5

Bottom line – 1

One of the problems of being the vicar is that you are a public figure. There is no retreating quietly into your own struggles and grief. Everyone is watching you. Everyone knows. More so in a parish like this, a council estate where people do not generally have a lot of confidence in themselves. They look to the vicar for faith and spiritual strength: ‘Hi, Alan. Say one for me!’ But now they look worried as they ask me how Tom is and, perhaps more importantly for them, how I am.

At first I am determined that I will be honest with people. I soon find, however, that honesty is not something most people can stand. They ask me how Tom is and, when I reply that he is dying or in terrible pain, they look away, change the subject or try to tell me it will all turn out OK in the end, which it won’t. As T. S. Eliot says, we cannot cope with ‘very much reality’.1 So I try to be honest, but only with those I think can bear to hear it.

They ask me the same, anxious question, expressed in twenty different ways. It is most clearly articulated by our local funeral director, as we are walking together one morning towards a grave for a burial. ‘What is this doing to your faith, Alan?’ he says. I ask myself the same question. Like Job in the Bible, I cry out to God for an answer. I pray and plead and try to bargain, but like so much of Job’s experience, and that of countless ­others, I find God is silent.2

I ask myself: ‘What is the bottom line? What can I believe now?’

At first I think of a verse our local Methodist minister, also called Alan and a good mate, is fond of quoting: ‘Love never fails.’ It is from that most famous of passages about love, from St Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth (another version translates it as: ‘Love never ends’).3 As I ache with love for Tom and the anguish of seeing him in pain and the dread of losing him, I cannot believe that even death can overcome or destroy the power of this love. I am not always St Paul’s biggest fan, but he so often says things which ring true, are profound, powerful and eternal. To the Church in Rome, facing persecution, he writes: ‘For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’4

For a while this is my bottom line: ‘Love never ends.’ It is reinforced by that stirring passage from the Song of Solomon, the Bible’s sensuous love song:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

  as a seal upon your arm;

for love is stronger than death,

  passion fiercer than the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

  a raging flame.

Many waters cannot quench love,

  neither can floods drown it.

If one offered for love

  all the wealth of one’s house,

  it would be utterly scorned.5

Love will surely survive even death. And even death will not be able to overcome it.

That conviction does not last. I am not an optimist by nature. This is exacerbated by being from Yorkshire, where people don’t like to get ahead of themselves or think too positively. They are stoic, expecting the worst. I remember sitting my A level exams, many years ago. We would queue up outside the gym before each exam, waiting to be let in. Just before we went in, my friend Brian would turn to me and say the same thing, every time. He’d say, in a very matter-of-fact voice: ‘Soon be dead.’ It seemed to sum up the Yorkshire attitude to life. ‘Life is tough, so take it on the chin and prepare for the worst.’ Well, maybe it is my Yorkshire roots or maybe I am just a natural melancholic. Whatever it is, sadly, ‘love never ends’, in my psyche at least, most of the time is not an answer I can cling on to.

What if love does end? What if everything ends with death? What if God is, as Professor Richard Dawkins insists, just a human invention, created to fit our need for meaning, hope and significance? What if there is no God? What if death is, indeed, the end? I am back again to the same question: ‘What is this doing to your faith, Alan?’ What is the bottom line, for me?

Later, after Tom’s death, I go through a long period when I cannot engage with this question. I am too low, too grieved, too depressed. After he is dead there is nothing to do. All the med­ical equipment, the medicines, the special mattress, his Zimmer frame, the syringe driver, have been returned. Our daughters have gone to both live in Nottingham and there is no longer the daily round of doctors, nurses and other visitors. I do bits and pieces but I am in no condition to take on a full load of pastoral work or leadership. I am not sure what clinical depression is like, but I must be very near it. I sit in the bay window and think to myself: ‘I will never get up, or move from here, or speak to anyone, ever again.’

My wife and I are very different characters. I feel entirely empty. She feels full: overwhelmed, overflowing with grief, loss, anger and pain. Her emotions are very near the surface. I cannot bear my own pain, never mind Annie’s. It is all I can do to put one foot in front of the other. If she weeps, all I want to do is leave the room. It is no surprise to me that over 80 per cent of marriages, where there is the loss of a child, end in divorce. Our grief overwhelms us, and neither has anything to offer the other.

Unlike Annie, I feel empty and hollow inside. Numb. I have heard it said that depression is anger turned in upon oneself. Maybe that is what is happening to me. I feel myself closing down and sinking into depression. I sit on the window seat at home, looking out on to the garden as first autumn and then winter set in. Leaves fall and die. Everything is cold and bare, reflecting my mood. Beyond the garden, the rows of council houses, each holding their own problems, their own needs, look back at the vicarage where the vicar has nothing to offer them. ‘What is this doing to your faith, Alan?’ they repeat. For which read: ‘If you go down, Alan, what will happen to the rest of us?’