Dealing with death at Christmas

On the darkest December day, a grim anniversary is recalled.

Jean Kabasomi

Jean is a consultant working with financial and Christian organisations. She also writes and broadcasts.

A moody sky overshadows a shingle beach on which a lone empty deckchair stands. A pier with funfair is in the middle distance.

Brighton Pier.

Nick Fewings, via Unsplash.

Thursday 17th December 2020 - a day I won’t forget.

Christmas 2020 was already proving to be a little strange. The UK was in this weird place of tiered restrictions, a sort of semi-lockdown approach. In London and the southeast, we had a bit more flexibility than folks in the north of the country, but people were not really out and about. Most people were saving their interactions for Christmas Day, so the streets were mostly quiet.

Like virtually everyone working in the financial services, I was working from home. The night before, my older brother had left the house after an argument and not come home. My younger brother and sister were concerned about his whereabouts. His phone kept going to voicemail. They were worried. There wasn’t much to do or anyone to see because everyone was regulating their behaviour and saving themselves for Christmas. I, on the other hand, was more nonchalant about his ‘disappearance’. My view was that he was an adult and had a habit of doing ‘immature things’ to get our attention. I thought, ‘He would come back home when he needed to.’ Little did I know how wrong I would be.

At about 4:50pm, as I was winding up and about to log off at work, I saw a police car in our street. My room is on the second floor of our house and my desk is positioned so that I can look directly out of the window onto the street in front of our house. The police car stopped in front of our house. The officers got out and opened our gate. I remember I went downstairs and said, ‘The police are here.’, just before the doorbell rang. I was slightly annoyed, I remember thinking, ‘What silly thing has my brother done now?’

My Mum invited them in. But they wouldn’t speak to her. They were looking for my sister. This seemed really weird at the time. Mum kept asking them what they wanted. But they wouldn’t reply. They just kept saying that they needed to speak to my sister. They wouldn’t speak to my sister in front of all the family, so they led my sister outside into the garden. It was dark outside. We couldn’t hear what they were saying because the back door was shut but we could see my sister’s reaction. She was deeply distressed. My Mum was beginning to get upset too, because she could see my sister through the window. They came back into the house. The police remained silent. It was just strange. My sister kept saying that we all needed to sit down in the living room. Mum kept asking the police what was going on but they remained silent. My younger brother and I were also frustrated and wanted to know. ‘Just tell us what is happening’, I remember saying. But my sister kept saying that we needed to sit down and go to the living room.

We finally all sat down and then one of the officers began to speak. I don’t remember his exact words but it was something to the effect of ‘A body was found this morning at Brighton Pier. From the belongings found on the body, we have identified that it is the body of your brother.’

At this point, I don’t think any of us really understood what he was saying. Someone must have asked, ‘Does that mean he is dead? Are you saying he is dead?’ ‘Yes.’, was the response. ‘How did he die?’, was the next question. Again, more weirdness. It seemed that they didn’t really want to use the word suicide, but that’s what it was. We kept asking for more details. What time? How did it happen? Was there anyone with him? But nothing was forthcoming. It all felt like a cover-up. And then it was over. They left and it was just us left to process it. It all seemed so surreal.

That evening is all a bit of a blur. I am quite a practical person - I knew I was leading a bible study meeting that evening. So, I messaged, the pastor in charge to say I wouldn’t be able to lead it that night. After that, the next feeling, I remember is annoyance towards my brother. I felt it was selfish on so many different levels. Why did he have to do this? How does it solve anything? Why is he always looking for attention? Why would anyone do something like this just before Christmas? I remember feeling he had destroyed Christmas for us forever. Why didn’t he just say something to us? We had just started playing tennis on weekday mornings before I logged into work, why didn’t he mention he was upset then? My younger brother and sister were deeply disturbed and didn’t know what to say or do. Both were blaming themselves. Mum was totally shocked. I kept thinking and saying that he didn’t mean to do it. It was just a mistake that he couldn’t undo. If we weren’t in this quasi-lockdown situation, maybe someone would have noticed him in the water sooner and he would have been rescued? Maybe someone would have been walking along the Pier that night, seen him in the water, jumped in and pulled him out? We didn’t need a hero, maybe someone would have seen him in the water and just called 999? Maybe someone would have noticed him pacing up and down, and tried to speak to him before he went over the edge?

The run-up to Christmas that year was extremely difficult. The government announced a full lockdown again and my family had to travel to the morgue in Brighton to formally identify my brother. I chose not to go with them, I felt at the time, that I wasn’t ready to see my brother’s body. We also had a tree in our garden whose roots had ruptured the sewer pipe, causing our bathroom to flood. It was all one big mess.

I am in charge of the Christmas shopping operation in our house. Christmas is my favourite time of the year. I love the carols, the weather, the darkness, the cosiness, the services at church, the Christmas TV schedule, the food and the opportunity to rest, pause and reflect. I love everything about Christmas. But now it felt weird celebrating Christmas. The delivery came. On Christmas day, I cooked, my sister baked. But it was all just so sad. We sat in silence through a lot of it just eating. Sometimes we spoke about the days leading up to my brother’s death. At different points throughout the day, one or all of us would be struggling to hold back our tears or silently sob. That period was one of the most difficult periods of my life.

I do not have to be in a state of constant mourning throughout the Christmas period. Neither do I need to pretend or ignore that I haven’t experienced death at Christmas.

Three years later, Christmas is still my favourite time of the year. Why? Despite everything, I still believe in the hope that came into the world at Christmas through Jesus Christ. It is that hope that helped me pull through that time. I held on to the comforting words I found in the Bible. I found people who supported me and worked through my grief on the Bereavement Journey. On this course, I discovered that it was okay to be angry, guilty, disappointed and sad about death. It was all part of the process. It was okay to grieve differently from my siblings and my Mum. I didn’t have to force them to feel like me, nor make myself feel like they did. As we began to piece together my brother’s final days, I slowly understood that he had his own mental struggles and sadly was unable to find the help he needed.

I learnt that grief involves the whole person – the body, soul and mind. I understood why I sometimes felt exhausted and at other times I was wide awake. It all made sense when I suddenly felt sad on my way home from my first time at Wimbledon. The body has a weird way of remembering things even when you think you are okay mentally, so I wasn’t surprised when I got a severe migraine exactly three years to the day that my brother didn’t come home. My faith does not mean that I understand everything about my experience neither does it mean that I can’t lament, question or be unhappy about the way things unfolded.

For me, Christmas is still a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the birth of Hope. But it is also a time of solemnity, even of grief. As the years go by, this will get easier but probably won’t go away. The two feelings are not mutually exclusive. I do not have to be in a state of constant mourning throughout the Christmas period. Neither do I need to pretend or ignore that I haven’t experienced death at Christmas. Rather, the most honest thing I can do is to acknowledge both feelings and take each day as it comes.

Article

Character

Comment

Education

Fun & play

1 September 2025

5 min read

Is your child school ready?

What really matters as a child develops

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A teacher looks on as a young child concentrates on writing.

Department for Education.

In the coming weeks, those little critters will start to emerge, easily identified by their autumn plumage of coloured sweatshirts and oversized backpacks. Anxious parents and caregivers can be spotted, shepherding their young along paths and pavements, casting worried glances left and right at the pelican crossings. Listen carefully and you may hear the squeak of uncomfortable new shoes and juveniles complaining about the wearing of a coat, as adults of the species re-establish social bonds with cries of, “Back to school already, I can’t believe how fast it’s gone!”

As they congregate upon the tarmac staging ground, some will be taking part in this ritual for the very first time. Neophytes who have maintained social bonds throughout the pre-school years might be seen to greet their fellows cordially, “Did you have a good summer? Can Flo make it to Izzy’s party?” Others will stand alone, scanning the playground for a half-remembered face from the bygone days of antenatal classes. That was only five years ago, but it feels like a millennium. The faces are changed; everyone looks more…tired.

The world has been turned upside down in those past five years. It’s been said so often that it is almost trite, but nonetheless true: nothing prepares you for becoming a parent. In the UK, new parents increasingly raise their children without the immediate support of extended family, coupled with the tyrannous expectation that one will retain one’s employment rank and contribution to the labour market alongside this new and 24/7 full time job of looking after baby. The Key Performance Indicators of parenting are ambitious. Deliverables for the first five years include toilet training, instilling speech and language skills, establishing basic recognition of 26 alphabetical characters (including the child’s ability to recognise the alphabetical sequence that spells their own name) and ensuring the recognition of and (ideally) ability to correctly sequence numbers 1 to 20. If your child can do all of this by the age of 5, whilst also learning not to punch, kick or bite other children, not to eat food off the ground, and not to stick rocks up their nose, then congratulations! Your child is school ready!

It may comfort some readers to know that very few 5-year-olds manage to hit absolutely all of these milestones. As the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, commented recently – parenting is too hard. She is working to establish a new iteration of Labour’s ‘Sure Start’ programme (rebranded as ‘Family Hubs’) to offer parents more support in the community. As part of her rationale she states, “When one in four children are leaving primary school without having reached a good level of reading, then something’s gone seriously wrong in those early years that has to go beyond the school gate.”

Whilst I’m keen to see more support for new families – I’m intrigued by this particular rationale for it. Ability to read well by a certain age seems an unlikely metric by which to measure whether a child has had a positive experience of childhood; it appears indicative of what autism-researcher Anne McGuire calls “The normative time of childhood,” in which the success is measured against an imagined future of economically productive years. By this metric, if a child learns to read at a prodigiously young age this is taken as an indicator that they will enter the workforce with greater velocity than their peers, essentially that they will have “more future-yet-to-be-realized” than those around them. McGuire writes, “In a neoliberal regime where ‘time is money’, the child is figured as ‘time-rich’ and so represents a good investment opportunity indeed.”

McGuire’s analysis is piercingly accurate of how we often talk about our children, despite knowing all too well that it represents a fallacy. There are multitudinous stories of adults who have gone on to make staggering contributions to human flourishing, despite being placed (literally or figuratively) under the dunce’s cap at school. But even without focusing on those who go on to excel, those who attract fame, fortune, or both, we don’t have to look far to find cause to re-evaluate what it means for a child to be school ready.

My son’s year group recently finished their own primary school journey, and a quick glance through some of the leavers’ books reveals that children are very good at valuing each other for what is here in the present, without recourse to an imagined economic future. As children wrote goodbye messages for each other they said things like,

“Thank you for always having such good ideas for games to play.”

“You helped me on my first day when I got lost.”

“You’re a great house captain and you always help the teacher.”

No one was particularly keen to predict fame and fortune for the future of their friends, and there was an understandable indifference towards academic milestones. As a literary corpus, the leavers’ books were testament to the old adage that people will not remember you for what you say or do but will remember you for how you make them feel.

One the subject of childhood, Jesus once said something that defies easy explanation. He was out, teaching in the open air, surrounded by crowds of adults including important religious leaders and wealthy individuals who wanted to ask complex and deep theological questions, but in the midst of it all there were parents bringing their children, elbowing their way to the front of the crowd to ask Jesus to pray for their little ones. When some of Jesus’ followers tried to usher the children away, Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” The precise meaning of this utterance has eluded thinkers and theologians for centuries – what exactly is it about childhood that Jesus was alluding to?

I wonder if it is something about the capacity of children to live in the immediate, and therefore to value what really matters – justice, kindness and friendship. In primary school, yes it helps in some ways for children to arrive aged 5 with a certain command of the alphabet and the ability to finish the day wearing the same set of underwear that they arrived in. But perhaps what matters more is children arriving ready to enter the fray of friendships – being kind, being helpers, having the self-confidence to know that they have something to give to the learning community that they are joining, whatever their learning speed might be. Such things are gloriously untethered to economic potential or a future-yet-to-be-realized, but they are closely tethered to a child’s understanding of themselves as a valuable and important person. If Labour’s intention to offer new parents more help in the community goes some way towards communicating to our pre-school children that they have that have – and will always have – value, regardless of what they will or won’t attain to academically or economically, then it will help many more children reach the milestone of being school ready.

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