A Song for Issy Bradley

by Carys Bray

  “It’s all about the way you look at things,” he tries. “Think of the pioneers. I saw a photograph of the prophet’s office on the Internet and he’s got a sculpture of two hands holding a little spoon on his desk. Do you know why? To remind him of sacrifices made by the pioneers. There’s a story about a German lady who was traveling with a handcart in the winter and her children froze to death. When it was time to bury them, she had to dig into the icy ground with a spoon. No one’s asking us to do anything like that. We’re making much smaller sacrifices. Nana and Granddad could be here with us, or they could be helping people join the Church, helping them to be with their families for Eternity.”

  There’s something about saying words out loud that makes them true and, having explained things to everyone, he finds himself converted. It’s all right for Mum and Dad to stay in Dublin. He discards his disappointment and carries on with the lesson.

  “From now on, our lives will be all about being worthy to get to the Celestial Kingdom. We’ve got a special, personal motivation that most people don’t have, a specific goal in sight: to be reunited with Issy. We’re like footballers.” He looks at Alma, hoping to engage him with the sporting comparison. “Footballers train every day, don’t they? We’re in training for the moment when we’re judged and Heavenly Father says ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant’ to us.”

  “What if I don’t get to the Celestial Kingdom? What if I’m not good enough?” Alma asks.

  “You don’t need to worry about that. You’d have to do something awful. You’d have to kill someone or break your covenants—you’d have to apostatize and leave the Church.”

  “But would I get to see her?”

  Claire looks up from the carpet. “Of course you would,” she says.

  “Poor Issy.” Zipporah’s voice wobbles. “She won’t know anyone. I hope she’s not by herself.”

  “She’ll be with my mum,” Claire says.

  Ian knows Claire won’t like what he’s about to say, but it’s important to be honest, so he says it anyway.

  “Issy might be with Mum’s mum, provided Mum’s mum has accepted the gospel. If Mum’s mum hasn’t accepted the gospel yet, she’ll be waiting in the Spirit Prison.”

  “You mean our other nana who we don’t know yet might be in prison?” Jacob asks.

  “No, my mum’s definitely not in prison.”

  “I don’t want Issy to be by herself. She’s only little,” Zipporah says.

  “She’s not by herself. All our ancestors who’ve accepted the gospel are there. And the Spirit World’s not far away, you know. It’s right here, we can’t see it, but it’s all around us … it’s like … it’s like there’s another dimension.”

  “Wow!” Jacob swivels around on the sofa, scanning the room with searching eyes. “Do you know everything, Dad?”

  “No, I don’t know everything. I don’t have all the answers, but I promise if there are answers, I’ll always try to find them for you.”

  Jacob gets up and crosses the room to sit on Ian’s knee. Ian holds him carefully, resisting the urge of his arms to clasp and squeeze.

  “I’m glad you know stuff, Dad.”

  He squeezes then. It’s an action born of thankfulness and fear. Jacob giggles but he doesn’t attempt to get down. He lacks Alma’s prickliness, he’s happy to be held, and in many ways he reminds Ian of himself when he was growing up. He just hopes he can do as good a job as his dad did.

  Dad always had answers and ideas. He had huge reserves of memorized scriptures, vast gospel knowledge, and a relentless determination to flatten bumps of doubt like a lawn roller. It was Dad who challenged thirteen-year-old Ian to read the Book of Mormon, and it took him just over a year to get through it.

  “You know what you’ve got to do now,” Dad had said. “Ask if it’s true. Ask with a sincere heart and real intent and you know what’ll happen, don’t you? Heavenly Father will manifest the truth of it by the power of the Holy Ghost. Get to it, lad!”

  Joseph Smith was fourteen when he had the First Vision. Ian was fourteen when he prayed to find out if the Book of Mormon was true. He prayed every night. He was primed and ready for a visitation—if not a visitation, a revelation, some kind of manifestation, perhaps a moment of inspiration or a dream, an idea, an impression, at the very least a feeling. He tried hard. He followed the steps he’d learned at church: Desire sincerely, read and study, keep the commandments, ponder, pray, and listen. He approached the exercise with mathematical precision, praying morning and night for at least ten minutes, an allotment of time that seemed adequate without being excessive. Nothing happened. Eventually he turned to Dad.

  “I wonder if you’ve been approaching it right,” Dad said. “What’ve you done so far?”

  “I’ve prayed every night.”

  “Good. What about the mornings?”

  “Every morning too. I even knelt down and prayed in the back garden yesterday, under the cherry tree. I thought it might work better outside, you know, like the First Vision.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Well, Mrs. Grier must have been hanging her washing out because she leaned over the fence to ask me what I was looking for. And she offered to lend me Mr. Grier’s magnifying glass. That’s all.”

  Dad thought for a moment. “Let me ask you a question, son. Am I your dad?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “Have you seen the results of a test to prove it?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know, then?”

  “You told me.”

  “Would it help if I reminded you every so often?”

  “No. I already know.”

  “How about if I wake you up in the night sometimes just to tell you? Or if I stop when I’m in the middle of an important job and phone home to jog your memory. Would that convince you?”

  “I already know!”

  Dad slapped him on the back. “And there’s your answer, son. Right there.”

  Although it had been nice to talk to Mum last night, it had been Dad he’d most wanted to speak to. When Mum had finished crying and talking she handed the phone to Dad. The first thing Ian did was tell him about the blessing.

  “I blessed her to live, Dad. I actually said it, I said she would recover, and … I, oh …”

  “It’s OK, son. It’s all explained in Doctrine and Covenants, in Section 42. If someone is given a healing blessing and they die, they die unto the Lord. If you keep reading, you’ll see that when someone dies unto the Lord, death is sweet unto them. If something’s sweet then it’s good, and it’s right. The Lord wanted Issy to come home. It was the right thing to happen. You couldn’t do anything to stop it. By blessing her to live, you ensured that she died unto the Lord. There’s no contradiction, nothing to agonize over. It’s not your fault.”

  Dad’s words had breezed through Ian in a great gust of relief. He lifted the box of tissues from his lap and put it on the dining-room table. His sorrow was contained again, soothed and wrapped in an assuaging bandage of scripture.

  Later, when they were in bed, he told Claire that Issy hadn’t needed to stay on Earth and be tested anymore.

  “She’d probably learned everything she needed to know here. She was too good—”

  “I don’t want people saying she was perfect. She wasn’t.”

  “But when children die before they’re eight, they go straight to the Celestial Kingdom, which suggests they—”

  “So every child in the world that dies, every child that dies of diarrhea and malaria and malnutrition, is perfect?”

  He’d never considered it before. “Yes, yes they must be.” He thought about all the perfect children dying around the world, dying at that exact moment while he and Claire lay in the dark, desperately sad, but warm, and safe, and together. He slid his hand over to her side of the bed and rested i
t on the silky material covering her thigh. When she didn’t react he began to move his fingertips back and forth in stroking circles.

  “Don’t change her life,” she said. “Issy wasn’t perfect. She wouldn’t wear her glasses, she used to hide them and pretend she didn’t know where they were. She drew on the walls and she howled every time she had her hair washed. She didn’t sleep through the night until she was six months old and—”

  “Stop it.” He pulled his hand away.

  “It’s the truth. And I love—loved—no, love. I love all of her, every bit, I love everything, I always will. That’s what you do; you love all of someone, not just the nice bits.”

  “But you concentrate on the nice bits, you think about them and emphasize them, you do your best to ignore the bad bits.”

  “You do.”

  “I do,” he agreed. His eyelids were growing heavy. He’d wondered whether he might have difficulty sleeping but he was exhausted, and he felt if he just surrendered to sleep, he might wake up buoyed by a new understanding and a fresh way of framing things, something to counter the recurring pain in his chest.

  “Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it?”

  He waited, hoping for a quiet “Yes.” But Claire didn’t respond. He touched her thigh to nudge a reply out of her. She must have fallen asleep.

  “It would be nice,” Ian says, “if you could all just listen for a little longer.” The children are beginning to get restless and he needs to hurry up and conclude while he still has their attention. “The coming weeks and months are going to be difficult. But special blessings come at sad times. We need to be on the lookout for Tender Mercies. Does anyone know what they are? I read a Conference talk about them this morning. Tender Mercies are consolations, little signs that Heavenly Father is mindful of us and trying to bless us. There was a story in the talk I read, about a soldier killed in Iraq. After his wife was told of his death, a Christmas card and message arrived from him: It was a Tender Mercy from Heavenly Father.”

  “Don’t you think it would have been better if Heavenly Father had stopped the soldier from dying?”

  “You’re missing the point, Alma. Heavenly Father can’t always stop bad things from happening—He can’t interfere with people’s agency—but he can always provide comfort.”

  “But if he can stop bad things from happening sometimes, why does he choose not—”

  “One day we’ll understand why bad things happen and it’ll all make sense.”

  Jacob wriggles off Ian’s lap. He puts his hand up above his head and waves it around as if he is competing for attention at school. “I know, Dad. I know what it’s like. It’s like in Sleeping Beauty when the good fairy comes in and says she can’t undo the spell, but she can make it a bit better. It is, isn’t it, Dad?”

  “Well … I suppose it is, except we don’t believe in bad spells or curses. And the priesthood is the power of God, not magic. And fairies don’t hold the priesthood because they’re girls—but yes, I suppose it is a bit like Sleeping Beauty. Now, what about the funeral? Does anyone have any ideas, anything special you’d like me to mention during the service?”

  “I’d like to do one of those slide-show things with pictures of Issy’s life,” Claire says. “Sister Stevens is coming round later to help me.”

  “But it’s Monday night. She should be at home with her—”

  “I didn’t ask. She volunteered when I called, earlier. She knows how to do it, she makes slide shows on her computer and emails them to Utah, so her parents can see the children.”

  “It might not be allowed.” Ian gets up and pulls the Church Handbook from the bookcase.

  “It’s no big deal, putting some pictures of Issy to music,” Alma says. “I’ve seen people do it at funerals on TV. We could have ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ ” He clears his throat and starts to sing. “When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high.”

  “Shush, I’m trying to concentrate.” Ian finds the section on funerals and starts to read. No one says anything. They all wait for him to speak. He closes the Handbook and puts it back on the bookcase. “It’s not allowed.”

  “You can make an exception,” Claire argues.

  “I can’t. People will think I’m a hypocrite. They’ll think it’s one rule for our family and another for everyone else.”

  “They won’t know,” she says. “You didn’t know until you checked. I bet no one else knows either.”

  “We’d be setting a precedent.”

  “But people are usually old when they die, aren’t they?” Zipporah says. “I mean, it’s not as bad for old people, is it? That’s probably why their relatives don’t ask about stuff like slide shows. You’ve hardly done any funerals since you’ve been Bishop, Dad. It’s not like people are dying all the time. I don’t think you need to worry.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you think, Zipporah. There’s a right way to do things and we’re going to choose it wherever possible. We can do a slide show afterward, in the hall, while people eat. Now, for our Family Home Evening activity we’re going to write in our journals.” Alma groans and slumps over the arm of the sofa. Ian ignores him.

  “This will be one of the most important journal entries of your lives. Claire, will you fetch the CD player, please? This is your history. One day your children will read your journals and they’ll learn from your struggles and your faithfulness. Your journals will be like scripture to your descendants.”

  Ian selects a Tabernacle Choir CD. They write in their journals and it’s so peaceful; if it wasn’t for the empty beanbag, he could almost feel happy.

  When the doorbell rings everyone jumps up, abandoning their journals to rush to the front door.

  “You don’t all need to go,” he calls, following them into the hall. Sister Stevens is standing on the doorstep holding an enormous casserole dish and several bags of cookies tied with colored ribbon. He nods and retreats back into the living room to finish his writing. He hears Claire invite Sister Stevens in, then everyone rushes to the dining room and Sister Stevens’ loud, cheerful voice disrupts the peacefulness.

  “I’ve made funeral potatoes! You must’ve had them before. Never? What kind of Mormons are you? Hash browns and cheese baked in mushroom soup with cornflakes on top. You’ll love ’em. They’ll fill all your sad spaces. Come on, guys, we’re gonna make the coolest slide show ever! Hey, Alma, you look like you could use some cookies.”

  Jacob’s journal is open on the floor in front of the sofa. Ian picks it up. Jacob has drawn a picture of Issy lying down with her eyes closed and he has written a sentence underneath.

  Issy died last night and I am sad. I am praying for a mirycul.

  Alma’s journal is on the arm of the sofa. It’s open, but upside down. Ian sits on the sofa with his own journal on his lap in case anyone comes in. He flips Alma’s journal over, glances at the left-hand page and is catapulted back to last Sunday afternoon when he said, “I don’t care what you write, Alma. Just write something. If you can’t think of anything, write the price of a packet of crisps. That’ll be interesting in twenty years.”

  Crisps

  Crisps from Tesco cost 50p.

  At Poundland you can get 3 packets for £1. But if you nick them they’re free.

  He’s only joking, of course, but Ian wishes he wouldn’t. On the opposite page he has scrawled:

  Family Home Evening sucks like a plunger and Issy’s dead.

  He slides along the sofa to Zipporah’s place, picks up her journal and flicks through it until he reaches today’s entry. She’s a good girl. She has written lots.

  Monday 19 September

  Mum couldn’t wake Issy up after Jacob’s party on Saturday. Issy went to hospital in an ambulance and she died last night. It feels like I’m making it up. We went to see her yesterday and it was awful. Mum told us she was going to die and we took it in turns to sit next to her. We were supposed to talk to her but I didn’t know what to say.

  When you
die, does someone meet you and show you around? Do they look after you while you get used to it? Do people go to bed in the Celestial Kingdom, and if they do, will someone tuck Issy in?

  He puts her journal back exactly as he found it and then, even though he knows he shouldn’t, he walks over to Claire’s chair and thumbs the pages of her journal.

  Monday 19 September

  There aren’t the words.

  That’s it. He flicks forward to double-check. When he finds nothing, it seems like she has played a trick on him. He feels slighted, but he can’t say anything or she’ll know he has been looking. Perhaps she needs some time. He’ll check again in a few days.

  He puts the journal back, steps along the hall to the dining room and stands in the doorway, watching. Claire and Sister Stevens are sitting side by side at the computer. Jacob has squeezed onto Claire’s lap and Zipporah is peering over Sister Stevens’s shoulder. Alma is perched on the dining-room table, throwing occasional glances at the computer, but he is more interested in the open bag of chocolate-chip cookies beside him.

  “Music! That’s the most important thing. What would you guys like, huh? Something inspiring, but not too churchy—no Tabernacle Choir!”

  “Do a search. Type ‘funeral songs’ and see what comes up,” Zipporah suggests.

  Ian watches as Alma licks his fingers and helps himself to another cookie. His lips are ringed by crumbs and melted chocolate. When he realizes he is being observed, Alma toasts Ian with the cookie and mouths, “Tender Mercies.” Ian can’t tell if he is being mocked, but he smiles back anyway—even if it’s a joke, it’s a gentle one.

  “Let’s try this,” Sister Stevens says.

  “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” starts to play and Ian concentrates, listening to the lyrics as if it’s the first time he’s ever heard them, trying to work out if they’re the right words to accompany Issy’s life. He likes the bit about daring to dream. Dreams can come true. His dreams are true: He knows this life is the beginning of something wonderful; he knows human beings have the potential to become like God, to create Spirit children and populate their own planets; he knows families are forever. His dream—no, his truth is immense, eternal, and infinite: It stretches from before the beginning to after the end.