Everyone has lost something this year. Credit: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
One of the highlights of my December has been watching a community advent calendar unfold on the streets of High Town, Luton. 24 neighbours have got together to, one by one, decorate and illuminate their windows with messages of hope and the coming of Christmas. An old friend of mine kicked it off with a bird, a sunrise, and the message: “A light has dawned”.
It’s a deeply religious project, firmly rooted in the Christian story, conceived and executed by a community of profound faith. So what is it that warms the cockles of my deeply atheist heart? I think it’s the strength of the promise: the coming of hope after a brutal, bitter year. For me, that hope is primarily in the shape of a vaccine being dispensed in hospitals and clinics in every corner of the country.
Is it sacrilegious of me to think of the coming of a vaccine — bringing with it a temporal salvation — as analogous to the coming of Christ? Or is it simply that religious stories work so well precisely because they are the archetypes of so many individual human experiences? I don’t know. But one thing I appreciate about Advent is the way Christianity gives us 24 full days to prepare ourselves for the arrival of hope. After all, if you step out of the dark into the light you will be blinded; you need time to adjust.
The Covid-19 crisis is not over. But the vaccine does herald the end of the worst; even if this latest surge were to push us beyond the peak hospitalisations of the spring, at least the fear that this is forever has gone. So, as we navigate the next few difficult months, we need to prepare ourselves to step into the light again. Am I the only one who thinks that will be hard?
Launching the vaccine, Matt Hancock said this was “a day to remember in a year to forget.” A beautiful line, of course — but balderdash. We should not forget; we can’t, even if we wanted to. This year has scarred us and bereaved us. We need to grieve what we have lost. The book that’s been helping me do so is Good Grief: Embracing Life At A Time of Death. It is a memoir of the first half of the year by Catherine Mayer and her mother Anne Mayer Bird, who lost their husbands within five weeks of each other around the beginning of this wretched year.
It would be a stretch to call Catherine a friend, but I know her a little and admire her a lot. I’ve been to the flat where many of the events in this remarkable book played out, above the recording studio where her rockstar husband played and recorded his last music. I’ve met, all too briefly, many of the characters whose deaths she recounts, or who help her, sometimes clumsily, to grieve. But it’s the universality of the experience of loss, not its closeness to me, that sticks.
The book as a whole is a metaphor for grief. It’s jumbled. It skips forward in time and back again. The chapters are themed, but messily so, taking you with them through surges of emotion just like those which hit you unexpectedly after the loss of a loved one, just as you’ve decided you’re going to be ok. Its greatest strength is a series of letters from Anne to her dead husband, with whom she wanted so desperately to share the experience of this dreadful year. Written at intervals during the worst phase of the lockdown, they punctuate the book, acting as a trigger for the reader’s own detailed memories of how it felt, then, to be scared, or worse — scared and alone.
I’ve been finding it hard to remember much of this year. It blurs. We did the same walk in the same park so many times it’s hard to be clear about what happened when. Even specific trips, like the one time we visited my mother, or an eat-out-to-help-out lunch in my hometown, seem to have an ethereal, faded quality. But without memory, there is no healing. Catherine and Anne’s book is a catalyst for all our memory, and a playbook for how to deal with its darker corners.
There are dead people everywhere in Good Grief, brought to life by the stories Catherine tells of them. Some you’ve even heard of like Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates. They are not gloomy spectres haunting the text, but the warm spirits of what Catherine calls the “lovely dead”. Catherine and Anne are both advised to leave the homes they shared with their husbands, to escape the memories. But they do not want to escape the memories: they bring them joy. It reminds me of the lines Shakespeare gives Constance in King John:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty look, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Mourners are told this is pathology. This is how you get stuck in grief, and forget to live. But the central message of Good Grief is the opposite: we live well by doing justice to the lovely dead. We live well by making time and space for grief, making it “welcome,” not trying to suppress it. That is how we will do justice to this year, as well: not by pushing our grief away, but by making space for it.
Unless you are the luckiest person in the country, you have lost something this year. Your freedom. Your peace of mind. Your watercooler moments. Your sense of smell. Your favourite pint. Your club nights. Your income. Your security. Your prospects. Your university place. The list is endless. And our feelings of loss will not go away simply because the experience has ended: they need to be discussed, and processed, and dealt with.
Good Grief helped me to see that leaning into grief is not self-indulgent. Experiencing your loss is the best way to understand what you had; it’s even a way to relive the joy of what was. The dead, of course, can only return in memory. The same is not true of the opportunities to create new memories that we lost in this catastrophe, of course. But it is worth spending time with your grief this winter to help you work out what you want back. Will you keep up the volunteering or the zoom calls with your family? Will you return to the commute? Will you join a campaign for a living wage? For changes to local government funding? Will you eat differently? Will you spend more time in the park? No-one could come through a crucible like 2020 unchanged. How has it changed you?
Since we’ve been told to celebrate Christmas as little as we can, now seems like the moment to ask that question and start to find the answer. Let grief fill up the room, if only for a few hours. Let it walk up and down with you, and see what it says. Matt Hancock got it wrong: this is not a year to forget, but to remember. We will be best prepared for the dawn if we allow ourselves to experience the darkness which precedes it.
Polly Mackenzie is Director of Demos, a leading cross-party think tank. She served as Director of Policy to the Deputy Prime Minister from 2010-2015.
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SubscribeHow will I remember this year? Countless games of football in the park, free money from the state (makes a nice change from giving them all my money), a lot of wonderful, high level wine tastings in my garden and on other people’s roof terraces etc, getting a lot of upticks on Unherd, reading the brilliant ‘Milkman’ by Anna Burns (among approximately 66 other books), catching up with Mercury Rev’s ‘The Delta Sweete Revisited’, Wayne Rooney taking charge at Derby County…
Of course, the demented, authoritarian and destructive responses to Covid across the West has only accelerated Paper Money Collapse and the decline of the West, but I suppose we might as well get it over with.
One of my pleasant memories of 2020 will be discovering your columns, Polly. I agree with everything you said about grief. Fortunately, no-one close to our family has died of COVID, although several people close to us have had it.
A wonderful Spring and Summer, sheer nectar for
my dogs.
Trump and Cummings sadly got the chop, a mass panic over the Chinese instigated Scamdemic, and Brexit executed against all the odds.
Coffins on Amazon for only £210 + £2.99 for delivery!
Otherwise little of note, yet another bucolic year in Arcadia has passed, and there is still ‘honey for tea’.
Good article.
I’m sorry I missed this moving and profound article first time round. The terrible death toll Covid is meting out has brought back vivid memories of ministering to the bereaved over 42 years as a parish priest.
I found the vast majority of the bereaved wanted to talk about their loved one. They wanted to share their memories of their “lovely dead”. This is why the conspiracy of silence around death and bereavement can be so problematic. People often try to avoid talking to the bereaved because they don’t know what to say. Very little has to be said beyond the expressions of sympathy and sorrow because that will usually be a trigger for memory sharing to begin.
I also found that the bereaved were sensitive about respect being showed to their loved one. There is a desire to do “justice to the lovely dead”and to acknowledge their existence and contribution they have made.
Over the years I officiated at approximately 1900 funerals. Many of them were of the elderly for whom death was a natural end to their existence on earth. The Bible says we can expect between 70 to 80 years. Increasingly many of us are getting more and that is generally good,but not always. But what about those who get less? I can remember the too frequent infant funerals in 1970s Liverpool, the 15 year old girl who drowned in Lake Windermere, the young motorcyclist killed whilst competing in the Isle of Man TT and the 4 men who died suddenly within two weeks. Every day I think of all those dying before their time of Covid.
Polly Mackenzie refers to a wonderfully imaginative Advent calendar on show in Luton and describes it as “a deeply religious project, firmly rooted in the Christian story, conceived and executed by a community of hope”.She reports that what “warms the cockles of my heart” is “the strength of the promise – the coming of hope after a brutal,bitter year”. She goes on to ask “is it sacreligious of me to think of the coming vaccine – bringing with it a temporal salvation – as analogous to the coming of Christ”. I would say that it is in fact very apt because the temporal can point to the eternal. For instance Advent is about Christ’s Second Coming and the completion of the work begun at His First Coming. This will result in a new world where sin,evil and death will be no more. This is when the temporal and eternal meet and become indistinguishable. I also think that the vaccine points to the victory of life over death which Christians believe has become a present reality through the Resurrection of Christ. We believe death need not be the end for individuals, but can be the doorway to the presence of Jesus. In Him we can have a sure and certain Hope of Eternal Life.
Annus horribilis +++
Wasn’t there any loo roll left when you got to the supermarket?