Notable Death

Opening the front door bleary-eyed on the morning of the night before my sister stands with an unusually serious look on her face.

“Have you heard the news?”

“No, what?”

“Princess Diana is dead.”

It was the day after my birthday and just a handful of months following the death of my father.

The days of public mourning which followed felt like a dislocation.

People crying openly for someone they had never met let alone known. Why all this fuss? Nobody had turned a hair when my dad had died and seemed intent on returning to normal with indecent haste.

Grief is anything but rational.

This week Martin came round for dinner to record a trail for the new season of “Sideways”.

“Did you hear that Father Paul died?”

I hadn’t and it affected me.

I’d known him since I was seven and, much like many people think of the Queen, I had felt comforted by his presence on earth even if in later years, as he had lost his sight and been confined to a nursing home, I had not seen him.

I met him first when my grandfather was still alive when I pushed open the huge heavy oak door of the church that seemed, to my young eyes, as vast as anything I had ever seen.

In the years that followed I would often kneel in prayer beside my mother staring up at the magnificent stained glass east window at the end of the chancel.

I would think about eternity and try to imagine being somewhere forever in the truest sense of the word until I frightened myself with its intensity.

I stared at the window in 1997 as I said goodbye to my father and again a decade later as my mother joined him.

Father Paul confirmed me, married me, played chess with me the night that the IRA bombed The Hare & Hounds, and did not bat an eyelid if I tested my mothers declaration that, “God doesn’t mind what you wear to church” with the adornment of a “Black Sabbath” t-shirt to mass.

He provided a constancy that dwindles inevitably as those we look up to gradually leave us and move towards whatever it really is that lies beyond the chancel window.

Then, hot on the heels of Father Paul’s passing came news that the much-loved dog of a friend had come to the end of his life.

I found myself telling colleagues that Toby, my collie-lurcher rescue who lived to age 17 and whom I have been without for over fifteen years, is still in my thoughts every single day.

My sister and I exchange texts on the afternoon of the Queen’s death bemoaning the barrage of tributes that seem almost to suffocate and leave no room for the grief that seems to spring from nowhere and is hard to explain.

Societal grief is different from personal bereavement because there is strength and comfort in the collective mourning with others who share something of what you experience.

Personal grief is mostly terribly lonely.

Perhaps part of the reason we can feel so affected by the death of a monarch we did not know but was so familiar to us is that it reminds us of all the loss we have endured and will have to face in the future and that it requires processing in some way.

Some people will devour the hours of television and radio tributes, others will lay flowers at the gates of the palace. Some hardy souls will queue for hours to file past as the Queen is laid in state.

All of us though will have something personal that this communal experience reflects and there might be some who find the best way of dealing with it is to write it all out.