In the Midst of Life

by Jennifer Worth

  We have to go to a very different society and mingle with a people closer to nature to see a more realistic approach to death. In southern Morocco, in 2007, I was invited by a young Moslem woman to take tea with her family in her home. We entered a hole in the wall and went down a long, dark passage towards a dim light and into a tiny kitchen. There was a central place for a wood fire on the floor, and a hole in the ceiling let out the smoke and also let in the daylight. We went from the kitchen to a large room, about thirty feet by twenty. A beautiful carpet lay on the mud floor, and around the walls cushions were scattered on the floor for seating. High windows let in the daylight and oil lamps stood on low tables. Silk hangings adorned the high walls. The room was both elegant and beautiful. There was no upstairs, so this one space, plus kitchen, was home for the entire family. Other women and children came in, eager to see the stranger in their midst. The lady of the house, in good French, invited me to sit down whilst she made the tea. The cushions were very low, and I was apprehensive about sitting down in case I made an exhibition of myself trying to get up again! Seeing what at first I thought were some higher cushions I walked towards them. The lady must have read my mind or, if not, it is as well she spoke when she did.

  ‘That is my grandmother. She is nearly a hundred years old. She is near the end of her life, and Allah will come for her soon.’

  A woman was cooking, another feeding a baby, children were running around, and an old woman was dying. This is the realistic acceptance of death. The children will take it in their stride, as children always do, and as they grow up they will look upon death as a natural part of life. They had probably seen birth in that room and, without being told, had absorbed the fact that birth, life and death are all part of the whole.

  But we cannot see this. We are too busy ‘getting and spending’. The hush and momentary time-stop of the deathbed plays no part in the rush and perpetual motion of our busy lives. ‘Death? What is it to us? We want to live, live, live – don’t be morbid. We want sex, fun, sensations – don’t be a bore. We want money, careers, possessions – don’t be a drag. Friends, relationships, travel – these are the things we want. Death doesn’t come into it. Go away!’

  Each of us is going to die, whether we like it or not, but it only hinders acceptance of the fact if we never come near it. If we could see the infinite variety of emotions, insights, experiences and delight in little things that are granted to people as they approach the end, if we knew how human understanding and love can grow and flower in the last stages of life, if we witnessed the peace and tranquillity that is given to us in the last hours before death, we would be less afraid.

  The Berber children saw the tranquillity of death in that sunbaked room in Morocco. But we seem to think that our children should be shielded from it. ‘He is too young to be told. It would upset him,’ I have heard. And on another occasion, ironically from a professed atheist, ‘We didn’t know what to tell her, so we said that Granny has gone away to live with the angels in the sky.’ This sort of over-protection is misplaced. Another generation will grow up, remote from reality, and they, in turn, will want no contact with death or the dying. Parents who think they are shielding their children from something unpleasant are ensuring that, when their own time comes, they will be left to die alone.

  Yet children are increasingly exposed to violent death on film, television and computer games. They have a morbid fascination for horror and many are allowed unrestricted access to these sources, so they are able to see people carving each other up, and inflicting unimaginable suffering. And this is the generation of children whose parents imagine they are too tender to be exposed to natural death. What an irony!

  Many years ago Anthony Bloom, Metropolitan Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in England, played an important role in my life. He said that, when he first came to this country, the thing that horrified him the most was the attitude to death that he encountered. As a Russian, he came from a nation and a church where death was a normal part of life, something we all have to face, something known, seen and accepted. But, in this country, he was shocked to find that death was almost regarded as an indecency, provoking the most profound embarrassment, and certainly not a subject to be talked about. To his surprise and dismay, he found that meaningful contact with death was comparatively rare.

  He said that he visited an English family where a much-loved grandmother had died at home. The family was grieving, but the children were not around. He asked where they were, and was told that they had been sent away because they should not see ‘that sort of thing’. In surprise he asked, ‘But why not?’ It was the father’s turn to be shocked. He said it was quite unthinkable. The children knew what death was because they had seen it when a rabbit had been killed and half eaten by dogs in the garden, and they had been terribly upset. He and his wife had agreed that they must be sent away because they might have wandered into Granny’s room while she was dying or, which would have been far more upsetting for them, when she was actually dead. Such a possibility could not be countenanced.

  Did these parents really mean to leave their children with the idea that their grandmother was now like the dead rabbit, savaged by dogs? Children are highly imaginative. They would have sensed that something was wrong in the looks passing between adults, the hushed voices, the unfinished sentences – the ‘not in front of the children’. Or worse, they might have been told silly lies about their grandmother’s condition, which they would neither believe nor understand. Finally, to be sent away at a time of family crisis would have alarmed and frightened them. Their imaginations would have been inflamed, and they might have invented all sorts of lurid tales about the thing that was happening to Granny that was so terrible they were not allowed to see it.

  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 bro
ther 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

  GRIEF

  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.