I had a crappy year with three funerals.
You can either do this or you can’t, and as mentioned by some posters it’s not whether or not you’re a ‘public speaker’
That helps, but you are trapped in emotions, that could make it impossible or perfection.
The first was my best friend, after I had to break into her flat to find her
She had fully planned her funeral, and had chosen her reading from the novel
of Aliens.
It was after I gave that reading that I was asked to do the others
The second was my gran. I effectively used her funeral as a weeks holiday getting back to the island I was born on and to be away from the world.
I was a pall bearer and gave a traditional reading.
It was basically being sat next to my mad uncle having him joke & comment about everyone coming to see her off that got me through.
(I was more ‘happy’ that she had a good life and lived it her way, but it was hard to do)
The final that year was my dads, I would not have coped and refused to speak. I spent my time their propping up my mother
But for the first of them, having found her and been emotionally ripped apart to be a zombie for weeks I was determined to fulfill her wishes and get the talk done well.
My practical preparation was to take the text and print it in the largest text I could fit on A5 and laminate it, then repeatedly read it out to myself
On the day my preparation was being smothered by our friends in turn and not being left alone.
In the minutes before I was to step up I blanked the world out, composing myself.
Then stepping up, I looked around the room and down to my paper, gripping the lecturn for dear life I took a deep breath and looked up again opening with the first line “Why?”, and stopped.
I had to stop and recompose throughout, but that was taken as part of the piece rather than me breaking up inside.
Walking back and sitting down allowed me to to release having achieved the only thing I needed to get through