We may not be able to define or describe grief in words, but we can hear it. It has a voice, a sound of its own making, its own music. We describe the words that express this sound, this music, as onomatopoeic. The meaning is in the sound. Hear it, and you know immediately what it is. Keening is one of the words. Ululating is another. They are the sounds of loss, its ideomotor effect, and even the most stoical find it hard to repress them, battling tears and suppressing sobs, denying grief expression and escape, bottling it in. Sooner or later it will have to be released, do its work of protest, make its music heard, or it will divert its pain into self-harm and torment. And that’s when grief counsellors have to do their work, unclogging the memory, helping to release the long-silenced scream.
Any death prompts its own measure of grief and pain. But how the life was lost can add complexity to the grief and extend it, sometimes beyond resolution. Death by suicide, especially a violent and dramatic one, will pile extra layers of anger and guilt onto grief ’s already heavy load. Why didn’t they share their despair? Why didn’t we read the signals? Why couldn’t we keep them happy? Why weren’t we enough for them? How could they do this to us?
A death caused by medical negligence can add a sense of betrayal to grief ’s chemistry. We trusted them with this precious life. We gave it into their care. And the enquiries that follow may prolong its pain for years.
The death of a child can exile its parents in the far country of despair. Sometimes it splits them apart. They accuse themselves of failing to protect their child and give their own life for it: Would God I had died for thee. I still see that tiny white coffin on a snowy day in Lanark a lifetime ago. And I remember the funeral of a stillborn child in Edinburgh whose mother kept saying it was not her daughter’s death she mourned but her future, a future she memorialised in her own life. She would be eighteen today.
And prejudice can add its poison to the mix. I recall the angry grief of a parishioner whose partner’s body was taken away by his parents and buried privately without any acknowledgement that he was gay.
There was the woman who told me how she had slipped into the back of the cathedral during the Solemn Requiem Mass for the famous man who had been her lover, and how she had left before anyone could notice her and wonder who she was. Now she was alone with a grief that dare not speak its name.
Grief is shattering, but it can be survived if we let ourselves experience it. It has to be done, not bypassed, muffled or diverted. An important part of doing it is anamnesis, the work of remembrance, of going back over the life we have lost as if searching for clues that might solve the mystery of its departure. We can usually do this best with our relatives and friends. But we may have to go to a counsellor or a priest if we get stuck, or if there are issues we can only explore with someone who will hold them in confidence.
The dying can help our grieving. They will help if they think ahead and prepare the way for their absence in our lives. The only future life any of us can be certain of is the one we’ll have in the memory of those we shall leave behind. Why not plan it before we go? Such as leaving letters that tell them how much we loved them and how much they meant to us. Or by leaving instructions about the funeral we want – as long as we realise that it is as much for them as it is about us. Don’t mess with their grief by being too prescriptive, like the man I knew who insisted that no eulogy should be delivered at his funeral, thereby frustrating those of us who wanted to celebrate his distinguished life. He left detailed directions about the music and readings he wanted, but forbade any words about himself. It felt like everyone was there except him. He couldn’t be bothered to turn up at his own funeral. Plan ahead, and you will help good grief do its work of sorrow and remembering. And keep your plans up to date. I’ve had to change my funeral plans several times because I keep outliving the friends I wanted to participate in it.
The dying can also hinder our grieving. They can make grief harder for the bereaved than it might otherwise be. They can poison someone’s future by forcing them to fret over an unhealed past. Sometimes this is the legacy the dead actually want to bequeath the living. They want their anger to pulse down the years after they are gone. I think of the man who learned on the day his father’s will was read how much he had been despised; and how carefully his father had propelled that hatred into the future. He was excluded from the will in an act calculated to deliver a wound he would feel for the rest of his days. How can an act like that ever be reconciled? What must it feel like to know your father wanted you to carry his hatred in your head till your own death?
Jesus told us not to let the sun go down on our wrath, to mend a hurt before putting out the light. All the more reason to heal injuries before the light goes out forever. Don’t let death go down on your wrath because you meant to get round to healing that old hurt – but never did. Now it may never heal. Religious visions of the abode of the dead as places of eternal bliss or eternal woe can be given a helpful secular meaning. The dead can be thought of as living on in the lives of those who remember them either in peace or in torment, depending on how their relations were at the end. The dead may be gone but their karma goes marching on. Try to make good karma for those you leave behind. Don’t leave in a way that will corrupt your own memory.
Whatever the circumstances that attend a death, grief has to be done, it has to be expressed. The pain has to be endured. We have to get used to the fact that someone who was there has now gone forever. We can leave his pipe in the ash tray if we like. We can’t avoid the fact that his chair is empty and his jokes have gone forever. Friends can help if they listen to us and let our grief be voiced, however angry it sounds. It is often in grief that the bereaved discover who their real friends are. Some people can’t cope with the grief of others because they can’t face death and don’t want to think about it. There are many stories about new widows and widowers seeing friends coming towards them in the street who suddenly dash to the other side rather than meet them. As if fearing the contagion of death, they avoid all contact with the bereaved.
Gradually, almost without knowing it, our energy shifts from the past to the present; from the way things were to the way they are. The will to live that is in the heart of every creature asserts itself again. And life overcomes death, even a death we thought we would never recover from. We may even fall in love again. We may pour our hearts into another life as completely as into the one whose death we thought we could not survive. The future opens before us, and we turn towards it. We start living again. If you live as long as I have, you see this happening again and again. You see sorrow unfolding into joy as the years bring their changes. One of the privileges of the priest’s life is to be present at both ends of these transformations. Not long ago a young man came to see me with his fiancée. More than thirty years before I had conducted his mother’s funeral. Would I marry them? This is what I said at their wedding on a hill in Fife:
Forgive me if I begin on a personal note. In 1975, when I was Rector of Old St Paul’s on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, a young nurse called Connie Cuthbertson came in to see me. It was the death of her brother Bobby that brought her in my direction. She told me of her grief and the grief of her parents, who had now lost two sons, Andrew having died in 1958. But life moved on and her sorrow turned to joy when she and Norman married in Old St Paul’s one snowy day in February, and they went over the Forth to run a farm and grow a family on this hill.
I was away from Edinburgh for six years and came back in 1986 to discover that Connie was dying. I came to see her here and something she said captured the essence of her personality. Her hair had fallen out, but she told me with a smile that she spread it on the bushes in the garden so that the birds could use it for their nests. That incident captured the grace, kindness and humour of her soul. Death took her and again there was sorrow in her family. But sorrow was again followed by joy when Norman married a young widow called Trish and she brought her sons into this family of large men, the Niven boys all built on the s
cale of Connie’s gentle giant of a father, Robin Cuthbertson. Today that story of loss and the love that overcame it passes another milestone, as Graham and Amy bind their lives together whatever the future may hold for them.
The most moving thing about a wedding is the way it gathers scattered elements of the past and brings them together into a new future. Amy’s story also has its losses and its intriguing connections. Her loving and selfless father Andrew died nearly three years ago after a history of heart disease. Drew, as he was known in the family, was a metallurgist, who in his twenties had worked for a time for Trish’s father. Just file that wee coincidence away for a second, because there are more to come. It’s as if some benign force in nature was gently nudging these two fine young people together. And fine they are, each of them working selflessly to care for our planet and all the living creatures whose home it is. They didn’t know it, but slowly they were being drawn together. They had friends and interests in common. They liked the same bands – one of them, Whisky Kiss, playing here today. They went to the same concerts, socialised in the same pubs. They even lived at different ends of the same street. Then one night with a group of friends in a pub in Tollcross their paths finally crossed, a spark was lit and the courtship began. And being the brave, adventurous people they are, when it came, the marriage proposal wasn’t made on Blackford Hill or in a bar in Bruntsfield. It happened on a finger of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field in the distant reaches of South America, as far from Leamington Terrace as you can get.
So these two beautiful and idealistic young lives were joined. And we have come here today to witness and celebrate their love and offer them the encouragement of our support as they begin their lives together. As well as being an act of promised love, a wedding service is an act of courage in which two people pledge their lives together for the future no matter what it holds. We know that human life can never fully escape sorrow and may even encounter terrible loss. But we also know that the love people have for each other can withstand whatever the future brings and guide them through its storms.
We will surround Amy and Graham with our love as they set out on their journey together today. But before we send them on into the future, we want to look back at two great souls they love but see no longer, Graham’s mother Connie and Amy’s father Drew. Though in one sense they are no longer with us, in another sense they are: because they are present in their children, as they will be in their children’s children. So we look back for a moment now, but not in sorrow. Only in joy for what they gave and what their children will carry of them into the long years ahead. And to celebrate that undying link with the past I now invite Amy and Graham to light these two candles for Connie and Drew, absent today but carried always in our hearts.
VII
THE LAST BUS
Iwas phoned recently by someone who had been commissioned by a newspaper to write my obituary. There was a fact he wanted to check and couldn’t find the answer to. Would I mind helping him? I was happy to. And it got me thinking about the important role obituaries can play in helping us prepare for death.
We don’t any of us know the date of our own death. And it is silly to think it has already been fixed by the Omniscient Registrar in the sky. But there is a date out there of which in the future they will say, that’s the day you died. So in that sense it is fixed, it lies ahead, it is waiting for you. There will be a notice in the newspaper announcing it, along with the time and place of the funeral. There may even be an obituary, a life in five hundred words with an old photograph that moves those who love you in a way they can’t quite explain.
Like the funeral address, the obituary is one of the arts of anamnesis, one of the ways we try to re-present a life before it fades into the past. It’s a difficult art. Too many of them concentrate on listing achievements and successes, so they read like post-mortem petitions for a public honour. But just occasionally something of the turmoil of a lived life will come through. They are the ones I like, the ones I profit from. I’m not bothered about how many directorships they had, or how many books they wrote and the prizes they won. But I do like to read about their struggles with sorrow or sex or religion. I like to hear how they played the hand life dealt them. I am helped by the knowledge that, behind the confident public face, the private face was sometime streaked with tears.
The obituaries I devour with particular interest are those of the movie stars of my boyhood, though most of them have already gone. My reasons for this obsession are complicated. It is partly because they take me back to the now of then in the picture palaces of my youth, long before the multiplexes and the shiny rows of concession stands in the lobby. Like many children of my generation, I escaped the constraints of a cramped existence by living vicariously through the glamorous characters up there riding across the silver screen. There was a consoling side to this movie habit that was relatively benign. And it was at its most therapeutic during and in the years immediately after the Second World War. We needed an occasional escape from grey reality, and the imaginary world of the movies provided it. But there was an insidious side to it as well, analysed by the film historian Mark Cousins:
. . . Hollywood films have an emotional amplitude greater than that of everyday life. Dark clouds hang over them as they do in romantic poetry and painting, and their stories are drawn against the background of that fate. Theirs is a phenomenally successful brand of emotional excess . . . [I refer to] as ‘closed romantic realism’. I use ‘closed’ because these films tend to create worlds that do not acknowledge that they are being watched and the actors behave as if the camera isn’t there . . .92
It was this closed, romantic world that dominated my inner life and its imagined longings when I was a child. Many commentators have remarked on the similarity between cinema goers and the watchers in Plato’s Parable of the Cave. Plato’s watchers face away from the real world outside and concentrate on the hypnotic shadows flickering on the back wall of the cave. It is the unreal that is most real to them, as it was to me. I remember coming out of the dark picture house into the sunlight of the war’s double-summertime and feeling bereft that the dream was over. And I wasn’t the only one who felt like that. In his poem, ‘Cahiers du Cinema’, Sean O’Brien captures the sense of expulsion we all felt when the movie ended and we went sadly home:
We watchers in the cave are cast out once for all
Into that fearful teatime light where everything is being filmed
And narrative has given way entirely to its critics, who must read
A thousand screens at once for damning evidence of dreams.93
Of my generation of dreamers, Joan Didion is the best expositor of the closed romantic realism of the movies we were immersed in during those years. She and I fell for the same characters, John Wayne being the most archetypal. She started going to the cinema a few years later than me, during the summer of 1943, the year John Wayne starred in War of the Wildcats. She tells us that is when she first saw the actor who was known to his friends as the Duke. That’s when she saw the walk and heard the voice telling the girl in the picture he would build her a house ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow’. When Wayne died, she wrote about him in an essay she called ‘A Love Song’. It was less an obituary of the actor who had just died of cancer than an exposition of the dreams he had stimulated in those of us who had been watching him over the years.
. . . when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumour struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question. In John Wayne’s world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. ‘Let’s ride’, he said, and ‘Saddle up’. ‘Forward ho’, and ‘A man’s gotta do what he’s got to do’. ‘Hello, there’, he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on a train or just standing around on the f
ront porch waiting for someone to ride up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralysing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.94
Didion has captured here what it is that touches me when I read obituaries of my boyhood heroes of the silver screen. What grabs me is the contrast between their idealised existence, their heroic presence on the screen, and the quotidian, often depressing reality of their lives off screen. Didion found it impossible to associate illness with her image of John Wayne. But there was more to his human vulnerability than the cancer that killed him. He was bald. And he must have hated it, because off screen as well as on he hid it beneath a toupee. It was as if he had lost the difference between the movie legend John Wayne and the boy Marion Morrison born in a small Iowa town in 1907. And there was a more profound anomaly than the difference between his idealised physical beauty on the screen and the paunchy, balding man he became in real life. In his films, he always played the courageous and lonely hero who took up arms against the oppressor and his bandit gang. Yet in real life, he managed to finesse his way out of being drafted into the military in the Second World War. He looked like a hero. He walked and talked like a hero. But his heroics were all in the movies. John Wayne was an act. But he wasn’t the only schoolboy crush I had whose actual life was very different from the one I saw in the pictures.
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