One of the consequences of writing a weekly blog is that it comes round inexorably every week. It also means that you cannot really avoid the events and what has happened in the week that has passed. That said I had decided not to write this blog today up until a few moments ago, not least as there have been so many words, memories and thoughts shared about the death of Her Majesty the Queen. But having spoken to a few folks and having read so much on social media, the traditional press and watched so much television I have been struck by a few thoughts and want briefly to share them.
Social media can be especially cruel and notwithstanding the fact that there is a very real diversity of opinion around the role of the monarchy what has surprised and also saddened me is the frequency of comments relating to the fact that we should mourn less the death of someone who reached the age of 96 compared to someone who was younger. I come across this all the time, indeed virtually every day. The inevitability of working in the care sector around and with older people is that death in latter age and very old age is natural. Associated with that is an ageist societal assumption that because someone is older that their death is of less value or significance and more than that that the sense of loss and grief and emptiness on the part of those who are left should be by consequence less severe. Too often have I come across people in their twenties or thirties made to feel guilty that they are struggling with the loss of a grandparent in their nineties. Such a presumption makes a mockery of the reality that when we lose someone we love the longer the length of that relationship the deeper the well of emptiness and the depth of sadness we mine. Tears are no less strong, the pain of not seeing that familiar face, the echoing absence of presence is no less diminished and intense simply because someone has reached a very old age. They still had so much to give and share, so much to achieve and be, that their absence is as acute as the loss of someone much younger. I think it is simply wrong for so many today to point to a life well lived and a long and healthy one and to somehow impugn that the pain of grief should by consequence be dictated by the chronology of time
The second brief observation I want to make is that I have been surprised by how much I have been personally touched by the death of the Queen. I am by no means the only one who has mentioned this or spoken of the sense of being caught out by the sadness of the hour. One of the main reasons for this, I suspect, for me is that her death has brought to mind the memories of my own parents now long gone and of grandparents even longer away from me. I have reflected on the struggles they had and the death of the Queen as one of the last of a generation who shared their days of history through war and renewal, has resonated deeply. There is a sense for many of us that a touchstone, a cairn of memory and moment, the security of a presence that affirms familiarity and belonging has passed with the death of the Queen. We need I think as a whole society to acknowledge the sense of individual grief people are feeling at this moment, not just for their sense of losing the Queen, but for the fact that her death has opened up for many of us memories of those important to us who are now longer alive. It is rare for the death of someone else to bring home the rawness and questions of our own grief, and such feelings need to be held and supported by the love of those around us and by the awareness of the wider community. The death of the Queen has made many of us face up to our own work of grief and so many of us are ill equipped for that journey. We will in the days and weeks ahead be faced with a collective and personal grieving which will require communal understanding and love.
Lastly – and this may be somewhat ironic given you have read up to this point – there have been so many words written and said, television programmes and films aired about the life of the Queen over the last two days and this will doubtless continue up until the State Funeral. It is only right, I think, that as a society we will continue to focus on memory and loss, recollection and insight, but I really hope we get some space to be silent, to grieve and to be quiet, that we can all be given space simply to be on their own, apart from the commentary and comment, cocooned from the sounds and words, alone from the sights of flickering film and footage.
A funeral is a marker and a moment, a ritual of remembering which even for someone we only know as an anchor in our communal togetherness, needs to be a time and a day apart from all others. The funeral of the Queen will touch so many people in such diverse ways. I really hope that we all of us have the chance to find a space or place to nestle into our grieving for whomever we are grieving; I hope we can find a way in which we are able to be supported and loved in our hurting; I hope that those living in the face of a dying loved one find the ability to be present with that person; that those who have in these days lost someone important to them have the sense that their death is as valued as the mourned one society is focussing on; because when all the words are spoken, all the cameras are shut off, all the people wander off to the ordinariness of living, when friends return to their own lives, the bereaved are left to the emptiness of absence, to a room unfilled with love… it is then we must be present to hold each other up and that is even harder if the days before that moment are as full as they have been.
the other side of memory…
I close my eyes and remember…
all those days that we have shared;
when you brought a bright spark
to cold and damp monotony;
when we collapsed in side-splitting laughter
about the nothing things of life;
when we listened to a piece of music
and tears sounded to its rhythm.
I close my eyes and remember…
all those faces that we have watched;
the fearful thrill of cradling life
as young new-born parents;
the certainty of adult doubt
as teenagers looked for answers;
the aching loss as the bone of our beginning
shrouded itself into the earth.
I close my eyes and remember…
all those places we have wandered;
the homes that we have furnished
with the love of our welcoming;
the journeys we have made
whose destination was beyond a horizon;
the hearts and lives we have changed
though we were blind to the knowing.
I close my eyes and remember…
all those graces we have been given;
the gentle glimpse of your hand,
open to share and bring comfort;
the smile which put at ease the stranger
and made them a friend for life;
the timbre of your content
as music filled a room;
the fragility of your strength,
from knowing Love in our midst.
I open my eyes and recognise…
that as the sun sets on this day,
as dusk scatters light
into the encroaching dark;
so somewhere,
on the other side of memory,
you are there.
And in that place beyond all sense
the sun is already shining,
the light is growing,
as the dawn of new beginning
aches its way through love’s pain
and loss’s mourning.
I open my eyes and see
that you and I are
both here and there,
both memory and future;
a life lived,
a love shared,
a beginning started,
a light rising,
over there
on the other side of memory.
Donald Macaskill
Last Updated on 10th September 2022 by donald.macaskill
