by Emily Dean
I was lying in bed talking to Rach on the morning of her funeral. It was a secret habit I’d been indulging in a lot over the fortnight since she died. I hadn’t told people about our ‘chats’ because if someone told me that, I would think they’d lost it. And besides, it all felt a bit Miss Havisham, holding on to a relationship that had ceased to exist. Actually, it was worse. At least she had the dignity of a Gothic pile to waft around in. But there were things only Rach would get – and as Jane reminded me, ‘She is still your sister. And you are still her sister.’
Sometimes I called her mobile, just to hear her voice saying ‘leave a message, byeee.’ It was a call into the void. I wanted the temporary relief of connection but I got a flood of fresh hurt when I was met with silence. And a side order of crazy to accompany my main course of loss. Later, a long time after she died, I would make one of my furtive calls to her and be hit with the message ‘this number is no longer available’, like the advice of a tough-love friend suggesting it was really time I ‘moved on’.
People had reached out endlessly, with cards, emails, gifts and texts, small gestures of compassion that acted like shots of medication. My friend James Gilbey sent a note saying ‘You need these’ nestling inside a giant box of cupcakes. The house filled up with huge bouquets, four-page letters and a card that read ‘No words – just love.’ My friends had come into their own. Jane was pragmatic and kind, Frank signed off his texts with ‘from an old man who cares about you very much.’ When I apologised to Gareth, my old radio show pal, for crying down the phone, he said simply, ‘Emily, your sister died.’ Polly was a permanent presence, my former Sunday Times colleague Tony Chambers checked in constantly and Penny and her family swept in to help with the practicalities I couldn’t face.
I chatted to my friend David about my dad’s ‘the best one has gone’ remark, which had lingered in my mind. His view of it was lighter and more rational than mine. ‘I honestly think he was just reaching for the sort of dramatic language King Lear would use – it’s just very your dad,’ David said. ‘Please don’t take it too seriously.’ I managed a laugh when he told me this, imagining Rach rolling her eyes and coming to the same conclusion.
But there were times when grief swaddled me in disconnection and I felt like someone playing at being human, unable to fully engage in everyday life. I called these periods my kitchen-floor parties, in honour of the night after Rach died. I would curl up in a ball and just cry, letting the calls and texts go to voicemail until they stopped.
I was starting to realise there is a curious honeymoon period in the initial stages of mourning when everyone treats you with the same friendly indulgence extended to the celebrity. It’s a land where turning up late, forgetting to respond to messages and having emotional outbursts is patiently tolerated. ‘You have to make the most of that time,’ I was warned, ‘because people forget quickly, they move on. But you don’t.’
I took the black dress off the hanger. It was a tiny sample size that would normally have seen me struggling to wrench my bum past its zip, but I rattled around in it today. The poster girl for the ‘bereavement weight-loss plan’!
Mum and Dad arrived to pick me up. He was in his best suit and tie, smelling of toothpaste. She had painted over her grief with blusher, and her hair bore the kink of freshly removed rollers. We made the journey through the frost-covered streets to Adam and Rach’s house where we were met with the welcome distraction of domestic noise. Giggle leapt up at us, barking wildly at the sudden influx of additional family members. My dad got on all fours to woof as he raced around and we all smiled at Giggle’s antics. He served as a handy focus puller, the thing to talk about when you didn’t want to talk about the big thing.
Mimi seemed quietly apprehensive. The other night when I was plaiting her hair I had said to her, ‘It will be Mummy’s day, when we celebrate how much we love her.’
She had written something for the order of service. My friend, Tony, designed the booklet for us. He noticed something we’d missed. ‘It looks great,’ he said over email. ‘But it’s quite formal. Might be nice to have something a bit more … Rach. That the girls can be part of, maybe?’ I replied saying, ‘Only a Scouser could get away with giving you a review of a funeral’s order of service. You are absolutely right btw xx’
So now Mimi’s note had been reprinted on the back page. It was written in lilac pen inside a red felt-tip heart with hundreds of kisses. She had included a photo of her cuddling Bertie, who was grinning from inside her inflatable swimming ring on their summer holiday last year.
Thank you for being such a great mum. You were such an amazing person. We love you and we will never ever forget you! We will miss you so much. You will always be our hero and we will always look up to you and love you! XXXXXXXX
It was beautiful.
I was clutching the print-out of my tribute to Rach, which I’d read out endlessly to myself in an attempt to crush the words into indifference. I found this surprisingly useful tip on a forum after searching ‘how to get through a funeral speech’. I decided not to take the advice from one contributor in Alabama who suggested, ‘Just get loaded, man.’
The funeral cars arrived. I caught a glimpse of Rach’s wicker casket, which was described in the undertakers’ glossy brochure as ‘caringly and passionately hand-crafted’. It was covered in a carpet of antique dusty-pink roses called Amnesia and delicate cherry blossom with cascading ivy and looked like a fairy-tale garden. ‘We want it to be pretty and almost magical – think Sleeping Beauty meets the Secret Garden – in Provence,’ was my demandingly eccentric brief to the florist.
Adam had decided to have Giggle as part of our family procession today. It felt like an inspired decision, a way of making the event less daunting for the girls, softening the day’s formality with a burst of uniqueness, just as Rach always did. It also felt symbolic of the life Rach had strived to create for herself – the full stop at the end of her journey.
The doorbell rang. Giggle rushed to greet the undertakers in their long black morning coats and tie-pins, assembled solemnly like prosperous members of the Victorian elite.
‘I’m scared, Dad,’ I whispered, as we filed silently out of the house. ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’
I glanced at the shiny cortège of cars. An elderly man was walking on the other side of the road, struggling against the cold in a thin anorak. He stopped when he saw the cars and made the sign of the cross before going on his way.
‘Perhaps,’ my dad said, resting a hand on my shoulder, ‘today is not really for us. It’s a performance, a public ritual. We will do our duty and then … return. To our own private grief.’
He had never mastered the art of writing a postcard. He hadn’t the first clue how to tell someone a pet was not coming back. And he was prone to coming out with entirely the wrong thing around a deathbed. But when I heard those words I felt grateful to have my father here today.
The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want;
He makes me down to lie,
In pastures green; He leadeth me
The quiet waters by.
The church was teeming with Rach’s friends, who hugged each other warmly. Many of them were professional couples in their thirties and forties with young families, and were trying to comprehend the idea of a life so similar to their own being extinguished overnight. There was none of the nostalgic laughter that comes with the inevitable conclusion of a long life. More a sense of incredulity.
Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale,
Yet will I fear no ill;
Until now hymns had always made me think of school assemblies, triggering memories of high-pitched vitality and covert sniggers. They’d taken on a darker hue today, with their references to God’s kingdom and final sacrifices. I didn’t look at the casket and its vast floral covering. I’d rather not acknowledge that it was Rach in there. A baby cried and her mother dashed out guiltily. It’s fine, I wanted to say, this is Rach’s day, remember. She hate
d it when people complained about babies crying. ‘What do these assholes expect you to do, pop a Xanax in their bottle?’
And in God’s house forevermore
My dwelling-place shall be.
There was the gentle shuffle of people reseating themselves. My heels echoed nosily on the stone slabs as I walked up to the brass eagle lectern, placing my speech on its outstretched wings.
‘Hi, everyone. I had the privilege of knowing Rach all my life,’ I began.
Afterwards, friends were kind about my tribute but some of them told me, ‘Your voice sounded different. Like it wasn’t you.’ They were right. It wasn’t me. I was playing the part of someone dealing stoically with grief, protected by a veil of artificial composure.
Mum had chosen a poem by Maya Angelou to be read out by her actor friend Hugh, who had driven us to intensive care that night. It was called ‘When Great Trees Fall’.
I tried to imagine what Rach would have thought of the choices we’d made to sum up her life. I kept hearing her voice when we were initially going through options. ‘Ugh, bit “quote you’d find in a crystals shop,” Em,’ I heard her say of one.
Hugh read out the Maya Angelou poem quietly and unadorned, not as a classically trained actor but simply as a friend. Just the way she would have liked.
Adam got up to deliver his tribute. I held Mimi’s hand as she watched him say his final goodbyes. He talked about punching above his weight and their married life, which had started in this church twelve years before.
I thought about her decision to leave the ephemeral bubble of Shakespeare quotes, dusty theatre programmes, overdrafts and bon viveurs, and her new world of family holidays, dog walks and insurance policies. She’d made a kind of mermaid’s choice in the end, leaving our native grotto for a life rooted on firmer land.
We’d picked a David Bowie song to close the service. Rach and I had a long-running joke about terrible songs to play at funerals. We referred to it as ‘Now That’s What I Call Funerals’, our very own dark fantasy compilation. She would email me occasionally with new contenders. ‘What’s worse? “I Believe I Can Fly” or the Titanic one?’
The song we went for today was Bowie’s ‘Everyone Says “Hi”’. It was kind of bittersweet and moving without being sentimental. I liked the simple idea of all of the people here today just wanting to say hi. It even included a reference to being missed by ‘your big fat dog’. It felt like the perfect way to say goodbye.
Chapter Nine
Christmas 2013
‘So, this will be your second Christmas without Rachael. How are you feeling about it?’ asked Sue.
‘A bit shit,’ I said. ‘But I guess nothing will be as bad as the first one.’
I was sitting in my therapist’s consulting room, though ‘consulting room’ makes it sound way too grand. There were no black leather Mies Van der Rohe couches or framed anatomical drawings of the brain. It was a sunny room in a suburban street with a comfy sofa and the sound of Ocado vans reversing outside.
My sister had been to see Sue many years before, and had always talked about her fondly. Rach and I had both dabbled in therapy over the years, although I’d never stuck to it – too expensive, waste of time, why rake over the past? I’d reached out to a grief counsellor a few months after Rach died but it felt slightly overwhelming. I sat there ploughing through endless ‘previously in this season’ plot summaries, trying to unpack our complex backstory, finding myself saying things like, ‘No, that was my dad’s other girlfriend. The Russian one? The one linked with Colonel Gaddafi?’ I just wanted to talk to someone who understood our family history and dynamics. I was tired of the fact that even our closest family friends and relatives didn’t know the full truth. Everyone always got the performance. But Sue knew what went on without the scenery. I’d had a few sessions with her to help me through the initial shock but it was only eighteen months after Rach’s death that I committed to seeing her every week.
Losing Rach had thrown up all sorts of difficult feelings, forcing me to confront some uncomfortable truths. Without my sister’s stabilising presence, my shadowy status as visitor in other people’s lives had been thrown into sharp relief. It felt as if my entire past and present had died along with her – but also my future. I didn’t know who to be without Rach. ‘Sometimes,’ Sue said, ‘it takes a traumatic incident to change who you are. Perhaps this is Rachael’s lasting gift to you.’
She hadn’t promised any overnight miracles. There were several luggage carousels’ worth of baggage to unpack. But I found myself dropping the mask in a way I hadn’t ever done to anyone else. Starting to challenge assumptions I’d always made about myself, cartoon characteristics that had been laid down in our family story. She forced me to unpick the childhood incidents I’d turned into anecdotes.
So. Christmas. Another one without Rach was never going to be a ‘Let it snow!’ celebration. More of a ‘Gotta Get Through This’ endurance test. But, as I said to Sue, it couldn’t be as bad as last year.
The first Christmas after she died, I’d found myself having a bit of a meltdown in Liberty’s. The store was packed with men on lunch breaks frantically grabbing gift beauty sets. One middle-aged man was impatiently breaking off from his phone call to answer questions about wrapping. ‘Yes, fine, all right, put one of your bow THINGS on it.’ I reached instinctively for my phone to share ‘one of your bow THINGS on it’ with Rach. A new addition to our library of sayings.
And then I remembered. Habit had decided to have some fun overriding sanity – just for the hell of it. The seasonal music and smell of pine candles suddenly felt suffocating. I pushed through the double doors into the street and walked the tears off through Regent’s Park until I got home.
This year we gathered on Christmas Day at Mum’s. We’d powered through the slog of what bereaved people call ‘Firsts’. First birthdays and anniversaries. First Mother’s Day. We had established some post-Rach traditions, toasting ‘Mummy Rachael’, the name we encouraged two-year-old Bertie to use so that she has a sense that this person we talk about is her mum, even if she’s not physically here. Adam wore a T-shirt saying ‘Life Rolls On’ and my mum cooked the roast potatoes the Gordon Ramsay way that Rach liked.
My mum also placed a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Justin Bieber in the living room: Mimi’s very own Christ figure. As she was arranging tinsel around his neck, Mum’s legs gave way and she grasped a chair for support. ‘Pissed after one drink, darling!’ she said. ‘You’ll have to put me to bed!’
She had lost weight recently. I was worried that she was skipping meals and remembered my own collapse at the hospital. ‘You need to eat,’ I urged her. ‘You’re too thin!’
She smiled, pointing out that that was an unlikely piece of advice from someone who worked for a fashion magazine.
My dad didn’t come over for Christmas anymore. He was spending it with his girlfriend, who remained in his life. As revelations go, his sudden no-shows were hardly up there with Watergate but his absence stung slightly now. I was inclined to take it as a one-star review of our collective worth without Rach. And I suspected his absence was mainly my fault.
We’d had a series of difficult conversations since Rach died, about money, bailiffs and the general chaos of his life, which had gone into turbo-mode now that his faculties were dwindling. I was faced with angry creditors and legal notices as he attempted to get by on his old standbys of charm and false promises in a modern era when those qualities were no longer enough.
The chaos felt overwhelming without Rach to share the burden. Or to maintain order – we were like two angry street brawlers now that her moderating presence had left the ring. His girlfriend had kept an eye on his life admin in the initial aftermath of Rach’s death but that period of grace was over. A few months afterwards, she had delivered a stack of brown envelopes to my house neatly labelled ‘Dad’s affairs’.
‘Affairs? Well, at least he’s finally owned up to them all,’ my mother laughed.
I paid off his unpaid rent and my mum rallied into action, arranging for him to get state support.
‘Splendid!’ he said. ‘I shall use the money for theatre tickets!’
‘You’ll end up in prison if you do that,’ my mum pointed out.
‘I will welcome the solitude. And I can end my days reading!’
He never had lost the art of a comeback.
Then he arranged to go to Greece with his girlfriend and called to ask me to pay for it. ‘Just take the money out of the trust fund!’ he said. The money left in trust to Rach and me by relatives had been plundered to virtually nothing over the years. Rach and I had signed documents to release funds well into adulthood. Business-class airfares, a series of loans.
‘Look, I only need a few thou …’ He paused briefly. ‘It might well be my last holiday.’
I reluctantly agreed but took the opportunity to deliver some harsh home truths about his spending, urging him to prepare for his old age. He responded with fury. It reminded me of ‘the one where Dad kicked the door down’. Eventually he hung up. He got his holiday but something shifted irrevocably after that heated conversation. We’d learned never to confront my father about difficult facts so it was a rash move to pull back the curtain and expose the man behind the Great Oz.
I initially felt that the onus was on me to patch it up. After all, I was the rational one who still had all their faculties. I knew that some of his friends who weren’t privy to my clean-up operations and his habit of slipping in and out of our lives might cast me as a heartless villain. So I decided to give them what they wanted. I opted to treat his ghosting of me with defiance. I decided not to build any more bridges.
‘I think I’ve worked out that my dad’s just not that into me!’ was my smart-mouthed, hot take on it, at least to the outside world.
Some of my friends suggested that he’d cut me off because of the Alzheimer’s. ‘It can make people act out of character,’ they gently offered.
I nodded politely rather than explaining that this was the way things had always been. I thought of him telling Rach and me all those years ago that he had never wanted children.
