Funerals are no one’s favorite place, but as a journalist I get to go to more than most.

They can be quite revealing of a situation, at multiple levels, telling you not just about the victim, but the society at large, and this one -- the burial of a young man killed in last week’s clashes between pro- and anti- government protestors at Beirut’s Arab University -- was going to be no different.

On this day, as we drove out of the center of Beirut, the roads were quiet, people still cautious after the blaze of violence that killed four and wounded more than 150 people at the University.

Our route took us along the old airport highway, once bordered by a beautiful beach, now a dense forest of semi-legal apartments, houses, stores and auto workshops that sprang up when Shias from southern Lebanon poured into the capital, after the Israeli invasion in 1982.

A sprawling shantytown capable of keeping secrets: It’s widely believed that American, British, French and other western hostages passed, without notice or remark, through the labyrinthine back streets and alleyways of this urban jungle.

That wasn’t on my mind, however, as we pulled up yards away from what used to be the golden sands. My first impression was not of poverty, rather more of general abandonment. This was a world apart from the wealthy mansions on the mountains a few miles away, looking down – in every sense of the words – on this and other neighborhoods like it.

Within seconds of stepping from our vehicle, we were accosted by a man on scooter with a two-way radio. Who were we, what were we doing, he asked and we told him, CNN, here to cover the funeral. He politely asked us to wait and returned a few moments later with two burly men. Hezbollah security. They were controlling the funeral and we needed their permission to film. It was granted in an instant. It’s not always that easy. I later found out our chaperones were told we were “untouchable”-- that is, not matter how angry mourners got, we were not to be hassled. And they could not have been more diligent, keeping us ahead of the crowd, and those times when we slipped back, maneuvering us with ease through the tight packed arms and elbows in to the best position to shoot.

Hezbollah’s leadership had clearly decided it was in their interests to let journalists see the pain and suffering in their community. They had also quite clearly decided not to let us film the guns fired at the graveside. I couldn’t see them, but I could sure hear them and see the smoke rise over the gathered heads.

Hezbollah has a shrewd and tightly- controlled media operation, enough to put some
corporations and even governments we deal with to shame.

But if our access was managed, the emotions of the dead man’s family were not. His wife, pregnant with his unborn child, called for revenge. His brother, who had been carried by two men through the length of the wake collapsed, a shambles, no more a man, slumped legs dangling in to the freshly dug hole. He had to be taken away.

But this wasn’t the emotional trigger I had feared. What brought tears to the eyes of even the most embittered of onlookers was the dead man’s daughter. She could barely have been three. She came with her brother, perhaps all of five.

Her mother, sitting by the grave flailed about, wailing, the crowd echoed to get the children away. They stood what felt like an eternity looking at they knew not what. The hole, the crowd, their mother, the men holding them. I searched the girl’s eyes for a glimmer of understanding.

Only raw, red swelling, a mirror of her mother. Next to me, tears ran down a translator's face. In that instant shone every reason not to go to war.

As we moved away, out of the human press surrounding the grave, we came to a different part of the crowd. Their murmuring washed over me like a gentle wave and the intensity of the isolated graveside solitude receded.

It was then I realized that while most of the faces at the graveside were young, the faces of those here in this group were older. They’d seen it all before. Buried generations of brothers, fathers, sons and cousins before. Been through a civil war, knew what could come. It was the young who were at the grave side, it was the young who were lamenting the dead, it was the young simmering in the hatred of the other side that accompanies loss in this way.

If what is happening in Lebanon heralds the start of a wider conflict to come, as many fear, then a fresh cycle of it was forged here in this cemetery.

As large as several football fields, it is already a final accounting for many who’d left their homes in the south during the last civil war. As we exited the graveyard and turned up a tiny alley, we passed the victim’s brother, sitting on a green plastic chair outside a store, his feet resting on another chair.

Some color had returned to his face. As we walked on, I thought about how elsewhere in Lebanon that day, other young men were being buried, young men killed in the university clashes. More brothers, wives, mothers -- more children-- bereaved and bereft and not just where Hezbollah could open the door and put them on display, but from other traditions too.

Everyone loses. Hard not to conclude the seeds of the next conflict are being sown.