MournMate is a new online market-place that promises to connect bereaved families and funeral homes with professional mourners in the US. It was advertising for its first ‘500 Founding Members’ when I looked, and, curious to know what it was all about, I signed up.

The qualifications and requirements were surprisingly broad – the site was looking for actors, musicians, public speakers, eulogy writers, and anyone with experience of religious or cultural ceremonies. The advertised rate was $25 to $300 an hour, with an extra 50 per cent for emergency bookings. Grief, it seems, has joined the gig economy.

I have an A-level in drama, so could at least blag some acting credentials, and as a novelist I reckoned I could manage a eulogy easily enough (though I suspect the rise in AI will soon take the place of the professional eulogist). I selected my mourning styles – ‘emotional’, ‘quiet presence’, ‘supportive’, ‘traditional’ – and discovered that I could offer anything from ‘Silent Support’, essentially sitting there and looking suitably sombre, to the grander position of ‘Lead Mourner’, involving spoken tributes and structured remembrance. There were add-ons too: I could get around $200 for that eulogy, with an extra $150 for delivering it.

I could get $200 for writing a eulogy and $150 for delivering it… Grief, it seems, has joined the gig economy

It all sounds terribly modern and slightly grotesque at first glance. However, I had in fact stumbled into one of the oldest professions going. Professional mourners are, broadly speaking, strangers paid to attend people’s funerals. We see them in ancient Egypt and Rome, where conspicuous grief could become a demonstration of the dead person’s status. The more people the family could pay to come and mourn, the better.

And paid mourners still ply their trade from China to Ghana and western Kenya, where strangers can be hired not merely to fill a pew but to wail, sing dirges, and give public expression to a family’s grief. Urbanisation and the decline of extended family networks has in many cases made it necessary to bolster mourners’ ranks somewhat in rapidly industrialising societies.

Closer to home, we have keening, the historical ritual lament for the dead once practised across Ireland and Scotland. Traditionally, a keening woman would sit at the wake, with the body, and would begin her lament afresh whenever a new mourner entered the room. And it wasn’t simply screaming on cue. There would be something akin to a eulogy before the wailing began, and the woman performing it would have to tap into her own experiences of grief, making it quite an arduous, painful experience for her.

There is an important distinction here. The mourner wasn’t necessarily pretending to have loved the deceased. She was, instead, providing a language and a vehicle for every-body around her who did.

The keener occupied a peculiar social position too. They could speak freely at wakes in a way they couldn’t elsewhere. Their practice is pre-Christian, in that it enjoys an older history. However, it was fully embraced by many Christian communities. In large Catholic parishes in rural Ireland, where a priest would struggle to perform every communal function surrounding death, women continued to bear a lot of the burden. I see in this a striking parallel with the midwife: indeed, sometimes the same women may have performed both roles, helping to usher a child into the world, and usher the dead out of it. Birth and death were not yet things sequestered away in hospitals and funeral homes, but communal events. These women stood at either end of life, helping everyone else across.

And, of course, the professional mourner is alive and kicking in modern Britain.

Envisage Promotions, a staffing agency, provides hired mourners across the UK. Its representative, Megan, tells me that acting ability isn’t particularly important (so unfortunately perhaps my A-level is useless after all). Rather, empathy and emotional intelligence are far more valued, she says. A good mourner needs to know when to talk, when to remain silent and, above all, how not to draw attention to themselves.

Envisage entered the business almost by accident. It was approached by a man who was estranged from his family. His father had died and he wanted to attend the funeral, but he couldn’t bear the thought of going alone, and didn’t feel comfortable asking his friends to accompany him. So he hired a small group of strangers from Envisage to go with him.

‘I think that is the part that can easily get lost when people hear the phrase rent-a-mourner,’ Megan tells me. Behind it there can be somebody dealing with bereavement who is also facing the prospect of walking into a funeral with very few people around them. ‘Sometimes having additional people there is simply about creating a supportive, respectful presence at a time when somebody feels particularly vulnerable.’

If professional mourning sounds ridiculous at first glance, it’s perhaps because we instinctively think grief ought to be authentic and spontaneous. You cannot buy sorrow for $100 an hour, surely; nor can you conjure it out of nothing. But this perhaps misunderstands what is being bought. The ancient keener gave communal expression to feelings others may have struggled to articulate. The modern professional mourner gives us something a little more prosaic: another body in the chapel, another person there to make sure that someone isn’t so alone as they go into the night.

What has struck me most, speaking to people in this peculiar little economy, is the humanity of it all. I went in expecting novelty – perhaps even something faintly macabre – but everyone I interviewed approached the business with extraordinary sensitivity. Look at it from the right angle and there is something rather heartening about the whole enterprise: strangers lending their presence, even their tears, to people at precisely the moment it is needed most.

As Megan from Envisage tells me: ‘The term professional mourner makes for a great headline… but in our experience the reality has been far less sensational. At its heart, it has been about giving somebody support on an incredibly difficult day and making sure that a person is given a respectful farewell.’