Hearing her voice I pause at the crack in the slightly ajar door and peep in. She sits cross legged on the bed, face hidden from view behind long blonde sheets of hair. But if you want to hide the tears on your face you shouldn't sing. Or play the guitar quite so tentatively.

"Oh my star, what have you gone and done?"

That's not the kind of song a nineteen year old girl should ever have to dredge up from her soul and scrawl onto a piece of paper. Or to which a father should ever have to witness his daughter give birth.

Later I take my son to the service. He is just sixteen and I wonder if the moment might strike a chord. Maybe help him change his mind about some choices he is in the process of making. We stand together bleakly at the back of the church trying to sense the rhythms of each other's breathing; each treasuring the other's company; each bemused at how the bits of being that make up life could fall apart so easily.

Somehow when they bring the coffin in I am able to look at it squarely. Able to notice that I know almost all of the faces lined up in threes along its walnut sides. Am ambushed by the sharpness of the memories that seemed to dance in front of my vision as the family walk past me. Surely it's meant to be much more soft focused than that.

Eyeballing the crowds I realise that I can place almost every individual. Know almost all their names. Many for a long, long time. Then my legs almost buckle. I begin to feel sick. Graham hasn't turned up. How did Bruce Cockburn put it? "I'm scanning these crowds for one glimpse of your face." I am. And he isn't here.

Graham and I were at school together. Lived about half a mile apart up a country lane where we used to trudge cool-slung-canvas bags on our shoulder, Woodbine singles burning half hidden in cupped hands, conversation minimal as befits two strong silent embryonic males. I was never sure back then if I liked him; quite uncertain if he liked me. We were never best friends.

At University he, married now and struggling to support an abandoned mother and two younger brothers, turned up at my door to sell me life insurance. I didn't need it, but bought it anyway. Owning life insurance made me feel older. Relevant. Nothing like the penniless Philosophy student that I actually was. Owning life insurance was a rite of passage. Like buying a suit and tie.

Sometime in the late seventies we met up again and our families became close. There's a lot of interaction that isn't relevant here. And somehow the evaluation of all that went on in the seven years of our adult relationship seems out of place in this memorial moment. Churlish. The thought patterns of a smaller man. So the loose ends remain untied. And the questions remain unanswered.

I try to focus on the good things. You have to do that at times like this. When the temptation to give up and let yourself drown in anger or despair dwarfs your normal Monday-to-Sunday-focus-on-the-practicalities perspective. Focus on the good things. We all have some of those. Dig for them Ian. Drag them screaming to the surface.

The body in the coffin is not yet twenty years old. He and my daughter are friends. Sorry, were friends. It's so hard to think of nineteen in the past tense. Not just vague friends. Close friends. There's a crowd of them grew up together; toddler, boy and almost man. He was in our house earlier this year.

"Oh my god, what have we become?"

She writes good songs, my daughter. Played in the Baggot when she was only sixteen. Christy Moore played there. And the Frames. And a few more besides. Though I've never seen her weep her way through one before.

I've never seen my son so red eyed. He's standing in that uncomfortable way that sixteen year old lads do - reaching out for cool, but not quite making it. He doesn't talk a lot. Ever. But I can tell that he's in pain. The guy in the coffin was a friend of his too. Like I say there was a gang of them. He (my son) is experimenting with the same stuff that this guy did. The dead guy. The one in the coffin. I know this. I don't have to be told.

Being a father is difficult sometimes. It's that mixture of caring deeply but not getting in their face. And what you don't realise, or what no-one ever tells you, is that whilst you have only one way of doing it (a bit like only having one management style) how you do it isn't going to work for all your kids in the same way. That YOU won't work for all of your kids in the same way. What connects with one threatens another. What makes one feel secure alienates two. And so the story goes. But I guess you have to stick at it. Have to be there. Help pick all of us up when we all fall down.

The child in the coffin, hell let's stop pussy footing around. The body. The corpse. The stiff. He lost his way big time. Maybe he never found it in the first place. A lovely guy though. All the kids used to call him "The Master". No, it wasn't an S&M thing; it was just that he always knew what to do, what to get and where to get it. Or at least, that was his disguise. The face that he showed to the world.

The things we have to do to cover up our pain.

Anyway, he's been going downhill since his father walked out. Lives in America now, his dad. Big shot business man, showcasing a latest model blonde with all the bells and whistles. The wife and four kids in Belfast must have been holding him back. It's hard being a first born when your dad runs away.

No-one's sure when he first hit the drugs. Though the minister's making some kind of reference to it in the sermon. I glance at my son to see if he's taking it in. But this is not a time to score points. Even the best intentioned. Anyway the kid in the coffin seems to have become quite a user.

Curiosity killed the cat apparently, but that hasn't stopped the rumours. The things this boy's meant to have done! What he actually did do was mug an old lady on a Friday night and steal her handbag. He did it out of habit. Though something in him was burned up by the shame. And here is where you'll need to excuse me because my heart won't let me punctuate his pain or his mother's grief or the sense of anger in my daughter and the hole that was punched in the souls of his brothers and sister when he stood on the chair in his cell and tied his shoelace round his neck and jumped into darkness and brought himself in this wooden box to this weeping congregation and on to the dirt and the space in the ground where he's going to lie for the rest of forever...

"Oh my star, what have you gone and done?"

The music dies away. The bearers pick up the coffin. The sounds of mourning are a lost, torn keening. You should have been here Graham. Should have been participating. Watching silently. Weeping with the rest of us. Maybe storming heaven to get answers.

He was your son god dammit.