There is something I often feel—but rarely hear said—about secular funerals: they can be visually thin.
Not emotionally. Not intellectually. But visually.
As a photographer, I notice it immediately. A Catholic funeral mass, for instance, carries with it two thousand years of accumulated gesture and image: the slow swing of incense, the priest in violet vestments circling the coffin, the choreography of standing, sitting, kneeling. These actions hold the eye. They give grief a form. They create moments you can see, and therefore, remember.
Secular funerals, by contrast, are still inventing themselves. They are often held in neutral or uninspiring spaces. The rituals—if they exist—are light, improvised, or absent altogether. And so the visual language of mourning can feel incomplete, as though something important has not yet been written.
I find myself searching for gestures. For customs. For anything that might anchor the experience in something visible and shared.
Recently, I photographed the funeral of the drag queen Maxi Shield. During the service, one mourner caught my attention—not through movement, but through presence. Coco Jumbo sat quietly at the back of the room, but she had transformed herself. It was not casual, not incidental. It was deliberate.
Afterward, I asked her about it.
She told me she had spent over three hours getting ready.
“Maxi has been in my life for 16 years,” she said. “She gave me my first job… we worked together, travelled together… There was no way I wasn’t coming to her Big Finale in drag. She would have loved it.”
That phrase stayed with me: her Big Finale.
What Coco did was not simply dressing up. It was an act of preparation. A private ritual before a public farewell. Time spent remembering, assembling, honouring. The care was the tribute.
And it made me wonder whether this is what secular funerals are missing—not just ceremony within the service, but ceremony before it.
We have inherited the habit of putting on a black tie almost absentmindedly, as if mourning could be done on the way out the door. But what if we asked more of ourselves? What if attending a funeral required time, intention, even a kind of creative effort?
Not performance for its own sake, but preparation as remembrance.
What would that look like?
Perhaps it is clothing chosen with meaning rather than convention. Or carrying something small that connects you to the person—a photograph, a scent, a piece of music you listened to while getting ready. Perhaps it is setting aside an hour beforehand simply to sit with memories, to write something, to gather your thoughts before entering the shared space of grief.
These acts would not need to be prescribed. In fact, their power may lie in being personal, even idiosyncratic. But over time, they might accumulate into something like a secular language of mourning—one built not from doctrine, but from care.
Coco Jumbo’s preparation felt, to me, like a glimpse of that possibility.
Not a replacement for ritual, but a beginning.