Beauty’s extraordinary masterpiece

Gathering like figures in a painting, a family grieves.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

A rockpool on a beach reflects the sun, a castle stands beyond the sand dunes

Bamburgh beach, Northumberland.

Dan Russon on Unsplash.

There is one particular quality of light that I love above all other. You get it most in autumn or in spring, the times when change is on its way. It is a slightly softened light, faintly blue, which lays a muting wash over a golden afternoon. It’s as if there’s a teaspoon of milk stirred into the clarity of a May morning, a gossamer veil across a long view. Edges are merged and brushed, brilliance blends to dreaminess. It is opal, not diamond.

We had light like that today, and it was just right in its gentleness. Because this morning we took the cardboard tube containing my cousin Billy’s ashes, and we poured them into the sea. His wife Sarah drove down from Edinburgh to join us in Northumberland, and we gathered on the shore in a place sheltered from the wind by the rocks. The Farne Islands were before us and to the north lay the blue bulk of Bamburgh Castle, with Lindisfarne – Holy Island – showing wreathed in soft haze further beyond that.

He was too young to die, Billy, at 51. Too gifted, too clever, too kind. It was pancreatic cancer that got him, and it got him fast. Eleven months between diagnosis and death, that’s all – and here we are, shocked and saddened. It would have been his 52nd birthday today. We have had cake and prosecco. And yet we are casting what remains of him into the water – a tidal pool washed by waves and weather.

It’s not without its funny aspects, this solemn occasion. Billy’s beloved dog Obi is with us, only just out of puppyhood, and like all vigorous young creatures is unimpressed by ceremony. He finds a decaying guillemot and begins messy chewing. We manage to get it off him, but only after a chase and much commanding. Sarah picks it up by the tip of its wing; it spreads open like a glossy black fan. She swings it into the water where Obi can’t reach it. He doesn’t care anymore as he’s just found the corpse of a seal and is going to roll… we put his lead back on.

Dead bird, dead seal, dead man. Living place though, restless foam-flecked ocean, wheeling seagulls, wind in our hair, the beautiful light pouring over us all. And a lot of love. We make a close circle round Sarah, our arms around her and each other, absorbing her grief, sharing our own. We can’t fill the empty space, the echoing chasm of loneliness – but we can head for the pub instead, to fill our more everyday chasms with Sunday lunch. Roast beef and Yorkshires please, for everyone, and sticky toffee pud to follow. Sadness is hungry work.

We are like figures in a painting trying to cling to others in the same painting, not understanding that we cannot be lost.

Later on, much later, when everyone is gone, there is a spectacularly gorgeous sunset. I stand in the harbour watching it, mother of pearl colours melting silently from west to east, reflected in the sea and in the wet sand. My chest and throat and face and shoulders ache with sorrow, and a man on a bench sees me and asks if I am all right. I tell him about Billy. He asks if I would like to hear a poem he has written for his friend, who is lying in hospital with his neck broken. It is about a potter, shaping and moulding wet clay, collecting up and reusing shattered shards, creating new pieces seamed with gold. It is nice. The man is nice. And I have a sudden overwhelming feeling of being held. That underneath everything – the man, Billy’s death, the colours, the guillemot, Sarah’s aloneness, the wide wild sea – is a perfect, powerful sureness, holding all in balance. Me included. I am not a spectator in this situation, I am a part of it, one little detail in an extraordinary masterpiece. I don’t need to clutch and grasp and hold on to things. None of us do – because all are part of the same whole. We are like figures in a painting trying to cling to others in the same painting, not understanding that we cannot be lost. Creation remains complete, even when the pieces move around within it.

It is a feeling of absolute reassurance. Thomas Aquinas (revered scholar of the ancient church) says that along with truth and goodness, beauty is one of the three Transcendentals, the unchangeable foundations of reality and the surest evidence of the divine. And it is so very peaceful there in the harbour – the huge luminous sky, wavelets hushing onto the sand, oyster catchers calling in their wild voices as they prepare for the night – that I am perfectly certain of the presence of God. So finally I can cry… for Billy, for Sarah, for my sadness. But mostly, simply, because it is too beautiful not to.

Explainer

Comment

Death & life

8 November 2023

4 min read

What they don’t tell you about when someone you love dies

Sharing her experience of her husband’s death, Yvonne Tulloch charts grief’s journey and shares signposts to help. Part of the How to Die Well series.

Yvonne Tulloch

Yvonne Tulloch is Founder and CEO of AtaLoss, helping bereaved people find support and wellbeing.

A group of grieving friends with their hands on each others backs.

The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash.

Turn on the news and death is all around us. Yet somehow, we think it will never happen to us. In one sense that’s good. We have a child-like innocence that protects us from the harsh realities of life.

A few years ago, as a church minister, I thought I knew about death. I’d been trained to take funerals and had supported families when a loved one had died. But it wasn’t until I was bereaved myself - when my husband died suddenly of a heart attack - that I realised how little even I knew.

Although busy, life had been good until then. My husband had a successful job, my own work was going well and our three children were flying the nest and finding their feet in university. Little did I know that in one, short phone call from a colleague, our lives would change forever.

Simon had been found dead in his hotel in Spain, and I was faced with telling each of the children and his mother, the worst news anyone could convey. Concerned about social media the news was embargoed until all family members knew, then I had to go to Spain to find, as well as identify the body, and bring him home. I had to work out our finances – no one knew what we had to live off – close accounts and put things in my name. I discovered our house wasn’t insured, nor our car for me to drive, that bank accounts were frozen, and that no organisation is geared up to help. Everyone insists on speaking to the account holder or seeing the actual death certificate before being willing to oblige. I had a funeral and thanksgiving to organise – two big occasions in just 3 weeks - and a mountain of admin to deal with, which would be difficult at any time.

Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.

We’ve been a death-denying culture, I now realise, for many years. With death invariably happening in hospices or hospitals, we’ve pushed death away and pretended it doesn’t happen. Consequently, we’ve lost knowledge of bereavement and the art of support. We’ve tended only to think about preparing for funerals and then counselling if the person isn’t doing well. But what about all the other help that’s needed? Understanding and support is necessary in all manner of ways. Bereavement is one of the most stressful times of life, affecting everyone sooner or later and every part of their life. Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.

At first most of us are shocked or emotionally numb; we run on adrenaline and we’re in survival mode. At the funeral others can think we’re doing well, and we can too. But it’s after, when the real sadness tends to hit, when the future must be faced and by then support has dropped away.

Many of us experience a roller coaster of changing reactions and responses which we don’t recognise as us or don’t associate with grief.

There are the physical reactions, for instance. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I was cold and I shook for months, I had a heavy ‘weight’ in my gut and was taken to hospital three times with suspected heart problems - our bodies are always in tune with our emotions.

And there are the psychological reactions. We can experience anxiety, anger and guilt; we can’t concentrate or remember, or function to do the most basic of tasks. I kept thinking I was seeing Simon and had a psychosis which made me feel separated from the world. We can think we’re going mad.

Grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing.

For me help came from two initiatives I was fortunate to find: Care for the Family’s Widowed Young Support and The Bereavement Journey course run by a church in London. In each of these I discovered others who had been bereaved, who understood what I was going through and who helped me to navigate the alien territory I found myself in. They also helped me to understand my spiritual responses which had been the biggest surprise. I had never doubted my Christian faith but with bereavement, that too was challenged, and God, who had always felt present, suddenly disappeared. I realize now that this is natural. Grieving is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning, and therefore some of whatever meaning we had before the person died, will deconstruct as we grieve.

Roll on a few years and I’m on the other side, running a charity helping people to understand that in our death-denying society bereavement impacts greatly, and that grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing. Support is needed in various ways which we direct to through our signposting website ataloss.org. And I’m helping people myself through The Bereavement Journey course to find healing and hope, offering also spiritual support for the faith questioning I find most people have. Unfortunately, though, because we’ve neglected death, many haven’t been supported through a bereavement in the past and are carrying loss which is unresolved.