Shorn of the rituals of old, death maroons us in grief
The pain of bereavement is worsened by isolation, but few of us now know how to speak about their own - or others' - loss
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/02/death-grief-bereavement?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
My father died just before Christmas. He was nearly 80; he had been ill. Intellectually and rationally there should have been nothing startling about his death. It is part of the pattern of things. Yet I have been as stunned by his death, and the utter absence of him, as if I never knew that human beings had a lifespan.
I did understand that people die. I didn't understand how the loss would feel. Perhaps it's something one can never grasp until it has happened, because the imagination refuses to go there. But it's also that death has been so removed from our daily experience that it has become almost embarrassingly private. We have gone from the strict and public mourning rituals of the Victorian era, with widows in heavy black clothes for a year and a day, and men wearing black armbands to signify loss, to having no mechanisms to signal our sadness at all.
When it happened I realised that I, like many of us, had neither the public ritual nor the private knowledge to tell me how to get through this. I needed to talk to those who had already lived through it, and who could tell me what had helped them. I wanted to talk about my father with those who had cared about him. Lastly, and almost most importantly, I wanted the close friends of mine who had never met my parents to know what had happened. And I wasn't sure how far it was reasonable to ask for any of this from anyone.
I couldn't think of anyone ever having messaged me to tell me that one of their parents had died. It's the kind of thing that comes up in conversation when you see someone, not something that you are notified of. So who was I to impose this news on others, especially at Christmas time. I didn't want to be the spectre at the feast.
I couldn't hope that many people would hear the news themselves. I don't belong to a church or a community that would provide such a structure. Much of the time we welcome the freedom of action that that implies. At times like this, though, it can be a loss. Mourners want to feel supported, but don't know what they can expect from others. Friends and acquaintances can be quite oblivious to those needs. In that gap there is room for much uncertainty and disappointment to grow.
One friend of mine was bereft when her stepfather, the only constant parent in her life, died young. She arranged the funeral, then felt abandoned. She found herself longing for the Jewish rituals others observed. "What I really wanted was for people to sit shiva with me - where friends and neighbours mourn with you, and bring food, for seven days. I didn't want to feel so alone." I didn't know this at the time. She, embarrassed by her need, kept it to herself. But it still hurts.
Over and over again people I talked to about this admit to having expected more from others than they received. Most just wanted more acknowledgment. They wanted acquaintances at the office or the school gate to express sympathy rather than pretending nothing had happened; they wanted cards to be sent, they wanted phone calls asking how they were, they wanted to talk about the person they had lost.
But I have also been struck by the way in which some people, while proudly rejecting formal rituals, expect everyone they know to have understood, by osmosis, that they should be following a very specific unwritten script. There can be a lot of resentment boiling away. Some are furious their friends didn't ask them out to social events shortly afterwards - "as if I was a leper!" - while others are furious that they did - "I don't know how they could be so insensitive!". Some are grateful for any expressions of sympathy; others are scathing about a remark they found clumsy, a letter that didn't sum up the dead person accurately, a card they thought was trite.
New technology has added to the minefield. An older generation expected, and received, handwritten letters upon a death. One man says that the many two-page, carefully composed letters that his mother was sent when his father died a few years ago were a real solace to her, and all have been preserved to be reread. In contrast, when his wife's father died, all she had were strings of text messages; nothing that she could keep. At first she was shocked. "All this death on my phone!" Then she decided it was the way things happen now. The next generation, after all, may do much of its mourning publicly, on Facebook.
But some feel miserably trapped between old traditions and new assumptions. One woman has never forgiven the friends who texted her after her boyfriend's accidental death. A recent widower doesn't like emails, for their lack of formality, but is grudgingly accepting of them if they are well thought out. He was livid, however, to receive one from an old friend which simply said, "Dear X, Words cannot express ..." No one would have sent such a letter. Technology had become an excuse for making no effort.
There are deep confusions here. Increasing numbers of us have rejected the old, codified forms of dealing with death in favour of something more personal, that we feel expresses both our grief and the character of the person who has died. Many funerals, like my father's, dispense altogether with priests or prayer, looking to literature, poetry and the story of a life to give meaning to death instead. Without the forms that tell people how to offer help, though, both the grieving and their friends can feel adrift and misunderstood.
Since we all insist on being such individuals, the only way through this is to be more honest and more generous with one another about what we would like, and the spirit in which it is accepted. The bereft can't expect their friends to be mind-readers, or express themselves with perfect empathy. I have been grateful for any and every message I have had, and am deeply sorry for the letters I didn't think to write in the past. The terrible fact of death is the loss of history, love, connection and meaning. The only consolation it offers is that the sympathy we are given and the sorrow we share can bring us closer to the living.
Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome: a stealthy killer
Suzanne Lowry's son, Max, died suddenly on the eve of his wedding. A year on, his mother shares her sense of loss – and her hope that others may be spared the same fate
- guardian.co.uk,
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/05/sudden-arrhythmic-death-syndrome?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
By eight o'clock on the evening before the wedding, the last jostlings in the table plan had ended and the numbers joining to dance after dinner had somehow been held to the level permitted.
I had seen the dress, hanging in its exquisite folds like a beautiful ghost, safely arrived from designer Georgina Chapman in New York (an old friend and schoolmate of the couple). Guests had gathered from far and near.
The bride, Jane, staying with her parents until the ceremony, made a goodnight call to her future husband (and my son), Max. He had just got back to their flat after a hard day's work at his studio, when he picked up the phone. They chatted briefly. "I love you," he said. And then, nothing, apart from a faint choking sound.
Across town, I was in my room, sending a few emails and looking forward to the next day. As the mother of the bridegroom, I reckoned, my role would be mainly to enjoy myself. That illusion faded when my hostess, Polly, burst in and thrust a phone into my hands. "It's Jane," she said. "Max is in an ambulance ..." I grabbed the phone and heard Jane say that he was on his way to Hammersmith Hospital and could I get there?
I don't remember leaving the house, only somehow being in a taxi. It dawned that I had no cash on me so we stopped at an ATM. As I waited for the notes to clunk out of the machine, I was thinking that perhaps we would have to postpone the wedding. A flickering hope.
At A&E I was shown to a room where I expected to see Max lying on a bed, but found only an anguished Jane holding her father's hand, tears streaming down her face. No one spoke. "Where is he?", I asked in panic. "Is he alive?" I spun around to find a doctor standing quietly by the door. "His heart stopped beating," he said gently. "We could not revive him."
Later during that long night Jane and I sat up with Polly, talking and weeping by turns, groping for comprehension. At dawn I went to bed, but my eyes seemed to be jammed open, "on stalks", like a cartoon character.
"You couldn't write this," Jane said. And after almost a year, this the first time I have tried. The aftermath of Max's death was so confused, and the fact of it so incredible, that even when - on what should have been his wedding day - I stood in the bleak little viewing room at the mortuary looking at him stretched out with something that looked like Grandma's velvet curtains draped over him, I could not believe it.
On the edge of his generous hand lying outside the cover I noticed a streak of green paint: a last reminder that Max was an artist. It was him and not him; here he was and yet here he was utterly absent. His hair was thrown back from his face; a small plastic tube was clenched in his mouth. I did not stay long, but left Jane talking and talking to him in a loving stream of consciousness, that she would never forget him, that he had shown her how to live.
That afternoon, most of the wedding guests, summoned by email and texts, walked en masse up Primrose Hill. At the top, Sam, the best man, addressed us and I began to understand just how much Max had meant to his legion of friends. "He was the cement in all our lives," Sam said, and at the end of his oration we all shouted "Max!" at the sky.
That was the first time that I felt suffused by a strange backwash of warmth, seeing off - briefly - the chill that was settling in me. The rush came again at the funeral, when even more - hundreds more - of his friends came to say goodbye. I have felt it many times since: early in the morning in my garden, or when I am with friends he loved, and sometimes when I am feeling low. Max specialised in the bear-hug, and I guess this is the best he can do from Over There.
So much has been written about death that I hesitate to add my spoonful of experience. It is a leveller, a common denominator, we are automatically signed up for it at birth. And yet its capacity to shock, and hurt, and bereave never diminishes - especially when, according to our hubristic programme, it comes too soon. As deaths go, Max had a good one: he had not suffered, he wasn't tortured or murdered, not wiped out in an accident, nor by a roadside bomb. He was at the peak of happiness and hitting his stride as an artist.
But the "good" aspects made his loss harder to take for those left behind, simply because he was young and seemed so fit and well. We were repeatedly told - by the coroner, the heart specialist's autopsy - that there had been nothing wrong with him. His heart was healthy, nothing toxic in his system, he was in good shape. At the inquest, the verdict recorded was simply "natural causes."
But there was a specific cause, and a stealthy one. He died of Sads - Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (sometimes called Sudden Adult Death Syndrome), an umbrella term for around a dozen conditions that kill at least 600 people under 35 a year in the UK. These deaths, linked to anomalies in electrical workings of the heart, have been compared to cot deaths in infancy. They have a special poignancy because there are few prior symptoms and the victims appear, like Max, to be in prime health.
Athletes on the sports field, a young girl thrilled by her first kiss, a teenager collapsing on to his birthday cake, a girl on her morning jog, somebody's son at the wheel, waiting for the lights to change - these are among the long roll of stories in the archives of Cry (Cardiac Risk in the Young). This charity works to raise awareness of Sads and helps to fund important research and a screening programme for under-35s.
Max's family and friends miss his presence every day - his smile, his warmth and humour. However, as an artist, he left his work behind. Next week, just ahead of the first anniversary of his death, some of his pictures and prints will be exhibited in London. It will be a celebration of his life and work, but also, it is hoped, will raise money for Cry, and their campaign to save others from his fate.
I'm a replacement child
When Maria Lawson's older sister burned to death aged four, her mother was told by the family doctor to have another child. Which is how Maria came to be born, and – unbelievably – christened with the same name as her dead sibling
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/18/replacement-child-sister-accident?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
During a game of hide-and-seek when she was five, Maria Lawson came across a box of brand new toys in the back of her mother's wardrobe. Inside was a wooden train painted bright red and yellow, and a striped spinning top, as pristine as the day they were bought.
As much as she would have loved to play with them, the little girl knew to put them back in the box, and never said a word to anyone.
Maria says: "I already knew who the toys belonged to: the 'other' Maria. My big sister with the same name who burned to death before I was born. She'd been given them at Christmas, a few days before she died at the age of four. A spark from the fire in our front room set fire to her nightdress as she played with the new toys and she was burned alive. I was born to be her substitute."
Today, Maria is a stylish, gregarious woman of 56, who runs her own interior design company in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
But her life has been defined – and overshadowed – by that single spark that flew out of the flames two years before she was born in 1955.
Maria was born as a "replacement child" – the term used for those conceived by parents to fill the void left by an elder child who dies. As if she could seamlessly slip into the shoes of her dead sister, Maria was even given the same name as the sibling who was lost. But instead of being a salve for her mother Nina's suffering, her existence instead seemed to be a daily torment.
In turn, it has left Maria with profound feelings of worthlessness, which have blighted her life ever since and resulted in three shattered marriages, and difficult relationships with her own children.
"I was called Maria – but it was made clear to me very early on that I could not live up to the first Maria, who was an angel in every way. I was told she was the perfect child with blond curls, who was brave and fearless and always did exactly what she was told.
"I was the dark one – with brown eyes and dark hair. I was a quiet, shy, reclusive child. Yet still my mother told me: 'God has taken away my angel and given me a devil in her place.'"
Looking back now, such cruelty seems almost incomprehensible. But as Maria now acknowledges, the tragedy happened in a very different era. Postwar Britain was a country where many had suffered personal losses, and the expectation was that everyone just got on with it.
There were other reasons that her mother Nina never recovered from her daughter's death. The stylish daughter of a wealthy Catholic family, she met her husband, Cyril, a sailor with the British navy, when he had pulled into port near her home in southern Italy at the end of the war.
Although they fell in love, she later claimed she had been lured to Britain by promises of a grand mansion with "swans swimming on the lake". Instead, she arrived to find her new home was a council terrace in Manchester.
Trapped in the marriage by her strict Catholic faith and unable to bear the shame of returning to her family, she stayed – but she made no secret of her resentment of her situation.
Introspective and intense, she was also a woman who made few friends. She never really mastered English, always speaking in heavily accented Italian, which made her hard to understand.
When the first Maria died, aged four, Nina had just given birth to her fourth child, John. She also already had two twin girls, Elsa and Margaret, six.
Much of what the surviving Maria knows about that cold January morning is what she learned through fragmented conversations over the years. It was rarely discussed in the family. Even now she says her twin sisters, aged 65, still cry when they talk about it.
"From what I know, my father had just lit the fire in the front room before he went to work," she says.
"My mother was upstairs feeding the newborn baby while the girls played with their Christmas toys. Maria was playing in the middle of Elsa and Margaret and there was no fire guard. A spark landed on Maria's nightdress.
"In those days, nighties weren't fire-retardant and hers went up in flames. My sisters were in mute shock and just didn't know what to do. When they started screaming for my mother to come downstairs, she didn't believe them.
"Maria managed to crawl in flames to the bottom of the stairs. When my mother did come down, she found Maria's charred body, on the bottom step."
Nina tried to put out the rest of the flames with her bare hands before running out on to the street. "But in those days people didn't have phones so it took about half an hour for the ambulance to come. By the time the crew arrived, she was repeatedly beating her head against the wall."
Covered with 95% burns, Maria later died in hospital, and so began a lifetime of blame and recrimination.
The twins were sent away. Every day for the first few months after the funeral, Nina would go to the Southern Cemetery in Manchester and sit by the grave as she rocked her son's pram. Often she would stay until the cemetery keeper told her he was closing up.
But her grief never lifted. Maria says: "My mother blamed everyone: My father for not putting the fire guard up and my sisters for not doing enough to save her, even though they were only six."
In those days, it was common practice for doctors to tell families who had lost children to have another baby as quickly as possible. When Nina went to her GP and was told having another child was the best way she could recover, she took his advice and got pregnant.
But it meant that even before her birth, Maria was required to step into a role that no one should ever be asked to fill. As a child, her earliest memories were that she was not good enough.
Looking back, Maria now believes that her mother's guilt that she could not save her little girl tortured her so much that "attack was her only form of defence".
"I was no consolation to her. She even claimed my father had raped her to conceive me. We never knew why she called me the same name. You'd never dare ask. That was just the way it was and I accepted it.
"Rather than being cherished, my mother would ignore me. I can remember getting a cake for my birthday at the age of six, but other than that I can only remember one or two hugs through my childhood. I just had to accept what I was given.
"I seemed to bear the brunt of it. My sisters quickly left home and married. My brother John was put on a pedestal because he was the son of the family.
"Dad was pretty henpecked and never spoke about the other Maria. My mother was a superb dressmaker and as the years went on opened up a shop. So Dad, who was a gardener, was the one who looked after me. He woke me up in the mornings, made me toast, washed my shirts and socks."
Maria's older sister Margaret Bryant agrees that Maria bore the brunt of her mother's deep depression. "It was a very sad household. There was no music, no laughter. If you don't have a happy mother, you can't have a happy child, and Maria got the worst of it."
Every Sunday, Maria would be taken on the bus by her mother to the place where her namesake was buried to put fresh flowers there. Bewildered, she would stand back and watch as her usually emotionless mother would kneel down and sob on the grave, marked with her own name.
There Maria would gaze upon the "face of an angel": the smiling image of a four-year-old girl with golden curls, which Nina had insisted on using to embellish the tombstone.
Maria says: "Often I would hear what a wonderful little girl my dead sister was, how she never answered back, how if you told her to stay somewhere, she wouldn't move an inch. Because she was four when she died, the first Maria never had the chance to become a fully formed person who made mistakes. But of course, I had plenty of opportunity to do that."
Feeling neglected and unloved, by 15 Maria had been caught shoplifting – she says her mother told the police she did not want her back – and as soon as she could, she left home.
By 19, she had fled her unhappy home to get married and soon had twin boys – but just as her mother had, she had difficulties bonding with them. With no model of a good mother to follow, she found it hard to express love. She went on to have three failed marriages.
"Maybe it would have been better if I had been born a boy. Probably if the accident hadn't happened, I wouldn't have got married so young. I was shy and insecure and had no sense of self-worth. But then maybe if my sister hadn't died, I wouldn't have been born.
"Because I felt so unloved, I couldn't believe in love. I had no confidence with men. It's taken me all my life to get over the fact my mother did not love me for who I was but that I was born to order because someone else died."
Consultant psychologist Dr Pat Frankish has a special interest in parents' reactions to the loss of a child and says difficulties forming relationships are very common in replacement children.
She says: "There can be serious interference in the development of their identity. If replacement children are brought up as substitutes, that stops them establishing a sense of themselves as a valued person, which makes it very hard to enter into relationships where they are equally matched."
This situation is made harder by the fact that the child who dies is elevated to the status of unattainable perfection, says Frankish, which the subsequent child can never live up to. "For parents, imagining their children as an angel in heaven is a way of defending themselves against the reality of a body in a coffin."
While in the 1950s, parents were expected to get over the loss of a child, she says that it is now accepted that parents never fully recover.
It is likely that Maria's mother suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, made worse by the fact she had to wait for half an hour for an ambulance to come to her daughter's aid. Because it was not addressed, this experience then got deeply buried.
Indeed, even at 93, unable to hear and with Alzheimer's, Nina, say both daughters, still weeps over the first Maria, but remembers little else.
Margaret says: "Our mother still has her picture with a little candle next to it, like a shrine. There is room for four bodies in Maria's burial plot. To the end, our mother refused to let my father, who died from cancer, be buried there. Now she says she is looking forward to joining Maria there and seeing her in heaven."
As her mother nears the end of her life, Maria says that while she finds it hard to love her, she is closer to finding forgiveness.
"I think if she'd had counselling, we all would have stood a better chance. By giving me Maria's name, she was denying it had ever happened. But back then, you were just expected to carry on.
"It's taken me a long time to understand why she was the way she was to me. But now I understand she had just had a baby a few days before, her hormones were raging, she had no family support, or anyone she could talk to in her own language.
"I would have loved to have known Maria and had a sister nearer to my age, although who knows if I would have been born if she had lived.
"As a child, I imagined what she was like all the time. I was proud to be named after her. It made me feel closer to her. But the tragedy is that by losing a sister, I lost my mother as well."
Death of a daughter
Wendy Perriam has faced every mother's greatest fear. Her daughter Pauline died of cancer three years ago, aged 42, leaving two young sons. Wendy's chief consolation is that her daughter defied medical expectation by living even that long
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/16/wendy-perriam-daughter-death?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
The wind tugged at my hair as I stood at the far end of the harbour wall at Newhaven, on the Sussex coast, gazing out at the open sea. In my hand was a small glass bottle, containing two letters. One was to my daughter, Pauline, who had died exactly a year before, on 27 August 2008. The other was to anyone who might find the bottle, should it drift off course, begging them to send it on its way.
Its destination was Whidbey, a small island off Seattle, where Pauline, a naturalised American married to an American, is buried. The cemetery is a beautiful, untrammelled place, lapped by waves and shaded by tall trees, but it's 5,000 miles away, so I cannot make regular visits as I would if she were buried here.
Was I crazy to imagine that a helpless bottle could find its way down the Channel, into the Atlantic, then on to the Pacific, and eventually wash up at the Puget Sound – an interminable, unlikely journey – and not be smashed to smithereens on rocks, or blitzed by boat propellers? Yes, undoubtedly. But I, a grieving mother, unable to visit the grave in person on this first anniversary, felt a deep need to reach my daughter, however irrational the means. So I asked my two grandsons, Ned and Will, to watch out for the bottle and let me know if and when it arrived, even if it took a year.
Two days later, I received an email from a man in Southampton, who had found the bottle and, having read my letter, sent it on its way again. The next email, a month later, was in a foreign language. The bottle had washed up at Nazare and again been hurled back into the sea by a kindly Portuguese person. The chances of my fragile little bottle travelling so far must have been a million to one, so I dared to hope that, by some stroke of luck, it might reach its destination. But that was the last I heard of it.
"Well, what did you expect?" a friend demanded. Yet, irrational or not, I intend to repeat the exercise. It seems important to make some gesture on every anniversary of the death; a pilgrimage to the sea and a communing with a daughter who lies cradled by another, far-off ocean.
Letters are important. Pauline left me one to read after her death – a source of both deep sadness and deep solace – and I placed one in her coffin, reminding her that my love for her would never die. I also helped Ned compose a short note to his mother, to be placed against her heart.
Pauline also left letters for her sons, and we worked on these together in the last stage of her illness. She wanted the boys, then 10 and seven, to have a written testimony of her love; fearing that, as they grew older, their memory of her might fade. I suggested she tell them about their births, as once she was no longer there, no one else would know the details. Their father, her first husband, had died at 42, of a heart attack. I hoped they might find it comforting to read how overjoyed she was to hold them in her arms for the first time.
Of course, I was remembering her birth, and my own elation when my longed-for baby was delivered safe and well. My triumphant smile seemed to spread through my whole body and send champagne bubbles frisking through my bloodstream. I'd been told in my early 20s that I would never have a child and, though I did conceive, I lost the baby at 12 weeks.
A few months later, I became pregnant again. However, at the critical 12-week stage, I had a haemorrhage and was informed by an obstetrician that the foetal heart had stopped beating. My mother, a devout Catholic, stormed heaven for a miracle and, incredible as it sounds, the foetal heart restarted two days later. Hence my joy on 31 December 1965, when Pauline was delivered healthy and very much alive.
Flash forward 42 years to another hospital, my daughter's deathbed. The palliative nurse, Alicia, explained that Pauline could still hear, although she couldn't talk or move, and that my voice was the one she knew best, having listened to it in the womb. So I, her father, and her husband, Herb, spoke to her throughout the long, protracted process of her death. We did our best to support her as she slipped, alone, into that "undiscovered country"; trying to make her feel that, however terrible the parting, she was surrounded by our love.
Her end was peaceful. She had been terrified of choking to death – a possibility once the cancer spread to her lungs. She also had a horror of being buried alive and begged me to ensure that she was completely "gone" before any undertaker approached. No mother expects to have such conversations with her child, but Pauline's illness changed the nature of our bond. Before, we might discuss her career, or friends, or future hopes. Now we discussed her fear of death and doubts about – yet yearning for – an afterlife. She knew I'd understand, as I had wrestled with such issues since my teens and at least we were blessed in having time to address the important matters, including her sons' future.
In fact, realising how much worse it was for two small boys to have their mother so gravely ill helped me to cope myself. With their father dead, it had been an appalling shock for them when, in November 2006, a cancerous tumour was discovered on her tongue (extremely rare among non-smokers and the under-65s; Pauline was only 40 and had never smoked).
Radiation in the mouth is one of the most brutal of cancer treatments. Yet, throughout the gruelling weeks of treatment, Pauline never indulged in self-pity. All the pain she suffered, I seemed to experience myself, as if she were still part of my own body; still in the womb. I hope that at least it helped her feel a little less alone, knowing that we were so closely linked, in body and in mind.
Her remarkable courage set me an example that I draw on even now. Despite my natural cowardice, I knew I must be worthy of her. Once, I had taught her how to read, how to sew, how to plant nasturtiums. Now she was teaching me far more important life lessons. Yet I ached to take the cancer from her; even to die instead.
In 2007, when she was still expected to survive, I wrote a short story about her illness and deliberately gave it a happy ending. The story, entitled Worms, was prompted by my grandson Will, whom I was taking to the school bus. As we walked along, we kept seeing earthworms stranded on the sidewalk and Will insisted on stopping to put each and every one safely back into the soil. "Worms mustn't die," he told me, with deep feeling – not needing to spell out who else mustn't die.
He and Ned matched their mother's courage throughout the slow, relentless encroachment of the cancer. Ned read to her when she was too weak to pick up a book; held cool flannels against her burning forehead, urging, "Be brave, Mum!" Obviously, though, both boys were prey to hideous fear and the vividness of their imaginations was frequently brought home to me. On the day of her death, Will asked, "Is Mum a ghost now?", and later, during a family discussion about a suitable memorial for the grave, he remarked, "We can't plant a tree because the roots would get tangled up with Mum's feet."
No one could deny that the death of a child – even a grown-up child – is profoundly traumatic. My sister, who lost a son of 33, told me, a few years ago, that she re-experienced the grief every single day. It was no worse, she said, on his birthday or the anniversary of his death – it was a constant, daily, gnawing sense of loss.
At the time, I didn't fully understand. Only now do I grasp the truth of her words; waking daily to the reality of having lost my daughter; wrestling nightly with gruesome images of her thin, grey, lifeless body, or the heartlessly glossy coffin that seemed to mock her own bruised and shrunken state.
Yet, since she died, I've discovered tangible ways of remaining close. Herb (who has formally adopted Ned and Will) gave me her coat as a comfort blanket for the harrowing flight home. I continue to wear it, seeming to sense her presence in the fabric.
My greatest consolation, though, is that I had my child for 42 years – 42 years longer than predicted at the outset. I keep a sort of scrapbook in my head, full of Pauline, as baby, toddler, schoolgirl, undergraduate, career woman, bride and then mother in her turn. Even death cannot expunge the fact that I enjoyed my daughter at all those different stages – and, yes, even now, I strive to keep her vibrantly alive.
Rose Callaly: 'I heard my daughter's voice say: 'He did it'
Rose Callaly's daughter, Rachel, was brutally murdered in 2004. At first it seemed a burglary had gone terribly wrong, but three years later Rachel's husband was convicted of the killing. How have the family coped?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/17/rose-callaly-rachel-oreilly-murder?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
Nine days after her daughter Rachel was murdered, Rose Callaly felt she knew, with sudden shocking certainty, that her son-in-law had done it. Rachel O'Reilly, the 30-year-old mother of two young boys, had been bludgeoned to death at her house, just outside Dublin, on 4 October 2004. The scene had been staged to look like a burglary that had got horribly out of control.
In those days afterwards, remembers Callaly, as her tight-knit family struggled to come to terms with the shock, Rachel's husband, Joe O'Reilly, remained cool, cold even. "Up until she was buried," says Callaly, in the living room of her house in Dublin, "I was too much in shock to even consider who might have done it. In the beginning, my heart would break for him [O'Reilly]. I remember the day Rachel was buried, the police said to him that they wanted to come to the house the following day to identify what was missing [in the 'burglary']. The day after the funeral, he went and we spoke to him that evening and he said he felt a great peace being in the house. He asked us if we wanted to go."
Callaly had no intention of going back to the house where just over a week earlier she had found her daughter's body in the bedroom, bloody and unrecognisable, but her husband, Jim, said that if it had helped O'Reilly start to come to terms with his wife's death, then maybe it would help them too.
At the house, O'Reilly, as she recounts in her book about the killing, investigation and trial, was behaving bizarrely and upsettingly, re-enacting how he thought the person responsible must have killed Rachel, even acting out the blows to her body that would have produced the blood that was still spattered on the walls. Back downstairs, he made a show of playing the answering machine messages, many of which were from himself. What Callaly heard in her head, instead, was Rachel's voice, saying: "He did it."
"I know this sounds strange but I could hear her," she says. "It was like someone kicking me here." She puts a hand to her stomach. "I remember thinking to myself that I was really losing it. But I came out of the house that day and I knew in my heart. I had no doubt whatsoever that he had done it."
That night, after their eldest son (Rachel was the middle of their five children) had gone back to his house, Callaly told her husband of her fear. He became very upset, and pleaded with her not to talk about it to anyone else. "He said people react to grief in different ways and that Joe was just behaving as if he was in shock because he was so cool and calm. I couldn't speak to Jim about it after that because he would get so upset, but I said, 'I'm not going to say it to you again, but I'm just asking you to be open-minded.'
"It probably took Jim a long time to come round to the fact that he was capable of doing that. It was the worst-case scenario for us. Eventually, he came around to it – he was just quietly having to accept facts – and it nearly destroyed him." In those early weeks, O'Reilly had regularly visited Callaly's house. "I couldn't look at him," she says. "And he knew I knew."
The police soon ruled out the burglary theory, and six weeks after Rachel's death, Joe O'Reilly was arrested. After a long investigation, he was convicted of her murder in July 2007, though he has never admitted the killing. How does Callaly feel about him now? "I try not to think about him, and if he comes into my mind I put him out. I could be angry, but that would waste energy I don't have. He is still saying he didn't murder Rachel, and I can't explain how important that it is, that if he just admitted that he did it, it would be a huge burden lifted."
Clearly the centre of her large family, Callaly is warm and welcoming, stopping to offer more coffee and plates of sandwiches and cakes. "When I look back, I wonder how I kept sane through it all," she says, when she sits down again. "It changes you for ever. I'm not the person I was. Your perception of life changes. I always felt lucky and I knew it. Now, I have a fear of the future. I certainly don't look forward as much. I'm very sensitive now, in lots of ways, about people and interaction with people. I just find I'm not as happy a person as I was. Our lives now bear no comparison to how they were almost six years ago."
The family dealt with it differently, she says. "Although 95% of me knew that they never would, I used to be afraid the lads would do something [to O'Reilly]. I even thought things myself that I never thought would ever enter my head – I would feel I wanted to kill him. Thank God, that passes. Declan is very quiet, and he would be sitting there and I would look over and he would be in floods of tears. Paul had a different way of dealing with it – he would get angry. Anthony and Ann were absolutely devastated."
It isn't unusual for couples to break apart after the death of a child, even an adult child, and Callaly admitted that her relationship with her husband became very difficult. "In the beginning, you take it out on the ones closest to you. Jim and I were doing that, which was very hard. He was very angry for a long time, angry at everything. I remember he was either prostrate with grief or he would fly off the handle. That's just the way he got through it." He went back to work, running his plumbing business. "I think he tried to keep busy. He still does, because it keeps his mind on other things. I found it very hard in the beginning. I wasn't sleeping, and when I did get to sleep, I didn't want to wake up. I didn't want to go out, but I couldn't sit in the house. I would go for walks, and many times I would be walking along in floods of tears. Sometimes I thought I was over the worst, but I wasn't. You reach your limit for a time, and then you gather yourself together again. That happens less as you go on, and I'd hate to have to go through that part of it again."
Jim recently started having counselling, and it has helped, she says. "I might, but I'm not ready yet," says Callaly. "I can talk for Ireland, and I think if you can talk, it helps because you're not holding it in as much."
She started writing her book, she says, as a way of processing information that seemed too surreal to deal with, and so that there was nothing she could ever forget. "It was incredibly painful to dig through all the stuff I had been trying to forget. At the time, it didn't feel like it was doing me any good but you realise you can't bury it for ever. In hindsight, it was therapeutic."
Writing also made her remember signs that things weren't all that they might have been in Rachel's marriage, that she had dismissed at the time; that brought a huge sense of guilt. "I know life doesn't always go smoothly for people, and you let it pass over."
She recalls that O'Reilly had been withdrawing from his wife's family in the months leading up to her death, and she had seen her daughter in tears after what she assumed was an argument. "It's only when I sat down to write and it was on the paper in front of me that I realised there were signs and I didn't make more of them. I keep thinking, why didn't I do something?"
When she talked to Rachel's friends, she found that none of them knew what was going on in Rachel's marriage, though she had given each little bits of information – that she wasn't happy, that O'Reilly, who at the trial was revealed to have been having an affair, was controlling and manipulative. "It was like they each had a bit of the puzzle but she didn't tell one person the whole picture. That I didn't realise something was up is the part I find really hard. I do regret that, but I don't know that, had I questioned Rachel, she would have told me."
Her grandchildren – she has four by her surviving children – keep her going. "When they are around, they really lift my heart. I don't dwell on anything else, I'm just thinking of them. You just feel life goes on and you look at the rest of the family and it's getting bigger. They are all so supportive of each other, which is a great help to Jim and I. We were very close already, but something like this does make you close ranks and makes you realise the importance of having support around you. It is particularly painful at family get-togethers, because Rachel would have been in the middle of it all – she was so family-orientated."
For all Callaly's warmth, there is a tangible sadness about her. "I do think of all the good times Rachel had, but she had better times to come. What she missed out on, and the horrific way she died, is what I think about most. When you realise that life has to go on, it becomes an acceptance, but you don't ever forget. It doesn't hurt any less, but you learn how to cope better with it. Life will never be the same. Before I go to sleep every night the last thing I think about is Rachel and every morning, the first thing that comes into my head is Rachel. It's always Rachel."
How we coped after my wife's murder
In 1992, Elizabeth Howe was killed by a stranger. Her husband Jeremy Howe explains how time – and love – helped him and their two daughters rebuild their lives
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/25/jeremy-howe-wife-elizabeth-murdered
In broad daylight at the University of York on Saturday 25 July 1992, the opening day of an Open University summer school, Dr Elizabeth Howe was stabbed to death in her study bedroom by a stranger. Elizabeth – Lizzie – was my wife and the mother of our two girls, Jessica, then six and Lucy, four. We were just an ordinary middle-class thirtysomething family leading a normal Guardian-reading life.
The murder smashed through that with the force of a hurricane. It destroyed Lizzie, a promising academic whose first book had been published weeks before. She was the love of my life and a wonderful mother. Jessica, Lucy and I were nearly swept away by the force of what hit us. Nearly 20 years on, all three of us are again normal people leading normal lives. How on earth did we cope?
A couple of days after Lizzie's death, when I was still reeling with the shock of what had happened – as well as struggling to come to terms with the fact that I, an averagely useless workaholic dad, was now the sole carer of our, my, two girls – a wise friend of ours made a suggestion that has stayed with me. That, in spite of what had happened, we weren't necessarily damaged, but that our lives would be different than if Lizzie were still alive.
At the time it didn't feel like that. It was as if we were stranded in the wreck of a car that had just been driven into by a 40-tonne truck. One of us was dead, the three survivors were battered. I had an image of all our worldly goods, our lives, lying scattered around the scene of the accident. I was just sitting paralysed in the wreckage. I just didn't know what to do and it felt as if our future had been smashed up in front of us. But my friend was right. I think our lives have been different, that we have not been damaged. But it was a close-run thing.
When Lucy was eight, the mother of one of her classmates died of cancer. "Daddy, I can't decide if it is better for your mummy to die like Mummy, which was so quick."
"No, darling, nor can I."
"I think it is better like the way Mummy died."
I hugged her.
Loss is one of the most difficult things to come to terms with, and I can't bear to think how tough it must have been for Jessica and Lucy – and Lucy's friend – to have no mother. It is bloody tough whichever way you skin it, but what I do know is that coming to terms with murder is in a different order to plain grief.
"So how did your wife die?" a colleague asked the other day.
As I write, I can feel that sense of being marooned on the pavement at the moment she asked the question: I take a deep breath, my heart begins to pound, my face goes red, my throat and chest tighten, "You don't want to know," I say, but once I have started I cannot hold back, some unstoppable force in my brain has been unleashed and I blurt out – against my judgment, which is saying "Stop! Avoid! Abort!" – that she was killed. I qualify killed – "Murdered" – and breathlessly babble out the whole story. The shock on my colleague's face is visible, "My God, Jeremy, I had no idea, I am ... so sorry ... so ... how terrible," and she bursts into tears on the street there in front of me. I don't know what to do or say, so I hug her although we barely know each other and I can feel myself wanting to cry – and I don't want to – so I start talking 19 to the dozen.
I feel shriven all day long. Nearly 20 years after Lizzie was killed, I still don't cope with it at all well. The details of Lizzie's death are like a horrible secret, but like the troll lurking under the kitchen table waiting to pounce and devour you, it is a secret that will come out. It has the malevolence of a cancer cell – it quietly grows and grows, and I know deep down that if I fail to respect it, it has the potential to overwhelm me.
When Lizzie died, my grief was a massive crater in the living room of my house. How do you live with that?
For years afterwards, there were times when I just wanted to beat the shit out of the man who murdered Lizzie. I knew that if I was in the same room, I would want to kill him. This is not healthy. I had never experienced anything like that before – a kind of uncontrollable, bubbling anger remote from anything in my experience. Hatred is exhausting. Only Lizzie's killer being put in prison for ever – albeit five years after her death – quelled my feelings and my fears. Knowing that he was out of harm's way – my harming him's way – lifted the burden of hatred.
The manner of Lizzie's death screwed me up. The sheer violence of it, the madness and the pointlessness of it, polluted me. When I think of Lizzie's terrifying last moments, my mind just shuts down. Her death blocked the way back to the happy memories of our love, so that the life that we had been leading, just a few days before, was emotionally unreachable and horribly tainted. It was painful to live with.
The police didn't help either. I went to York on the day after Lizzie's death to identify her body. They were perfectly polite and they offered their condolences, but they were formal and cool in their dealings with me. Why? Surely they could see that I was in a state of shock, how vulnerable I was? When I met the two detectives in charge of the case, it dawned on me that they were treating me as a suspect.
I knew I had nothing to do with Lizzie's death, but they didn't. Even though they had arrested the man who admitted to killing Lizzie, for all they knew I could have put him up to it. It was a chilling realisation. The next 45 minutes, while I "helped the police with their inquiries" was one of the worst, most frightening, episodes of my life. Because it was all done so politely, it was surreal – like the worst nightmares are surreal – but I sat there feeling that my life was collapsing around me.
Less than an hour later, I was free to go and get on with the rest of my life, but the damage was done. Whenever the police got in touch with me over the following few years – a regular occurrence because of the impending trial of Lizzie's killer – my anxiety levels hit the roof.
And the press? As far as I was aware, Lizzie's death was first reported that afternoon on the news bulletins on Radio York as "an unnamed academic has been found dead in her room on campus". Within an hour of my leaving the police station it was the headline, and by the middle of Sunday afternoon our street in Oxford was awash with journalists. Luckily, we were staying at my sister's in Norfolk, so not affected – except that it felt as if we were hiding from a prying world. Lizzie's death was Monday's front-page news. Seeing your life story paraded as a tragedy across the tabloids was a strange experience, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. It didn't feel connected to what we were going through: it didn't even feel like our story.
I was curious to see to whom they had talked about us. But most of all I felt a sense of relief that there was a public outrage about Lizzie's death. It made me feel better, that the world was sharing our disbelief. I felt cheated that by Wednesday it was no longer thought newsworthy. But it did mean that our story was firmly in the world out there, which made me feel very nervous about going out.
The hapless policeman who had been given the job of coming to the house to tell me at 1am on that awful Sunday morning had said that Lizzie had been hurt. He couldn't use the "m" word. It is one of the hardest things to say, and if it is hard to say – "My wife has been murdered" – imagine how hard it is to assimilate the reality of it into our lives.
You have to be one of a very select band of Jessica and Lucy's friends to be told what happened to their mummy. It is not that they don't want to talk about her – even 20 years on she is a part of our lives – but the shutters come down when the question of how she died is broached. I think all three of us have stratagems for avoiding the story, only sometimes, as with my poor colleague, they fail.
But we have assimilated it. As a family we saw a wonderful child psychiatrist who encouraged the girls to talk about their mummy, write about her, draw pictures of her, and make her death feel as much a part of their lives as her life was.
In myriad small ways she helped us to find ways to cope – so every night for years Jessica would say a prayer that was more like a phone call to God: "Dear Lord, thank you for the nice day I have had today and for looking after Lucy and Daddy and me. Can I talk to Mummy now ..." and she would then tell her mother everything she had done that day.
I found these prayers unbearably difficult to cope with, but the psychiatrist would talk about them with Jessica, and then tell me: "I am sorry, Mr Howe, but I think Jessica still needs to say prayers." I saw a psychiatrist myself, who taught me not to confront the massive black hole that seemed to threaten my life, but to live with it, skirt round it, peer into it, but to go no further. He turned the monster I had in my head of the man who killed Lizzie into a man who was sick, but when I started to show signs of feeling sorry for him, he told me to channel any compassion I had for him towards people who mattered. Both doctors were brilliant.
In the end, the solution to our problems was simpler than therapy. Time is indeed a great healer. The anger, the hurt and the strangeness of being on planet grief faded with time, and being a single-parent dad became a kind of normality. But, more fundamentally I think, as a family we laid ourselves open to what had happened, which is easier in a situation like ours – murder rather than cancer – because when your story is paraded across the front pages of the press there is nowhere to hide, so it makes you confront it. For a start, I had to – uneasily and reluctantly – tell the girls exactly what had happened to their mummy because if I didn't someone else would. In doing so, I discovered that truth, the facing up to it, the act of outstaring the awfulness of what had happened to us, might hurt like hell, but it doesn't do damage; it helps you heal. Truth is an astringent, it cleans wounds, it sets broken bones cleanly. And living openly with their mother's death bound Jessica, Lucy and me together with hoops of tempered steel.
In the weeks, months, years after Lizzie's death I found love like I have never found before – the love of family, of friends, the love of being a parent. Eventually I discovered, too, that I could still love Lizzie, but in a different way to before: I could love her through what she had given me and what she had given the children; and I could love her through what I saw of her in Jessica and Lucy too.
By realising that, I changed. Instead of staring down at the path I had been struggling along, I looked up, and in 1996 I met someone and fell in love. The day that Jennie moved in with us was the day I stopped calling myself a widower. It was the day my life became normal once more. I had picked myself up, dusted myself down and moved onwards.
If the marshlands are not restored... then the marsh people will fade into history, and our generation will be responsible for the deliberate extinction of one of the oldest races in the world 
