Most of us in Britain don’t know quite what to do with grief. You don’t hear funerals announced on local radio, as I did in the west of Ireland, or gather around the body for three days in a marae, or sacred place, as my family did in New Zealand for my uncle Chad. In the secular world of shopping centres and balloon arches, microwave dinners and text messages, we don’t really know how to respond when someone dies. Especially around their loved ones.
My advice? Lift up your skirt and show them your nethers. Like many millennial women of my acquaintance, I have become hooked on the audiobook of Annabelle Hirsch’s A History of Women in 101 Objects. As I rehung damp towels flung over doors, and put the rubbish on the bin actually into the bin, I welled up at the description of the US anthropologist Margaret Mead calling a healed thigh bone the first sign of human civilisation – intimating, as it does, a time in which a weak or injured member of a species was cared for by those around it. A little later on, while wiping milk circles off the table and scrubbing toothpaste from the sink, I listened to the story of Adam’s first wife, Lilith. That’s right: the Adam from Adam and Eve. According to various ancient texts, the first man was actually divorced. He had tried to make things work with a clay-fashioned woman called Lilith; but she wanted some general semblance of equality, so was relieved of her marriage and sent off to become a baby-eating demon. Fair play to her, I thought, flushing the toilet. Fair enough.
