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

America

Comment

24 November 2023

6 min read

The significance of legacy and what it can really stir

Concluding an American journey in the footsteps of his hero, Ian Hamlin ponders how legacy arises.

Ian Hamlin

Ian Hamlin has been the minister of a Baptist church since 1994. He previously worked in financial services.

Martin Luther King reaches from the pulpit of a church while he preaches.

MLK preaching at Riverside Church, New York.

The Gotham Center for New York History.

Travelling around recently, considering the impact of the US Civil Rights Movement as part of my sabbatical trip across four States, I’ve been struck by the immediacy of it. It really doesn’t seem very far away, or long ago. Part of that, of course, is its ongoing resonance, but there are also some personal factors. Martin Luther King was just four days younger than my mother, who’s still alive, and I was born in the week leading up to ‘Bloody Sunday’, and the Selma – Montgomery march. Although not strictly true, this feels like a history of my own time.

That sense has, I think, been amplified by some other recent significant dates. Earlier this summer was the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, the subway in Atlanta is still awash with anniversary posters. Beyond that, of course, just days later, we remembered a similar six decades since the Klu Klux Klan’s bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed; Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, three 14-year-olds, and one 11-year-old girl. A commemorative service was held in the church, just weeks ago.

History had changed, its arc had indeed bent towards justice. Yet such gestures, profound though they may be, rarely tell the whole story.

Less dramatically, yet still poignantly, 2nd November saw the 40th anniversary of Ronald Reagan signing the bill into law, which created Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday in America, on the 3rd Monday of January each year.

Now very much part of the fabric of national life, the holiday represents, as much as anything, the formal adoption of Dr King as a fully-fledged American hero, part of the great story of the Republic, and the ultimate acceptance of this black man by his country.

Symbols like that matter, such a legacy is significant indeed. It was on Martin Luther King Day 2013, that Barak Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States, for the second time, a black man, who spoke, that day, of a dream fulfilled, as he made his oath of office on King’s bible. History had changed, its arc had indeed bent towards justice. Yet such gestures, profound though they may be, rarely tell the whole story.

Should we be satisfied with the unity that comes from an altogether flatter story, even if it tends towards ‘Disneyfication’, or ought we insist upon messy truth... ?

The holiday wasn’t celebrated until January 1986, Reagan himself wasn’t particularly keen on it, it passed only after something of a battle in Congress where, famously, Senator Jesse Helms led a 16-day filibuster, where he claimed King was a subversive radical, dangerous traitor and communist agitator, And, it wasn’t until 2000 that it was acknowledged in all 50 states.

Such details, if known and remembered, serve to confuse the notion of legacy, to muddy the waters and call into question its real heart. Because the easiest histories are the most straightforward, travelling in a straight line from A to B, from problem to solution, tragedy to victory, despair to hope. They mould into the very fabric of the Nation that the key idea, that the good guys won in the end, like they always do, and the Republic sails inexorably on towards even brighter lights to come.

The question of legacy, when it comes to Dr King, as with many others, is vital for sure, but far more complex than that, and contested too. Should we be satisfied with the unity that comes from an altogether flatter story, even if it tends towards ‘Disneyfication’, or ought we insist upon messy truth, with its inherent conflict and challenge, recalled back then, and still present now?

Martin Luther King was far from a hero at the time of his death, quite the contrary, he was well on his way to becoming a pariah. No longer welcome in the Whitehouse, he had fallen foul of Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, and his consistent enemies in the FBI now seemed to hold sway there. His relative ‘successes’ with the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965, genuine and monumental as they were, had only served to demonstrate that a lot of the true causes of segregation, north and south, were less amenable to easy legislative removal, and were actually rooted in economics. As he turned his eye increasingly towards housing in particular and poverty in general, as well as what he called ‘the war question’, he largely lost his platform.

On 4th April 1967, at Riverside Church, New York, he gave what many consider to be his greatest and most eloquent speech ever, but few recall it. Distilling his Christian calling, his civil rights history and sense of present-day necessity, ‘the fierce urgency of now’ as he described it, he began by noting, “surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent …” He went on, after giving a detailed dissection of American history and policy in Asia, to declare that “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Before continuing to list out what he called ‘a true revolution of values.’ None of this was designed to win him an appreciative audience in an increasingly materialistic America, and it didn’t. King’s approval ratings, according to polls, were firmly in the negative, and falling. The idea then, that someday soon, the whole nation would come together annually to honour him, was laughable.

Just occasionally though, even in the killing, something is stirred that brings out a legacy more powerful than could ever have been imagined, even more so than national commemorative days.

Of course, death changes things, particularly, premature, violent death. It shocks and inevitably provokes both sympathy, and reassessment. It has us wonder, whether we should’ve listened more carefully, when we had the chance. On this site a few days ago, speaking of the current situation in the Middle East, Graham Tomlin longed for leaders of old who were prepared to break the cycle of violence in the name of peace. My mind turned, inevitably, to Martin Luther King, saying that ‘We will meet your physical force with soul force’. Adding, ‘Do what you will, threaten our children, and we will still love you …we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, in winning the victory we will not only win our freedom, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience, that we will win you in the process.”

Such talk rarely, gets you national holidays, named in your honour. It more often gets you killed. Just occasionally though, even in the killing, something is stirred that brings out a legacy more powerful than could ever have been imagined, even more so than national commemorative days.

Legacy speaks of the power of passing on, in the words of Jay Z, turned into a popular pin badge, ‘Rosa sat, so Martin could walk, so Barak could run, so we might fly …’ These cascading consequences of commitment, truthfully sketched out here, and which could’ve gone back further, at least to Maisie Till’s courage in sharing the death of her son, which was said to have inspired Rosa Parks. And, certainly they could also be projected forward. To a multitude of actions, large and small, destined to add to that ongoing legacy of justice. These are, in many instances', the continually ‘rolling waters’ of prophetic imagination that King loved to picture.

In his mind, there is no doubt they find their ultimate source and inspiration in a day set aside to remember, not his though, but Easter Day, when resurrection hope forever shook the world. If, on the 3rd Monday of January each year, some thought might be given to that truth, he could be forgiven a quiet, knowing smile.