In the Midst of Life (22 page)

In being kept away, they were denied seeing the true mystery and nobility of death, which any child can understand. They were not allowed to see their grandmother’s slow decline, nor see her lying quiet and still, nor feel the aura of calm and peace, in fact, holiness, that surrounds the newly dead. They were left to invent their own frightening stories.

And when they returned home, Granny would be gone, with no last days in which to tell her they loved her, no chance to say goodbye, no time to adjust, no funeral –just gone.

David Hackett, consultant cardiologist, is the clinical editor of this book. His wife, Penny, is a nurse and the family is Irish. I was sitting one fine spring morning in their big kitchen with its wide windows overlooking the gently rolling fields and woods of Hertfordshire, talking about this book. It was half term and the children were home from school.

He said, ‘When my mother-in-law died in 2005, in Ireland, she was laid out in the front room, which was the custom. Family and neighbours came in to pay their respects and to say goodbye. My children came, too, to see and to touch their grandmother. I don’t think it upset them.’

I turned to the two children. ‘Did you find it scary, seeing your dead grandmother?’

The boy, aged about thirteen, gave me one of those teenage looks that suggests, ‘Here’s another silly grown-up asking silly questions!’ The girl, two years older, spoke: ‘Well, no … no, not really … just …’ She shrugged, then after a moment’s thought: ‘Just sort of ordinary. She looked … well… sort of asleep. Sort of … peaceful, like.’

She looked towards her brother and he nodded, ‘Hmm, yeah,’ and carried on chewing his toast – I like a man of few words!
Obviously neither of them had been upset, much less traumatised, as some people might predict.

I was having lunch with an old friend, Mark. We were talking about my forthcoming book and he suddenly said:

‘My mother died in 1950 and we children were never told.’

They learned, many years later, that their mother, Julia, had developed phlebitis, apparently after the birth of her fourth baby. A clot had dislodged itself, travelled in the bloodstream, and blocked a pulmonary artery, and this had killed her.

Mark was nine at the time. His brother Robert was six and their sister Marian was four and a half. There was also a baby called Fiona, who was about a year old. They are now in their sixties and I have spoken to them all recently.

Both men told me that they could remember an ambulance coming to the house and taking their mother away. Some time afterwards (they cannot remember how long) family friends took the two boys on holiday, to the seaside. It was during this period, they have since concluded, that their mother died and the funeral must have taken place. At the end of the holiday their father joined them, and took them home to a house with no mummy.

Mark said, ‘It was very quiet, very bleak, and we didn’t understand why.’

Robert said, ‘There was a sort of black hole that we couldn’t talk about. No one said we were not allowed to, but you know how children pick up messages. We just knew that it was something the grown-ups wouldn’t approve of us talking about.’

I said, ‘Didn’t you ask questions?’

They had received vague, woolly answers, such as ‘Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’ Later, one of the boys asked where Marian was, and was told that she had gone to stay with Grandma.

Marian tells me she remembers it very clearly as a time of great unhappiness. Her grandmother was rather a remote figure. She says, ‘I was lonely, bewildered, wondering all the time why I was there and not at home. Daddy came to see me from time to time, and then he went away again. But he never brought mummy, and
I didn’t know why. I thought perhaps I had been naughty and she didn’t want to see me.’

After about six months or more her father came and took her home. Apparently she ran around the house looking in every room, calling out, ‘Where’s Mummy? Where is she?’ Her father said, ‘Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’ She responded, ‘Well, where’s Heaven? How did she get there? Did you take her? Why don’t you go and get her back?’

Eventually, she became aware, as her brothers had earlier, that it was something you just didn’t ask questions about.

Childhood grief is beyond my competence to discuss, but other writers have spoken about the loss of a mother being devastating to development. Fears and fantasies, depression, endless searching, low self-esteem, low achievement in school, a solitary child who cannot form friendships – these and many more psychological disturbances have all been discussed. Feelings of guilt and self-reproach also come into it.

Mark said to me, ‘I felt that it was all my fault, and I couldn’t admit it to Robert and Marian. You see, I was the eldest, and I was a “naughty boy”. I was always doing something that “upset” my mother. And I thought I must have done something really bad, and she had got so upset that she had gone away and wouldn’t come back, and so I was to blame.’

Marian said, ‘While I was with Granny I thought I was being punished for something I had done wrong.’ At the time she was only four years old.

‘The death of a mother is devastating for any child,’ added Robert, ‘but I am sure that the silence made it ten times worse for us.’

But I was forgetting; Julia left four children, not just three. What had happened to baby Fiona, from whom the older three were separated? She had been looked after by an aunt and uncle, and eventually they adopted her into their family.

Fiona told me that she was too young to remember the time of Julia’s death, and grew up in her adoptive family thinking that Mark, Marian and Robert were her cousins. Fiona understood this
was considered to be the best solution, as she was so young. She did remember being told the story of Julia who had died, but did not relate it to herself.

‘So when did you find out?’ I asked.

‘When I was twenty-one and needed access to a full birth certificate for a visa. For years, I felt constrained about discussing the past; it is only since my parents have died that I have felt free to talk about it.’

During that memorable lunch with Mark, he said, ‘I can see now that I have been searching for something all my life and never found it.’ The moment was deeply sad, and I did not know what to say.

The social taboo surrounding death is deep-seated, and it is most unhealthy. How has it developed? How has it sneaked up on us? The Victorians and Edwardians used to wallow in their death scenes and funerals. Why has the pendulum swung so far the other way, so that a death is neither seen nor mentioned?

I have a theory (which deserves further research) that it started after the First World War (1914—1918) when eight and a half million young men worldwide died in battle, when twenty-one million were maimed or mutilated and when upwards of forty million died in the flu epidemic of 1918. And the carnage didn’t end there. The bloodiest century in history killed up to half a billion men, women and children. Everyone was so sickened by death and loss and grieving that perhaps they just couldn’t take any more. So they turned their backs, and thus started the climate of denial that inhibits us to this day.

Man was made for Joy & Woe;

And when this we rightly know

Thro’ the world we safely go.

Joy & Woe are woven fine,

A Clothing for the Soul divine;

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

— William Blake,
Auguries of Innocence

Cycling in south-west Ireland has been one of the loveliest experiences of my later years. The further south and the further west you go, the more remote it becomes. Hills and sky and clouds blend into the blue-grey distance. Gullies, streams and rivulets meander down to the ever-present sea. Lochs, still and grey as the granite of the hills, lie secretive and cold as ice. Cycling – meandering, really – on unmapped roads you pass through tiny villages of about fifty houses, hamlets each containing no more than four or five buildings, or remote dwellings set into a hillside, almost indistinguishable from the hill.

I recall once, passing a church. It was quite small, and in no way beautiful, but the church in its setting, with the graveyard all around it, and the hills, multi-coloured in the changing light, was so arresting that I had to stop, just to sit and gaze.

As I looked, the door of the church opened and a priest, wearing full Roman Catholic vestments, emerged. He made his way solemnly down a gravel path to the graveyard. He was followed by an acolyte, bearing the cross; followed by eight small boys in white cassocks; followed by two larger boys holding candles; followed by another acolyte, swinging his censer from side to side; followed by yet another acolyte, carrying the book of service; followed by a coffin, carried by eight men wearing black; followed by an elderly woman in darkest black, and veiled; followed by eight or ten younger men and women, all in black, with their children carrying flowers; followed by about a hundred men, women and children in everyday clothes, most of them carrying flowers.

The procession made its way down the path to a newly dug grave, covered by three trestle boards upon which the coffin was placed. The people gathered around the grave – the immediate family stood closest to the priest and his acolytes, the others
scattered further away. The priest read the office of burial, responses were made, a hymn was sung, and the trestle boards were removed. As the coffin was lowered into the earth, the priest sprinkled holy water on it, and many people threw in flowers. Two men with shovels came forward and heaved the soil on to the coffin. Everyone stood silently, and, when the job was done, they laid their wreaths on the new grave. People gathered around the widow and her family, and the whole entourage made its way towards the church hall. At which point, I slipped away.

You’ve got to hand it to the Catholics – they sure know how to do a funeral!

But what do
we
get in this age of fast foods, faster living and instant entertainment? Twenty minutes in the aseptic atmosphere of a crematorium, piped music, electronically moved doors and curtains, a speech prepared by a stranger, ever present morticians, discreetly keeping things ticking over and on time. When the coffin slides out of sight, they ensure that the mourners are quickly led away, orderly, neatly, to make room for the next funeral party which is waiting outside. This is but a mockery of a funeral, as far as I am concerned. And who loses out? Not the dead; it is of no interest to them. But it is important for those who are left behind – those who grieve. They are the ones for whom the banishment of ritual can be so damaging.

Human beings need ritual; we need sacraments and symbols and ceremonies. We need the bell that tolls a solemn note, and a prescribed formality fitting for the occasion. We need somewhere to lay the flowers or tokens of remembrance. It does not have to be a burial; a cremation is just as good – better, in some ways. It is the solemn ritual before and after that is so important.

Nothing is more shattering than the death of a child, and often the parents never get over it. Early in 2008 I was shopping in our local high street when I suddenly became aware that everyone was looking behind me. I turned around and saw the approach of two magnificent white horses, drawing a carriage. Their dressage was white, and beautiful white and silver plumes adorned their heads.
The coachman wore silver grey. As the white and silver carriage drew closer, then passed us, we saw that it was not a carriage, but a beautiful glass bier, upon which lay a tiny white coffin about three feet long adorned with white lilies. The bier was followed by four funeral cars with blackened windows. The contrast was startling – shining white for the dead child and blackest black for the parents and those who mourned. The greater the grief, the greater the need for ritual.

Everyone in the street stood quite still whilst the cortège slowly passed on its way to the church at the end of the road. The parents must have seen (though we could not see them) the people standing quietly in the street, and I hope that the respect we showed was of some comfort to them. I looked around the crowd and was impressed by the solemnity on all the faces. That experience was what I would call community ritual, something I had not seen for years.

Community ritual has largely been stripped away, and I doubt if the majority of young people would know what I am talking about. Social life used to stop for a funeral, as everybody paused in their daily affairs out of respect for the dead.

I remember well the death of my grandmother, when I was about twelve. She had a heart attack at home and died in her husband’s arms. Her body was laid out by the local handywoman, who was also the local midwife, and placed in an open coffin in the main room for friends and neighbours to come in and pay their respects. This was common practice. It may seem gruesome now, but in those days practically everyone felt it was right and fitting to go to the house with the purpose of seeing the body. They would stand quietly beside the open coffin, offer some suitable words of condolence to the bereaved, and perhaps reflect for a few minutes on life and death and their own mortality (nothing concentrates the mind so powerfully as the sight of a dead body). This is still practised on state occasions and on the death of royalty. It is a practice that is also routine in the Orthodox Church.