8 March

I was shaken awake this morning by my daughter asking if she could PLEASE go to heaven. Not the sort of thing a doting mother wants to hear, or indeed, deal with first thing in the morning. I had been thinking about Milla’s sad tale of a couple of days ago, about the Mum who died, and didn’t really want to think about death again on a bright March morning. But K has a macabre fascination with mortality, completely normal for her age, but hard to cope with nevertheless. She is a stubborn and persistent little soul, and talks constantly about her dead grandparents, who she never knew. My husband’s parents both died far too young, and I have tried hard to ensure that my children know about them and that they are included in our family tales. Unfortunately, I never knew them either, so I have few resources with which to answer their questions. Their photographs are slowly fading in the albums, and there’s only my husband left to make them smile and wave, like the magic pictures in the Harry Potter books. K is cross and frustrated by concepts far too big for her – or any of us, in fact – to understand. She senses that something has been taken from her, but she doesn’t know what. She has a formidable will, and would rip down the veil, if only she could see it. My son, more introverted and having grown out of the immediacy and storms of toddlerhood, is, at eight, slowly facing his own mortality, and that of his parents and surviving grandparents. My heart aches as I watch him
mull it all over in his head, his worries occasionally bursting out with questions like “How long do people generally live?” I remember the fears of eight. I remember him, at four, facing the loss of our most beloved family cat, with the same thoughtfulness. Henry was a huge cat, almost the size of a spaniel, but with the most gentle heart. He is buried under the sundial in the garden, amongst the rosemary (for remembrance) and the Good King Henry I’ve planted around him. James gathered shells and flowers to put with him, like grave goods, and studied a book I’d bought which had pictures of the spirit of a dead cat flying up to the sun (Goodbye Mog, by Judith Kerr – I would recommend it). I remember the illumination and joy on his face as he realised that the spirit had gone somewhere, just nowhere he could see. My daughter won’t be fobbed off with mysteries or maybes; she can’t remember Henry – he died the week before she was born – but often demands that we dig him up so she can see that he’s dead. We adults recoil at the gruesome idea, but it is of course entirely natural for her to ask. James, as a proper country boy, may now deal with the deaths of animals in a matter of fact and practical manner, but I know he walks quickly past the house next door, empty and lonely since our neighbour died a couple of months ago. He was a very old, gentle and courteous man who had lost his wife to cancer and both his girls, in a cruel twist of fate, to multiple sclerosis. For years he had run the Butchers shop in the village, always up at 5.00 am, until he retired, in his late eighties, and within six weeks could no longer walk unaided. Within four months he died, his purpose in life gone, along with his family. James was subdued over his death; Katherine cross that he was no longer waving to her.

On a beautiful morning like today, we often walk to school through the churchyard, green and ancient and slumbering. Primroses and anemones peep through the long grass. My boy, his head stuffed with times tables, football and absorbed with the demands of his busy life, does not look around much. K is singing, lost in being three. It is only me, anxious and adult, who tiptoes through, my heart constricting as always as I see the tiny mound for my friend’s days-old son. Our neighbour is buried here too, alongside many generations of his family. Their name is on the war memorial on the green, too, and when I pass them there I feel the familiar frisson of horror to think of those boys, ripped from their world of ploughs and harvests, lying among the poppy fields.

My girl, so vivid in her pink coat and full of fresh spring air, has no thought for the dead lying so close. She only has time for life now, and claps with delight to see the single purple crocus flowering on the baby’s grave.