The London
Metropolitan police rang at 2pm on 6th February 2009.
I had been looking
out of my drawing room window across Killala bay and thinking what a beautiful,
calm day it was. The sea was a sheet of light grey-pink glass. Bartra, the
uninhabited island that separates our small bay from the Atlantic glowed white
along its edges, the tall rushes of grass on its dunes like soft, creamy mohair
in the distance. I was feeling lucky when I picked up the receiver.
“Your brother Tom
is dead.”
Tom was troubled
and we had a difficult relationship. There was less than a year between us in
age and he was the first person I remember loving. We knew each other side out
– we adored each other yet - we were not
speaking when he died.
I was devastated by
his death; flattened, depressed.
Veteren
grievers told me of their two year deadline.
“It was
two years before I could pick out a gravestone.”
“ - two
years before I could say their name out loud.”
“- two
years before I cried a tear.”
“- two
years before I could walk into a church .”
“- two
years before I was able to laugh again.”
I
didn’t believe them and yet - two years after that February morning, the
universal truth about death revealed itself to me: life goes on.
It was
spring in Killala after the worst winter I could remember. Much of workaday
hedging at the side of our house was killed by frost, but the most beautiful
flowers and shrubs survived. The frost thinned out the crowded daffodils on my
front lawn, and rewarded me with a yellow band of colour and the bluebells had turned
the ignored wasteland of trees and scrub at the back of our garden into a
magical woodland. The lilac and hawthorn interrupted my daily trips to the
composter with a sweetness that made me stop and smell the air. My peony roses were budding by March and the
gooseberries seemed almost big enough to harvest – a full month earlier than
previous years. The worst winter, in my lifetime at least, cleansed and
transformed my garden.
If I
think back to the day Tom died and the weeks after his death, I am carried back
to the moment and tears begin streaming down my face. I wish he had never died,
I wish he would come back – sometimes – in my darkest moments, I still wish I
could join him.
Most of
the time, however, I am Kate again – writer, mother, wife, and the woman I was
before it happened. I am a person who knows what it is to lose a brother but I
am no longer solely defined by it. The trauma, the drama, the terrible pain of
losing my brother has become absorbed into who I am. I have accommodated it. I have gone from
somebody who did not know what it was to lose a loved one, into someone who
does. In that sense, his death has added to my live, his loss has given an
extra dimension to who I am.
I don’t
know what I believe any more in the way of heaven and spirits and God, but I do
know that it doesn’t really matter what I believe.
All
that matters is the universal truth; alive or dead, people live in our hearts.
When they die they are alive only in how much we love them and honour them and
remember them.
They
can be spirits, floating about waving their invisible hands in front of our
faces, sending us messages from beyond the grave but if we don’t look, we won’t
see them.
They
can be simply gone, flesh and bone under the ground, grey dust - ashes on the
wind, but human love is consistent whether we believe in spirits or not.
A
photograph, a recollection, a family resemblance in a small child’s face can
keep our dead alive through memory and the feeling of loving them.
Time
heals and then it asks us to believe that if love is all there is – what does
it matter if those we love are actually dead?
If the love stays alive, surely that is the most important thing.
Because nothing is more tragic than the death of love and one thing I have
learned is that death makes good love stronger.
