18

Blessed

Birthdays come and go. More grandchildren are born: Lucia and Ximena. Grandchildren Tom will never know. Grand­children who will never know Uncle Tom, though we regularly talk with them about him. He is part of our conversation. Part of the ongoing story of our lives. New people are added to our circle of family and friends. We grow older and change. The world changes. There is sorrow as well as joy: the tragic loss of baby Esther. Tom, though, remains the same. It is a strange paradox. He journeys on inside us. He is part of who we are. Yet he is always 21.

People give us books to read about coping with grief. Most of them are unfit for human consumption. They often depict ­people strengthened, renewed and rejoicing following their ordeal. The worst ones paint a God who ‘loved Tom so much that he took him for himself’. What sort of despotic, despicable God is that? A God who treads roughshod over our love for our son and his love for us, and snatches him away, like some selfish ogre? Few books seem to face up to the reality of grief and death. Few books can stay with lament, with the suffering and pain of Good Friday. They always seem to want to rush on to Easter Sunday, to a victorious, happy ending, without the desolation, the silence, the nothingness of Holy Saturday. With­out the ongoing, open wounds. Without appreciating that, without death, there can be no resurrection. There is resurrection, but it doesn’t usually happen, for me at least, after only three days.

C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, an account of his wife’s death is a welcome, if painful, exception – a raw and honest narrative of the pain of the loss of his wife and of his struggle with faith.1 Another is a book already mentioned, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son,2 but these are rare exceptions.

September 2004 – another Ryder Cup. Europe’s biggest ever margin of victory: 18½ points to 9½. A brilliant performance and a fantastic result. Bernhard Langer, the European captain, when interviewed afterwards, says simply: ‘We creamed ’em.’ Yet, the following week I feel terrible, plunged into a deep, dark place of depression and anger. I cannot understand why. Then I remember why. What happens the week after you win the Ryder Cup? Answer: your son dies.

Three years on from Tom’s death, Annie and I drive in to Cambridge and park the car by the Green Dragon pub. We walk across the footbridge and out along the path by the side of the river until we reach Tom’s tree and bench. We sit down and look out over the river. Our view is partly obstructed by a boat tied up a few feet away from us. As we sit, quietly, saying nothing, a kingfisher appears, perched on the bush to our right. Then it flies down and perches on the mooring rope, just in front of us, not more than ten feet away. Kingfishers are not that rare, but to see one so close is extraordinary. Usually, all we see is a flash of colour streaking low over the water, but now the blue and gold of its feathers shimmer in the sunlight before us. All our senses are heightened as we watch it dive down into the river and then back up on to the rope, again and again. We sit quietly, watching, waiting, for about 20 minutes. We feel privileged to be here. Our rational minds dismiss it, but it seems like a visitation; a sign. These sorts of experiences are like glimpses of God: glimpses of hope, of resurrection, of assurance. They are rare, but they help sustain us. I am reminded of ‘Folk Tale’, a poem by that grumpy, depressive Welshman, R. S. Thomas. It is about prayer, based on the fairy tale of Rapunzel. He ­imagines himself at the foot of a tall tower, throwing prayers, like gravel, against a distant window, without any response. Yet he concludes:

I would have refrained long since

but that peering once,

through my locked fingers,

I thought that I detected the movement

of a curtain.3

For me, too, very occasionally, I think I detect the movement of a curtain. That is just about enough.

Exactly a year later there is a knock on the door. It is my friend, Hugh. ‘I’ve just come round to say that I am thinking of you especially today,’ he says. He has remembered. I had forgotten.

In my work I meet others who have lost sons and daughters. Many are sudden deaths – accidents, suicide, murder. Deaths where the first thing you know is the policeman on the doorstep. No opportunity to say farewell. No opportunity to make things right. Sometimes they are deaths where the last word spoken has been a bitter one; where relationships are left unresolved, unhappy. Relationships which can never now be mended. People rightly fear cancer and the painful death it often brings. For Tom it was indeed a terrible, painful and untimely death. For us, too, it was pure agony and heartbreak, seeing him suffer, day after day. Yet I am deeply thankful for the time we were privileged to share with Tom, and with each other, through those dark days of his dying. We took the time to say all that needed to be said. We sat with him, cared for him, held him and were at his side as he breathed his last, leaving all else aside in that Sacrament of the Present Moment.4 Such times are precious, important, of immense value. I do not in any way thank God for Tom’s illness and death. I wish to God he were here with us now. I do, however, thank God for Tom’s precious life and for time we spent together in the months of his dying – time with Tom and time with each other.

Tom’s death has strengthened the bonds between us. This is not always the case. Grief can be destructive, a breaker of relationships. Often there is recrimination, anger, blame. Sometimes people are utterly crushed by loss and never recover. Few marriages survive the death of a child. We are lucky, blessed. Each of us, in different ways, receives ongoing support from a circle of people around us who love us and stick with us through thick and thin. ‘Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.’5 Friends, colleagues, the church community, people in the medical and caring professions: they help us in practical ways, in listening to us and being with us, in remembering us and praying for us, in laughter and in re-engagement with the normality and the joy of living.

We are, for the most part, able to be open and honest with each other, though this is often far from easy. And we are, generally, not ashamed or afraid to ask for help. We are fortunate to be inheritors of good models of stable, strong relationships, from my parents in particular, which provide us with the commitment and belief to stick it out. We feel we owe it to Tom to make the best of the gift of life. Determined to love each other and to live as well as we can, as though each day were our last, trying to make a difference, for the better, that we ever lived at all. Unlike so many families, which end up torn apart, destroyed, by grief and death, we are lucky and blessed.

After Tom’s death, Liz and Jo decide to live together. It is not just a short-term move. They still live within five minutes’ walk of each other, in and out of each other’s homes, now with their husbands and children. Ben decides to go to university in Nottingham, to be near his sisters, and stays there for several years. Though now in London, he is regularly back and forth. Annie and I will go and live in that same area when I retire, along with Shirley, another member of our family. ‘Each other’ is of huge importance. We often fail to realize just how important it is, until it is threatened or lost. More important than that attractive career move which takes you to the other side of the country, if not the world. More important than the lovely house you have seen, many miles away on the other side of town. For in the end ‘We’ are much more important than ‘I’. Also, without ‘We’ there can be no meaningful ‘I’. Rediscovering the importance of stability6 and commitment in relationships has been, and is, a huge blessing to us.

Perhaps surprisingly, much of the time we are indeed thankful. Thankful for Tom’s life. A life which is not just measured in years but in quality of relationships and in its lasting impact on us and on others. Would it have been better if he had never lived, and so spared us the pain and the grief of his death? Certainly not! I am profoundly grateful for our 21 years with Tom, for all the love and laughter and generosity he shared with us. Love and laughter and generosity that live on inside us and continue to bless us.

I recall hearing Desmond Tutu speaking in Cambridge, before the end of apartheid. He talked about standing with a family in Soweto, powerless to do anything, as a bulldozer smashed down the home where they had lived for many years. The home that contained all their worldly goods. As the house was crushed flat, he suggested they pray together, but, as this tragedy was happening, he could not think of anything to say. After a time of silence, the man whose home had just been destroyed prayed: ‘We thank you, O God, that you love us.’

Thankfulness, gratitude, an ability to count one’s blessings. Such attitudes are not always easy to foster, but they make a huge difference to how we experience life, even in the face of tragedy. Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and psychologist, insisted that how people coped with the concentration camp depended largely on their inner attitude, which was the only thing they could control.7 We have a choice. We do not have to submit to bitterness, resentment and self-pity. George Herbert, the seventeenth-century clergyman and poet, wrote:

Thou that hast given so much to me

Give one thing more: a grateful heart.8

I am reminded, too, of Ernesto, whom we met, years ago, in Embarcación. He had been to the regional hospital in Salta, but they were unable to do anything for his cancer, so he was heading home to die. He stayed with us while waiting for a lift home to his tiny village, deep in the remote, semi-arid, Chaco area of northern Argentina. Annie asked him one day, as they ate breakfast together, if he had any children. ‘Yes,’ he replied, with a warm smile, ‘one living and eight with the Lord.’ Then he told her how the eight children had all died within a fortnight of each other during a measles epidemic. The only one living was born afterwards. Yet, far from being bitter, disappointed, resentful, he is thankful to God for his life and for his family. He is thankful, content and at peace within himself. He is patiently waiting for a truck to arrive. Waiting to go home to die. Waiting to go home to the ‘land of the living’,9 where he is certain he will see them all again.

I do not think I am in denial of grief, or in denial of Tom’s death or of other times of pain, loss and sorrow, which all of us must face in life. I am not always able to see it, but I have a great deal to be thankful for. A very great deal. I am richly blessed. So, I will strive to resist allowing bitterness, resentment, disappointment or anger to fester: things which ultimately destroy me and destroy my relationships with others. Instead I will seek to foster gratitude, to be thankful, to count my blessings. Because I am indeed richly blessed. Because, in any case, it is simply a better way to live.

10 October 2012, the tenth anniversary of Tom’s death. Annie, Liz, Jo, Ben and I park the car and make our way across the footbridge. We walk along the footpath by the river, picking up conkers and putting them in our pockets, just as Tom would have done. The tree looks in good shape. It is, hopefully now, beyond the size at which it could easily be vandalized. We wonder how long it will be before it, too, produces conkers? Many years yet, I think. We stand by the river and throw in the roses we have brought, watching them float away, as the current gently carries them downstream, beyond our sight. We sit on the bench. There is just enough room for all five of us to fit, arms around each other. We sit for a long time, saying nothing. There is no kingfisher today.

At last we get up to leave. Before we go, we take one long last look at the small brass plaque screwed on to the bench. It is tarnished and weathered. Why didn’t we bring some brass polish? We always seem to forget it. Still, the engraved words are clear. It says all we need to say. In the end, all that remains of us is love.

 

In memory of

Tom Hargrave

1981–2002

We loved him and he loved us