In the Midst of Life

and still, nor feel the aura of calm and peace, in fact, holiness, that surrounds the newly dead. They were left to invent their own frightening stories.
    And when they returned home, Granny would be gone, with no last days in which to tell her they loved her, no chance to say goodbye, no time to adjust, no funeral –just gone.
    David Hackett, consultant cardiologist, is the clinical editor of this book. His wife, Penny, is a nurse and the family is Irish. I was sitting one fine spring morning in their big kitchen with its wide windows overlooking the gently rolling fields and woods of Hertfordshire, talking about this book. It was half term and the children were home from school.
    He said, ‘When my mother-in-law died in 2005, in Ireland, she was laid out in the front room, which was the custom. Family and neighbours came in to pay their respects and to say goodbye. My children came, too, to see and to touch their grandmother. I don’t think it upset them.’
    I turned to the two children. ‘Did you find it scary, seeing your dead grandmother?’
    The boy, aged about thirteen, gave me one of those teenage looks that suggests, ‘Here’s another silly grown-up asking silly questions!’ The girl, two years older, spoke: ‘Well, no … no, not really … just …’ She shrugged, then after a moment’s thought: ‘Just sort of ordinary. She looked … well… sort of asleep. Sort of … peaceful, like.’
    She looked towards her brother and he nodded, ‘Hmm, yeah,’ and carried on chewing his toast – I like a man of few words!Obviously neither of them had been upset, much less traumatised, as some people might predict.
    I was having lunch with an old friend, Mark. We were talking about my forthcoming book and he suddenly said:
    ‘My mother died in 1950 and we children were never told.’
    They learned, many years later, that their mother, Julia, had developed phlebitis, apparently after the birth of her fourth baby. A clot had dislodged itself, travelled in the bloodstream, and blocked a pulmonary artery, and this had killed her.
    Mark was nine at the time. His brother Robert was six and their sister Marian was four and a half. There was also a baby called Fiona, who was about a year old. They are now in their sixties and I have spoken to them all recently.
    Both men told me that they could remember an ambulance coming to the house and taking their mother away. Some time afterwards (they cannot remember how long) family friends took the two boys on holiday, to the seaside. It was during this period, they have since concluded, that their mother died and the funeral must have taken place. At the end of the holiday their father joined them, and took them home to a house with no mummy.
    Mark said, ‘It was very quiet, very bleak, and we didn’t understand why.’
    Robert said, ‘There was a sort of black hole that we couldn’t talk about. No one said we were not allowed to, but you know how children pick up messages. We just knew that it was something the grown-ups wouldn’t approve of us talking about.’
    I said, ‘Didn’t you ask questions?’
    They had received vague, woolly answers, such as ‘Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’ Later, one of the boys asked where Marian was, and was told that she had gone to stay with Grandma.
    Marian tells me she remembers it very clearly as a time of great unhappiness. Her grandmother was rather a remote figure. She says, ‘I was lonely, bewildered, wondering all the time why I was there and not at home. Daddy came to see me from time to time, and then he went away again. But he never brought mummy, andI didn’t know why. I thought perhaps I had been naughty and she didn’t want to see me.’
    After about six months or more her father came and took her home. Apparently she ran around the house looking in every room, calling out, ‘Where’s Mummy? Where is she?’ Her father said, ‘Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’ She responded, ‘Well, where’s Heaven? How did she get there? Did you take her? Why don’t you go and get her back?’
    Eventually, she became aware, as her brothers had earlier, that it was something you just didn’t ask questions about.
    Childhood grief is beyond my competence to discuss, but other writers have spoken about the loss of a mother being devastating to development. Fears and fantasies, depression, endless searching, low self-esteem, low achievement in school, a solitary child who cannot form friendships – these and many more