I hadn’t returned to my 25-year-old brother’s final resting place since his funeral. Could a journey along the Thames from London to Oxford help me come to terms with his death?
In October 2015, I decided to walk from my home near Croydon in south London to my brother’s grave in Oxford. John had been diagnosed with cancer in 2011, while studying for a PhD in history at Oxford University. When he died in 2012, there was no question of burying him elsewhere; though our family lived in London, Oxford was where John had felt most at home. I had not been back to the grave since his funeral; none of my family had.
We wanted to think of John as still with us in the world, not tethered to a single place, and we chose, on anniversaries, to do things he would have liked, such as going to see Paddington at the cinema, rather than laying flowers on the grass above his remains. We had driven close to it once, on the way home from somewhere. Seeing a sign for Wolvercote cemetery made me catch my breath, but none of us mentioned it, or the fact that my mother was weeping.
