From an early age, she encouraged me to be strong, physically and mentally. Those gifts helped me through the day we buried her
My mum was a PE teacher and coach. One of her early gifts was to help me feel like a physically capable female. For the couple of years before she died, my body had taken a battering, with illness and major surgery, then pregnancy and the aftermath, so I wasn’t feeling at all hale. Carrying a coffin is not something a woman necessarily plans to do – usually men perform this task; assumed to be stronger bearers. It’s a frightening, demanding duty.
But I wanted to do it for Mum. I wanted to be involved practically with the process of grief, and “put my hands under the stone”. My cousin R, an upland sheep farmer and incredible woman, walked at the front with me. What the congregation in church saw first as we entered the building was not a typical sight – a beautiful white wool coffin carried in by women. The coffin was chosen by my dad, my brother and me. It was constructed from local fleece and covered with flowers, a visual antidote to fear and darkness.
For the interment, we had the catastrophic challenges of storm Desmond’s tail – a Met Office red weather warning, flooding and damage in the village cemetery, debris everywhere. The entire burial was in question. Throughout, the undertakers were superb, calm, stewarding, agents of a remarkable humanity. Drains were unblocked; the grave was dug, the burial would go ahead, they insisted, the coffin taken via a high passable pathway, between the oldest headstones.
It’s an old Westmorland tradition that mourners walk in a cortege from church to cemetery behind the hearse, and everyone did. The scene was like something from an oil painting; the formal procession through a drenched Lakeland village, the gales dying out and black clouds breaking apart, rays of brilliant, gilded light. People had fought to get to the funeral – train lines and roads were shut and there were long delays, blockages, power cuts. Those who tried all made it, or sent representatives from as far afield as India and the US.
It was an incredible experience – a good disturbance in the heart. I’m haunted, but not traumatically, and a few years later wrote a short story about it all called Sudden Traveller. It is the only story I cannot read out in public.
Regardless of the epic December weather, there were absent people who might have come in support – of me, if not my mother. At the time, my marriage was breaking down and my daughter was only 16 months old. Mum had been sick with cancer for a year and I lived six hours away from her and Dad. I was in the eye of a personal storm, too.
