Writing about bereavement , by Elizabeth Kay

 

Pinky and Perky

We’ve had a pair of pigeons that made our garden their home. They were easy to identify, as one of them had particularly pink feathers, and was inseparable from another one with standard rock pigeon colouring. Pinky and Perky. I only realised that it was the pink one that was the male when he made overtures to another pigeon of exactly the same colouring as his mate, and was thoroughly duffed up as a consequence. He remedied his mistake later, by consummating his marriage very publicly on a neighbouring rooftop. Pigeons mate for life, although they may take another mate if one of them dies. And then Perky disappeared. Pinky seemed completely lost, spending a lot of time sitting in the water bowl and scanning the rooftops. We really felt for him, as he was off his food and couldn’t even be bothered to preen himself. This got me thinking about grief, and how bereavement has affected me over the years. And how well do writers describe it? Not very honestly on the whole, although war poetry has often served the purpose for men, who otherwise only get emotional about football. It seems to me that it’s relatively recently that books have dared to describe the relief you may feel about losing someone close to you – it’s taken a while to get over the sentimental Victorian legacy of children turning into cherubs, and a tone-deaf relatives joining the choir of angels.

          I felt very differently about the deaths of my parents. My father went suddenly at the age of 81. I was very close to him, and despite his age his death was a terrible shock. My mother coped very badly, and wouldn’t discuss anything so his funeral was a miserable affair with no memorial, no music, no eulogy, nothing. Six of us just sat there for ten minutes, watched the coffin disappear, and left. Eventually she came to live with me and my longsuffering husband, and it was hell. She refused to babysit, and I had to be at her beck and call instantly. She died two years later, after refusing to ask her doctor what was wrong with her. This made it very difficult to look after her, as patient confidentially made it impossible to find out anything. Her death was a different sort of shock. I had panic attacks. I couldn’t let myself feel the relief that she was no longer looking over my shoulder to tell me off for something I was doing wrong. At least I gave her a proper send-off. She herself had refused to go to any family funerals, and sent me instead. I was the only child of elderly parents, and there were no close relatives. She did manage to get at me ten years later, though – a distant cousin gave me some letters she had sent to her brother, Roy. She didn’t read them, just gave them to me. They were all about what an awful person I was, and how I couldn’t be trusted to do anything right. Thanks, mum        

Carole on the left, me
in the middle, aged 14

Carole in Cairo

Recently, it’s been the death of friends that has hit me the hardest. Too many to list, so I will deal with the most important one, Carole Proctor. We met at the age of eleven, at senior school, and stayed friends for the rest of our lives. She was probably closer to a sister, as her brother emigrated to Australia when she was thirteen, and she was virtually an only child from then on. We had our differences over the years, as I imagine you do with sisters, but they never lasted very long, and in the end we were in touch every day via messaging apps. The most difficult thing to cope with was her wedding to a thoroughly unpleasant man, who probably only worked for six months during the whole of their 23 year marriage. Fortunately he died before she did, and left her with a mountain of debt. Two days after she paid off the last of it she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. But she then had two years of freedom, even though she was being fed through a PEG to her stomach. She even managed a holiday to Egypt, which involved her taking all her liquid food with her in a separate suitcase and having the explanation translated into Arabic. She never lost her sense of humour, and if anything, I miss her more as the years go by. Her sheer resilience and determination were legendary.

Vera Rich

There are a couple other people I miss, not always the ones I’d have expected. The initimable Vera Rich, enemy of the old USSR, honoured by Ukraine.

My distant cousin Roy was a gentle soul, who never married and had clearly been born into the wrong century. I wrote this poem for his funeral, the last family one I ever attended.

 

When roses knock against the window pane,

Or silver birches ruffle in the breeze,

I’ll take a moment, think of you again;

You saw the things that had the power to please.

You took bad news with equanimity,

You gave new meaning to the word polite;

It wasn’t part of your philosophy

To rage against the dying of the light.

For such as you, the world was not a stage -

It was a mansion with a million doors;

Although you hungered for a bygone age,

With values that this century abhors.

Born a hundred years too late, you said;

You haven’t gone, you live on in my head.

 Writing about people you’ve lost can be cathartic, although I’ve never managed one against my mother – only people I remember in a really positive way. I think I could only express negative feelings if the person concerned was a character I’d created, a figment of my imagination. A lot of the material would be personal experiences, but I’d alter them a bit, disguise them.

 This has been a depressing post, but I shall end it on a positive note. Five days after the disappearance of Perky she suddenly reappeared. So where had she been? Sitting on eggs? Unlikely in September, although pigeons are a randy bunch and it’s not unknown. Or had she decided monogamy wasn’t for the birds, and been off for a little fling? Who knows. But they’re back together, although they seem a little cool with one another...