount of it: the cousin who could not travel adds the photograph, the sibling who spoke adds the eulogy, and the people who were in the room and the people who were not end up with the same thing.
If there is no grave to visit later, remembering someone with no grave, and the date that comes back each year is death anniversary: what to say. See the main guide.
