In sympathy

Recently I found myself in the glum position of having to buy an 'In sympathy' card to send to a friend – a friend from university who I don't see so much these days, yet when I do, our relationship is immediately and reassuringly as it ever was. One of those friends.

I am big on trivial outrage – one day I'm hoping that will develop into proper grown-up indignance about Really Important Things that I can expand upon at dinner parties – and one enduring outlet for my contempt is the ugliness of mainstream greetings cards. Yes, of course, there are beautiful, stylish, clever, handprinted-by-artists-in-their-Hackney-studios ones out there if you look hard enough and want to pay £4.95, but on the average high street, in the average stationer nestling between Caffe Nero and Dorothy Perkins, you are assailed by only the ugly, the twee and the retch-inducing. Who buys them all? Someone, anyone, tell me who? It can only be that same mysterious, hidden number who buy the 'gift ideas' stacked by the tills in John Lewis and Borders before Christmas, those poor potential presents sitting there like plain girls in nightclubs, waiting for desperation o'clock to tick-tick-tick around.

One of the ways in which I am turning into my mum is that these days I buy good greetings cards whenever I see them. They live in a drawer as a loose and peaceful Quality Cards Collective, alongside printer paper and bits of Useful Ribbon, until they are called to action. I have not yet purchased a special box to keep the good cards in, like my friend Ms B, but no doubt that day will come.

'In sympathy' cards are, appropriately, the most depressing examples of Card Crime. Of course, if you are the person receiving one of these cards, what it actually looks like is so very much the least of your worries (along with when you last ate a proper meal and what was it like to sleep right through the night) that maybe that's irrelevent. But that doesn't mean we should fob these vulnerable people off with the dregs of card design, like the government planning to surrender the poorest and weakest 10 per cent of children to the aliens in Torchwood: Children Of The Earth, purely because no one was likely to miss them.

In the popular high-street stationer (which seemed such a Palace of Promise when I was little and I would take my Christmas tokens into the Cambridge branch with tiny, trembling hands, and now is home to three-for-two paperback offers and family bags of Wine Gums) where I was forced to buy my card, the choice pretty much ranged from this:

To this:

I would never, ever, ever, I-really-can't-say-ever-enough-times-here buy a birthday or Christmas card from the same school of design as this. Yet this was entirely typical of the sympathy cards on offer. To paraphrase Morrissey, when he was still with the Smiths, they say nothing to me about my life.

But somehow the whole language of consolation seems foreign. What does 'passed away' even mean? Do the phrases 'at this sad time' or 'offer my condolences' skip naturally off your tongue? Not so much. Yet if you are sending a sympathy card, you feel such a responsibility not to make someone who is already feeling desperately upset feel any more desperately upset (it really is the least you can do, etc etc) that you grope around for the safe choices that everyone else uses. If you are the recipient, it is extremely curious to find that everyone around you is speaking in bizarre Tongues Of Grief (those who are not too scared of upsetting you to speak at all, that is). Although admittedly, you are in such a state of high confusion already that this new development is only a subtle shade darker on the Confusion colour card.

So at this sad time (you see!), swathes of vocabulary find themselves newly deployed, words that do not intersect with any other part of the Venn diagram entitled 'Stuff You Normally Say'. Yet funnily enough, no greetings cards exist which say 'I'm really sorry about this totally shitty thing that has happened to you' or 'When I think about the things you are having to deal with at the moment, I want to be sick', which may be more along the lines of what you actually mean.

In these situations, I would normally choose a blank card with some vaguely soothing flora on the front, and a large white space inside where I would agonisingly scratch out my awkward words of support, but even the blank cards presented a harrowing choice. In the end, I went for a more versatile 'Thinking of you' design, in which a cartoon crocodile hurried somewhere carrying a cup of tea.

I am assuming it was tea. Everyone drinks tea when they're upset, right?

Maybe not my finest hour.

I don't even think it was the right 'Thinking of you'. It seemed more to be saying 'I'm thinking of you now and again, like when I see someone else who is also in a plaster cast, or who also has glandular fever, or a woman crying in a restaurant surrounded by four girlfriends nodding sympathetically, with the one nearest her rubbing her upper back and saying that there's someone better for her out there.' A kind of 'Oh, chin up' thinking of you.

I'm not sure that it exactly said 'Thinking of you while I spend 15 whole minutes in front of the cards in WH Smith totally paralysed by remembering the kind of things you might be experiencing.' But it was the most like something I would normally say, or buy, on any other day of the week. Some kind of normality. There is not much of that around when someone you love has died.

It's not just cards, though. I don't know if this is an OK thing to say or not, but the whole aesthetic of commiseration and funerals seems the only area of our lives that has not been awarded some kind of style makeover in recent times. Given the revolution in interior design that has happened over the last 20 years or so, coffins have yet to embrace the same clean lines and tasteful Farrow & Ball-style paint colours on such a sweeping scale. Gloss surfaces and brass handles persist. In death, people are surely being housed in fabrics and finishes they would never have had in their dwellings when alive, but I'm not sure there are many alternatives.

Perhaps this is because, fortunately, we don't have to make these choices very often. And when we do, we are in a state of shock and disconnection. And when they're over, we don't want to dwell on them. We don't look back at pictures of the day. Unless we're really weird.

Perhaps I will open up some kind of supremely tasteful, forward-thinking funeral director's business, with a sideline in stationery. I'm sure they do exist already, but I'm not sure where. I could probably only do the front of house – I wouldn't be too good in the back where the (non-)action happens.

In the week after my dad died, I decided I might like to retrain as a registrar. The one we saw when we registered his death was so businesslike and buttoned up, and her office so chilly and charmless. I understand she didn't want to reduce us to sobbing wrecks with her overwhelming compassion and kindness, but I wouldn't have minded feeling a bit less like I was getting my road tax application stamped in the post office or signing on.

That ambition only lasted a few weeks. I doubt this one will be any different.