It’s 20 years this week since my mother died. That’s preposterous but also, apparently, factually accurate. My elder son was one and he turned 21 this spring (God, she loved him ferociously and would have loved my younger son, whom she never met, just as much yet differently, because she was good at that). It’s not that it feels recent, more as if it happened in another dimension, the foreign country of the past.
I am never sure about the etiquette of marking a death day. Isn’t it nicer – more polite, even – to focus on the person’s birthday? Usually I manage to skirt the issue by not remembering the exact date (I genuinely have to look up her obituary to check). Occasionally, someone else will remind me if they are in the mood to mark it, arousing a vague alarm: uh-oh, will there be emotions with a capital E? Like a cabinet minister sent to boarding school at seven, I find my emotions alarming and embarrassing and mostly try to squash them.
But it is true that we think about people we love dying and the day it happens, so surely it is better to mark the moment than to let it ambush you, maybe having to pull over when you’re driving because a particular Joni Mitchell track plays on the radio and you can’t see the road for tears. Isn’t that exactly where ritual helps? It gives the emotion a context and space for expression without frightening the horses (that’s me: I’m the horses). I have been thinking I might like that this year.
So what can you do to mark a deathversary, deathday, deathmas? See, those are awful – we definitely need a better word. It is odd most of us don’t have one, or a tradition like the Jewish Yahrzeit, though I’m not sure who I mean by “most of us” – atheists? The undecided? The emotionally repressed? My mother was brought up Catholic but lapsed, so although they do a good line in ritual, it won’t be mass. Latterly, she became a sort-of Quaker, so I could go along to a Quaker meeting because they are lovely, and in my experience sitting in shared silence for an hour is never wasted time. But those guys are awfully understated – that’s their whole deal – so it wouldn’t be very ceremonious.
It seems other cultures do this better. There’s the night-and-day-long burning Yahrzeit candle, simple and lovely. China and Japan have words and rituals for death days; they give alms in Sri Lanka, and prepare an anniversary banquet with the dead person’s favourite foods in Vietnam (Mum’s would mainly be chips – and none the worse for that). I like the Korean custom that involves preparing a ceremonial table to honour your loved one. I think a death anniversary bed would be even better for Mum, who loved hers: ironed white bedlinen, topped with several packets of Walkers cheese and onion and a glass of Taittinger, a radio broadcasting BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions, a Gillies of the Scottish Highlands she so loved, binoculars for the birds, scented mimosa, a pile of novels and her friends and family dropping in, but also leaving her in peace. That sounds like her kind of heaven.
It is funny – another wrong word – that she died so close to All Souls, Christianity’s collective death day. Now the season is all skull-shaped crumpets and web-effect gel nails, but originally it was a time to honour our dead (and cake, in the form of “soul cakes”, because God forbid we do anything without cake). Without that, we are left to make up our own – or, like me, fail to.
But speaking of cake, unless anyone has any bright ideas, I will probably end up doing what we always do at moments of high emotion, what she loved doing and what we did the day after she died: go to Betty’s tearoom in York. That haven of peace, civility and fondant fancies is the closest thing we have to a place of worship in our family. “Multigrain toast and a pot of tearoom blend day” isn’t very catchy, but perhaps it’s just right.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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