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.

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Wildness

12 June 2025

5 min read

What my noisy, messy crow neighbours have taught me about how to live

We can’t control nature; we just need to become more porous to it

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Meet the neighbours.

Townsend Walton on Unsplash.

Our neighbours hate our crows. I can’t blame them. The hundreds of crows that occupy the tops of the ancient pines which surround our rural manse are the noisiest and messiest residents I have ever lived near. They greet each sunrise with a din of caws and counter-caws, as if they are deeply concerned that anyone might miss this momentous daily event or the fact that it’s now happening before 5:30a.m. In nesting season, which lasts most of April and May, our car is easily identifiable in any carpark by the crusted grey spots with which the crows see fit to adorn it. Within a week of moving in, we gave up on the washing line so invitingly strung between two of the pines. Our pristine whites were too tempting a target for our crows.

I do not attend the meetings of our local community council, but I hear whispers of what transpires there. Our crows, evidently, have been a regular topic of conversation. Multiple solutions have been proffered for driving them away. All have been tried and all have failed. Our crows cling fiercely to their homes and their determination is more than a match for any human efforts. If I have the vibe of my community right, at least some of its members feel that there’s something perverse, obscene even, about a flock of birds being allowed to upset our human right to create a serene, comfortable, and convenient habitation. Our clump of houses is surrounded by a visually stunning landscape; shouldn’t the aural landscape be equally beautiful?

If my family does not mind our crows, it is because the treetop drama is just one more example of many natural encroachments on the house, some more welcome than others.

Every year we celebrate the miraculous return to our eaves of house martins, home from their intercontinental peregrinations. We look forward to another summer spent watching their acrobatics and listening to their chicks in the nests an arm’s length from our windows.

Clearing up the mess of our attic’s bats is an annual chore, one thankfully performed stoically by our church’s property convener, but there are compensations - such as the twilight shows they put on outside our living room window, performing impossible turns and reversals midair in their search for prey.

Less welcome are the massive spiders, which are a perennial presence; the slugs, which seemed to apparate onto the hall carpet all through winter, the mice, two of whom sacrificed themselves to knock our dishwasher out of action by chewing through its hose; and the wasps who built a nest the size of a telephone box in the roof space above our back bathroom.

Least fun of all has been what we call the Great Earwig Migrations, which have happened twice in our half-decade in the manse and which involve weeks of finding the little bugs under, seemingly, every object and on every surface.

When we moved into the manse, we expected challenges, the high heating bills, the leaking roof, and the isolation of the countryside. What we did not expect was the experience of porousness; the shock of realising that we had so little control over what other forms of life saw fit to share our habitation with us.

At first it felt to me perverse, obscene even, that a house, even a 120-year-old house, should be so vulnerable to incursions by animal creation. Shouldn’t our home, our space, be a haven where we can control who or what enters, who or what we feel comfortable with, and who or what we can exclude?

If I had to give a name to this expectation, maybe it would be that of the buffered home, a play on philosopher Charles Taylor’s description of the modern self as buffered. Taylor contrasts the selves we aspire to be in modernity, ones able to control and order our bodies, our space, our lives, and our relationships so that they accord with our autonomous desires and actions, with those of our premodern ancestors. Medievals and ancients assumed porosity. Bodies were subject not just to biological infection, but spiritual infections too. Projects and plans were frustrated not just by mistakes or personal failings, but by the ever-fickle whims of the goddess Fortuna. Their lives, their bodies, their homes, existed in a perpetual state of vulnerability. The threat of everything falling apart was always on the horizon.

We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security.

Modern technology has helped us tame the more unwelcome of these forces, but it has also given us an overly naive expectation that all that is inconvenient about nature can and should be gradually eliminated. This expectation frames the way we respond to worries about climate change and other creeping environmental crises. We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security. But as our ancestors might remind us, we are part of nature too, and, just as in any relationship, mutual vulnerability and sacrifice are needed if we are all going to survive. This is scary, but there are resources within Christianity - within other faiths too - to help us understand that there are benefits to affirming our vulnerability, our porosity.

My daughters love our crows. They point in wonder as the crows flood into the sky at dusk, hundreds of them making a giant circle once, then twice round the garden, before settling down for the night. When, in late May, grounded fledgings appear, bundles of feathers shocked at the sudden inhospitality of the nest, too stunned to realise they can fly home, my daughters watch over them, anxious lest the local cats take advantage of their bewilderment.

A few Sundays ago, my youngest, who struggles to stay quiet and well-behaved in Sunday School, pulled me out of church early. We sat on the church lawn staring up at the crows and soon were adapting the andante melodies of that Sunday’s hymns into imagined songs of praise that crows might sing. “No,” my youngest said, simpatico with the crows as she is, “I think they’d want something more upbeat.” And so we tried setting our own corvid-themed praise lyrics to Rosé and Bruno Mars’ song APT, while listening to the caw and counter-caw above. “Dad, how do you think God sees the world?” she asked me when we finished. I stumbled through my best theologically informed explanation of how God could be in every part of creation without being of it, before she stopped me. “I think it’s like a giant snow globe that he holds in his hands.” Watching the birds swirl around us, two stationary figures caught by the same currents of air that were sweeping them aloft, what could I do but agree?

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