Back to the family

So there I am sitting in the second pew from the front, all done up in a suit and a black tie because it is a funeral, and my cousin Lady Something is just in front to my left, and I am in a state of severe nervousness because though I have no truck with the English aristocracy or the Anglican God I am not often in the presence of either and the sheer unfamiliarity, the almost certainty that either the earthly representatives of the Anglican God or an aristocratic relation will say something or do something that I do not understand and I will just stare with my mouth open and then reply, not in a witty and urbane way which might go slightly over their heads as I would wish, but with something unambiguously stupid; when the younger cousin who is directly in front of me turns and hands me what looks like a nasal inhaler. I look at it. She looks at me.
I stare fixedly for some time at the little brown glass, fluted bottle. It has a rubber bulb on top, connected within no doubt to a glass tube which slides up the nostril before the intra-pharyngal squirt. Nothing useful comes to mind. I turn to my helpmeet on my right, but apparently she has decided to sit this one out and is studying the pipework of the organ. I turn back. Finally I brandish the bottle and say, “What is it?”
The cousin mutters a proprietary brand name which I don’t catch.
“And what’s it for?” I ask - not, as retrospectively it will appear, out of prurient curiosity, but because it might give me some hint as to what I’m meant to do with this, even between cousins, fairly intimate bit of gear.
She sighs heavily - it’s their father, a lovely gentle man, whose life, now over, we have come to celebrate, in fact that’s him under the flowers up by the altar.
“It’s supposed to calm you down,” she breathes.
I’m even further at a loss. Is my agitation that obvious to someone sitting with their back to me?
Suddenly, saving inspiration. “Why don’t you take some?” I suggest.
She seems pleased that the contempt which up to now was intuitive has met with the clearest empirical justification.
“I would," she says, " if I could get the sodding top off.”