Well, of course, everyone is unique. (‘There will be no one like us when we’re gone,’ writes the dying Oliver Sacks, ‘but then there is no one like anyone else ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled.’)
So instead, I came back from a concert and turned on my mobile phone and saw there were several missed calls from my brother. I knew immediately what he wanted to tell me and, sure enough, when I rang him back, he did, in his kind, distressed voice that I know as well as I know any voice in the world. I drove through the small hours and arrived at my parents’ house, which was in darkness. I let myself in and went at once to the small room where my father had been lying for the last nine months, and he wasn’t there. His body had already been taken away. I stood blinking in the doorway and stared at the narrow, stripped bed and waited in the silence to know what it was I was feeling.
Like when you cut your finger and wait to see blood well up and feel the first throb of pain.
Unreal.
* * *
• • •
(I have never really cried over my father. I didn’t – don’t – know where to begin or perhaps, once begun, how I would ever stop. But when I took our anxious, eager old dog to the vet to have her put down, then I cried. She used to come to Sweden with us every summer and she loved to jump into the lake where my father also swam, in his eerie twilight. We would hurl sticks for her and she would launch herself in the air and crash into the water, over and over and over again. I lay on the floor beside her and stroked her and told her we all loved her. I told her that she was going to be always in that lake now, swimming through the water lilies. She thumped her tail gently and then she stopped thumping it. I wept then, because it’s easy to weep over a pet: a pure, uncomplicated sorrow. Tears for the dog permitting tears for the man.
And remembering this, another memory comes to me: one of my father’s oldest and closest friends died in his forties. I never saw my father shed a tear over it – he wasn’t a man who cried easily – but some days later our ancient grey cat died and I found him sitting at his desk, tears sliding unchecked down his face; so very sad, so alone.)
* * *
• • •
The body dies, is lowered into the ground for its slow absorption back into nature or burnt into ash. But everything that made up that person’s inner world – all the love and hope and longing; all the relationships and desires and appetites and curiosities; all the knowledge they built up over the decades; all the memories they had; all their little habits and eccentricities; their intricacy and strangeness and inimitable them-ness; their particular gestures; the way that they smiled; the way the world shaped them and no one else has that shape now or ever will – does this just go?
How can the dead be dead? We talk to them, an impossible conversation, ask their advice, confess our sorrows and desires, seek their approval, have a relationship with them that shifts and changes. We carry them in our hearts. Who are we talking to when we talk to the dead; who are we weeping to when we go to the graveside and pour out our troubles? Who are we loving? For the love is present even when the person is lost, and it reaches into the future even though the future yawns terrifyingly because the person is not in it.
The dead do not die. But they are emphatically dead. They will not come again. The clothes hang in the wardrobe. The chair by the window is empty. The bed is undisturbed.
‘To learn to live,’ writes Derrida, ‘is to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company or companionship . . . of ghosts.’ The ghost is the other, living on in us – because it is only in us that the dead can survive. We have to be haunted. It is very hard to use the past tense.
* * *
• • •
What is it to mourn? The five stages of grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identifies in her 1969 book On Death and Dying (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) have for many years been criticized and disputed for their lack of empirical evidence, and for the tidy flatness with which they try to lay a grid over the chaos of grief. Yet the notion of stages through which a bereaved person moves retains a powerful grip on us. We want to feel that there is a known way through the bewildering, often disorderly, sometimes brutal mess of emotions; we call it a ‘journey’, as if there’s a map and a compass, steps that should be taken and a place we are trudging towards, even when we know we are lost.
I have a friend whose partner died when he was still young and their child was only four years old. She says that for many months she was quite mad with grief – and she means it literally. She lost her mind over it.
Another talks about how grief hurts, physically hurts. In the stomach, in the heart, in the head, in the bones and in the blood. It grabs us, punches at us, takes our breath away, assaults us and wrings us out.
Or another, who speaks of how old she felt for a while – stooped over and slow and befuddled with loss.
Or garrulous, stopping everyone to say over and over again what they have lost; on a loop of time, in perpetual lament.
Or lost, wild, abandoned, scattered. The mind like a drawer of knives.
Useless. Listless. Drab. Tired. Ill: ill with loss.
Strange, unfamiliar; sorrow covers the world like snow does a landscape, making everything that was known strange.
Time passes, a calendar of pain. But death is not just a mark on a headstone. Love is not in the past tense.
* * *
• • •
A few years ago, as my children were in the process of leaving home, I trained to be a humanist celebrant – conducting funeral services for those who have no faith. Whereas in religious funerals there is a structure and purpose – to consign the dead person to the afterlife, in the hope of being reunited there with them – in humanist ceremonies there is no belief in immortality or hope of ever seeing that person again. How should we say goodbye and not be crushed by the forever-sadness of it?
I met one woman who, in her early sixties, knew that she was close to death and wanted to be part of the funeral arrangements that her stricken family would have to make. She had no belief in the afterlife and yet at one point in our very brief friendship, she said to me: ‘When I’m lying in the church in my coffin, I want to know I’m in good hands.’ She was graceful, composed, thinking only of the people she was leaving behind who weren’t ready to lose her. She was spending her last days writing farewell letters, wrapping presents for her grandchildren, even making sure the freezer was well stocked with her family’s favourite meals. She knew her grown-up sons were going to suffer and she was trying to find ways to comfort them from beyond the grave.
Or a son and daughter, in their early twenties, saying goodbye to their magnificent-sounding mother. They were determined to celebrate her in the style in which she had lived, and so they instructed all the mourners to dress to the nines. They wore theatrical clothes, knowingly acting out their grief, and they played joyful music, told funny stories, gave everyone gaudy necklaces to loop around their necks. It was high ritual, kooky, witty and intense.
On another occasion, I helped a mother bury her beloved son. She wrote a poem addressed to him that she read at the funeral, and she spoke of him in a muddle of tenses – past and present and still to come, dead and yet alive and hearing her lines of sorrow. She said that she kept looking out of the window, expecting to see him walking up the garden path. She didn’t know what to do with herself or how to get through the days. Every minute dragged at her; every night she waited for the dawn.
Bereavement makes time into a torment. It seems endless and unendurable. We are trapped in it, but the dead person is free, beyond pain at last.
To be human is to feel grief. We do not ‘get over’ loss (as if it’s a barbed-wired fence), nor, like on the bear hunt, do we go round it. I don’t even think we go through it, exactly, because that is to assume we come out the other side
and are free. It feels more helpful to think of mourning as a gradual taking-into the self of the dead person: once they were external, a beloved object, their own subject; now they are interior, existing in the minds and memories of those they left behind. We lose them – and at the same time we can no longer lose them because they are within us, part of us.
In the past (in Victorian times, for instance, following Queen Victoria’s lavish example) there were rules for mourning. These often included social seclusion and mourning clothes that were the outward signs of inward distress. For men, it was easy: a dark suit with black gloves. For women, it was more elaborate: the deep, dull black of a material like unreflective silk or bombazine (very common in novels of the period), trimmed with scratchy crêpe that could be removed after a specified stretch of time (‘slighting the mourning’). Jewellery was forbidden, except for jet. There was black material on the door. The clock was sometimes stopped at the time of death. The closing of shutters and pulling-down of blinds – that becomes, in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for a Doomed Youth’, the soft beauty of ‘at each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds’. The black armbands.
Today, in the Western world at least, we tend to mourn silently and invisibly. Our blinds are not drawn down and our clothes not black (except at some funerals, and even this is getting less common: at many of the services I’ve conducted mourners are explicitly asked not to wear black but bright, celebratory colours). There’s often a briskness about the way we deal with death. The number of days a bereaved person is given off work is left to an employer’s discretion; most employees have the statutory right to a ‘reasonable’ amount of unpaid time off under the Employment Rights Act to allow them to deal with unforeseen matters and emergencies involving a dependant. This includes leave to arrange or attend a funeral. (What’s ‘reasonable’ in this time when reason goes sailing out of the window?) The average length of compassionate leave is apparently three to five days. As in the US, where there is no specific provision for bereavement leave, it’s largely a matter for employers to decide, and there is no statutory right to be paid. It’s as if death is a blip, a glitch – a few days off and we go stoically back to work. We are expected to get on with things and get over them.
The rituals, which we have now largely lost, publicly recognized the enormity of a death; the recently bereaved were marked out as different. Displaying their status as the mourner, they were distinct in their sorrow, to be treated with sympathy, delicacy and tact. Then, after a set period of time, the deep black gave way to a less inky black; then dark grey, mauve, white. The strict seclusion of the first few months gradually lifted. Mourning turned to half-mourning. Normal life returned slowly, visibly, in stages. The clock was wound up again; time moved forward.
Time stops for those who die, but for their survivors it goes on, ticking and tocking us into the future the dead do not have. For all the agony, the refusal, the dragging of heels and looking back into the underworld, most people let time take them onwards. At the memorial service for the great Observer photographer Jane Bown (who I worked alongside for many years, admired and was very fond of), her friend Luke Dodd read a passage from a letter that Samuel Beckett wrote to Barbara Bray in condolence for a recent hard loss. Luke later sent me the text: ‘I wish I could find something to comfort you . . . I have so little light and wisdom in me when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest.’ Why is such bleakness a solace? Yet it is: to acknowledge death’s harshness and still say that ‘somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and loneliness.’ It is the passing of time that he places his faith in: ‘Work your head off, sleep at any price and leave the rest to the stream, to carry now away and bring you your other happy days.’
‘Surviving – that is the other name of mourning,’ writes Derrida. Surviving is a complicated business. Successful mourning is also failed mourning. Grief is an act of memory, of fidelity and of remaining with the person who has died. Recovery is a necessary betrayal and an act of moving forward alone. Many bereaved people feel guilty when they experience moments of returning happiness or realize that for a stretch of time they haven’t thought of their loved dead one. The dead become, even briefly, the forgotten. And we have to forget, to let the dead gradually sink into our deep memory, where they are not always felt. We would go mad if we did not do this but remained stuck at the first stage of raw, appalled grief (and, of course, people do get stuck and do go mad). The dead are still alive in us, but we do not always remember them because they become part of us, in our fabric. They are forever absent and in the past, and forever present and in our future. This is the work of mourning; painful, time-consuming, solemn, crucial work. To gather the dead to ourselves; to recognize our own mortality.
* * *
• • •
Death is never a slight thing, however peaceful a passing is, however minute the distance crossed. Just a breath away, then like a feather being blown with a single puff and a whole world has disappeared.
And yet death can also restore a person, especially when that person had been un-made by dementia. Once they die, they are no longer only old and frail and ill, they are no longer only confused and forgetful, no longer a wrecked body and a failing mind, no longer not themselves. Because they have gone from us, they can come back to us and be all the selves they have ever been. Young, old, everything in between. Robust, vulnerable, everything in between. And often we fall head over heels in love with all these selves and we understand how they contained multitudes. (How we all contain multitudes.)
This is what good funerals can bring: the sense of a whole self being recollected again, restored and redeemed. Time, which is so tyrannical, releases its chronological grip. I was the celebrant for the funeral of a friend’s husband, who had lived with and died of Lewy body dementia. His illness and his last months were not denied during the service, which was largely written by his family, but were touched on then laid aside to make way for the rest of his long and good life: a man who had loved the sea and fishing, who had loved cooking, eating, laughing, joking; who had loved his children, who had loved his wife.
We talk of ‘funeral directors’ now, as though a funeral were a corporate event. They used to be called undertakers – which is what the American poet Thomas Lynch still calls himself, for he loves the way the word collects up many meanings (the taking under ground, the task, the pledge). ‘From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living – every one of us.’ He believes that ‘undertakings are the things that we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisome blather and the blinding dark. It is the voice we give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer.’ And towards the end of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, he adds this urgent advice: ‘Whatever’s there to feel, feel it – the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality . . . The only way round these things is through them.’
We four siblings arranged and conducted my father’s funeral. His grandchildren, each grandson wearing one of his ties, carried the wicker coffin that they had decorated with flowers that morning, and they stood together at the front of the hall to one by one share a particular memory they had of their grandfather. Two of his old friends told stories about him, funny and affectionate. We all sang the hymn that had been sung at my parents’ wedding, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. And we four told his life together and remembered all the things he had most loved, that we had most loved in him. We each read a poem. My eldest sister (who shares with him a passionate attachment to the natural world) re
ad Gerald Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’. My brother read Henry Reed’s Second World War poem ‘Naming of Parts’ – one of my father’s all-time favourites, though none of us ever quite knew why. My sister, who loves sailing, as did he, read John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’. And I read Thomas Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’, the poet’s rueful elegy to himself as ‘a man who used to notice such things’:
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
The Last Ocean Page 22
