Unhanded: Lucy Pollard offers some reflections on living and dying

‘Dust returns to dust. And yet. And yet.’

A very dear and longstanding friend emailed me recently to ask me to pray for Z, a young woman with two small sons who was dying of cancer. It isn’t unusual for us to share the names of those we are praying for, or holding in the light (my friend prefers not to use the Quaker phrase, because she is mindful of the kind of light torture that can be practised), but this request touched me particularly closely. Both my friend and I had breast cancer years ago, when our children were small, and the sense of panic about the possibility of leaving the children is still vivid to me. Who would know the important small things such as the bedtime rituals? Who would intuit what was distressing them when they couldn’t explain? We are both deeply grateful that we have been able to see our children grow up. Now that I’m eighty, I know that I may not live to see my grandchildren into adulthood, and for that reason I am writing about my life for them, and have started to keep a memory box for them to have after my death, if they are interested.

Years ago, I volunteered with a domiciliary hospice service. Every case needed – and received – compassionate attention and loving kindness, but the one that is lodged in my memory is that of a family in which the children, whose young father was dying, were the same age as my own.

So Z and her family have been very much in my thoughts. I hope that her children will have things to remember her by, and that their father will be able to talk to them about her. I hope that she was able to go gently through the door of death, lovingly held by her family.

A few days after I heard about her, just as I was on the edge of going to sleep at night, a picture came into my head: there was a field with a pond in it, and children playing. On one side was a deep forest, into which a young woman, whose face I could not see, was walking alone. When the image recurred to me the following day, I was angry with myself that I hadn’t offered the young woman a torch. Perhaps, my friend said, my prayers were a torch. I hope so.

My mother died in her early sixties, after an accident, when her life support system was turned off. All of her six children were at her bedside, but it was a brutally short goodbye to a person who, until a couple of days earlier, had been totally engaged with living and present to her family. My father died in his nineties, still lucid but gradually fading away. None of the six of us arrived in time to be with him, but we had already been saying a long goodbye. My stepmother was with him, so he did not die alone.

For the six of us, being at my mother’s bedside when she died was very important, but how was it for her? She was deeply unconscious. I have read that even in such circumstances, if you play familiar music, the dying person’s breathing may tune itself to the rhythm of the music. Perhaps we should have played my mother Mozart or Schubert, but we didn’t think to do so. We did talk, both to her and among ourselves. Did the sound of loved voices soothe her? I can only hope so.

I am not afraid of being dead, but I am afraid of the process of dying: I hope someone I love will be there to walk beside me as far as they can. The idea of ‘death midwives’ seems to me a wonderful one, most of all for those who are alone in the world or whose nearest and dearest are perhaps at a distance.

The birth of a baby is a miracle: here is a new person – different from any of the billions that have been born before – taking up her or his own space in the world. When a person dies, it is like a negative of the same image: there is a space where there was a person, but the person no longer inhabits it. Sometimes it’s hard to believe they have really gone: for months after my mother died, whenever the phone rang, for a split second I would think I was going to hear her voice, explaining why she’d been delayed.

We carry our loved dead with us in all sorts of ways, in our memories and in how we are who we are because of them. What is bitterly hard to live with becomes something different over time, as overwhelming sorrow and distress change gradually into an ability to cherish our memories and be glad to have them. As Sasha Moorsom wrote: ‘I hold dead friends like jewels in my hand’.

The idea of life after death makes no sense to me personally, either scientifically or spiritually. I feel that mind and spirit are not separable from body. I am content to think that I am part of the cycle of life as described by Wordsworth:

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

I love the words of one of the lesser-known Roman poets, Propertius, who wrote ‘What I am, one hand may be able to lift’. Dust returns to dust. And yet. And yet, I remember also the phrase used by another friend to describe his outlook: the ‘absolute perhaps’.

Does the spirit merge with something larger? Perhaps. What is certain is that our loved dead live on in us in some way. Human beings can only experience things through the lens of time, but those loved people were alive and are no less real, and no less loved, for being dead.

The words of The Observer’s art critic Laura Cumming, writing about her father, speak to me: ‘I once glimpsed a picture by my father framed in the upper window of a house as I passed by on a bus, and it suddenly seemed to be leading a separate life of its own, nothing to do with me. Some days this is how he seems to me too, apparently dead for over thirty years but still thinking hard somewhere else’ (Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life and sudden death, 2023).

What is important for me, now, is to seize the moment, to live until I die. I can’t speak for those I love, but that’s what I hope for them too, as well as a kind death when the time comes.

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