Whatever Happens, Grief Will Have Her Way
Shaken by her sudden death I took a camera into mum’s house to tell her story, my way. But grief had other plans.
When Mum died suddenly on November 10, 2019, the world jolted on its axis. This happens when a giant pillar collapses — your mum, dad, brother, sister, friend, partner—everything shudders and, amid the rubble and dust, grief and chaos take the reins. I checked my phone and her avatar was still there; I had four missed calls from her. How? The last time I saw her was in London two months earlier. We had talked about a visit to Amsterdam. And then she was gone.
When the call came in, it felt like a scene from a film. I had a broken leg and was sitting in a car with a friend; our four kids were in the back seat. On the end of that call was my sister in Vermont. I answered and started casually describing to her the scene she had dropped into, and then she said the words. The way I heard it, it sounded funny, like it obviously wasn’t real. Like it was a line from that film.
My friend heard the commotion and paused on starting the car. And when the awful conversation unfolded—What? When? What? When? — he suddenly found himself in a role of unusual responsibility. What he did next was very moving. He delicately asked the children whether they knew what was happening. “His mum’s dead, right?” one of them said, quite abruptly. Part of me wanted to laugh — we can laugh can’t we? — because it was such a beautifully courageous answer (the kind that mum liked!).
When we got home the kids ran upstairs, eager to break the news to my wife. I tried to call mum’s phone again and it went straight to voicemail — ‘Hello…. Eileen…’—and I sobbed as I put the key into the door. Over the next few days this slow motion atomic bomb engulfed my family. We had to deal with this sudden, absurd and brutal absence of being. It was madness.
We had only questions, confusion and pain.
We decided to travel en masse to where she died in Vermont. By then, I was still on crutches and KLM, the Dutch national airline, insisted on hoisting me up to the plane in one of those little disability cabins. Again, very funny. A few days later we took her remains back to the Isle of Arran in Scotland and hosted a small family funeral, hostages to a process none of us wanted. I wanted to quietly remember her, say ‘thank you’ and celebrate her full — but shortened — life. It wasn’t possible because grief had us in a chokehold.
A few weeks went by and I made a very strange decision. It was January, 2020. I decided to go back to her house in England and film the experience, aware that a health crisis was engulfing Europe. In this tiny village her house quietly waited, full of 71 years of her memories and things (and a lot of crap, too). Mum lived in Rutland, a tiny county in the East Midlands. She loved the idea of a place for us all to visit with our kids. Her own little granny paradise.
That day I flew from Schiphol to Stansted Airport where my sister, Antonia, picked me up and we drove to the village, which sits beside a conservation area on Rutland Water. I had a goal in mind: to film this beautiful house and preserve mum’s personality and quirkiness through a short film, before the house was emptied of her belongings and sold. The film would be called Eulogy, I decided. I would walk through each room, filming mum’s things and then sit in her kitchen, mount my camera on a tripod and read out the eulogy I wrote for her.
One of the first rules of documentary filmmaking, I’m told, is to plan well and write a draft script and then ignore it when you start shooting. I got out of the car and realised I had left my tripod at home. We tried the front door and the keys didn’t work. Or maybe we got the wrong door because of our nerves.
By now, I had turned the camera on and shot the sparse trees beyond the fence and her sad garden. It looked like it was waiting for her to come home. And instead it got us.
We walked through the door and something happened. There was grief, waiting for us in the silence. I kept filming and from behind the camera I watched something unfold; I don’t know what. I didn’t have time to think, just follow and document these treasured moments before the world closed down on us. It was a huge responsibility because I was acting on behalf of my family and everyone who has ever loved her, or loved someone. It was a painful, tiring and, at times, despairing goodbye.
It was also quite funny; grief can be funny. We made a cup of tea, and talked shit and filled the silence with stories and memories. And slowly, the cold became warm. I always felt powerless to grief because her biggest waves would wreck me and I would fight her back. Command and control… the British way. But that wasn’t how things unfolded. In fact, grief owned me and I had to learn to respect her when she visited: when I was slumped at the dinner table; frozen in a supermarket aisle; or, breaking down in the toilets at work.
After a while, I learned that it’s best to accept her waves and roll with her currents.
I walked around the house and pointed the camera at things that I never noticed before. Why didn’t I appreciate this Chinese stool? The quirky placement of her sculptures, the redundant barbecue out the front, the large stuffed snowman that lay inexplicably on the bed in her front room. Fruit baskets, wooden African elephants and Christmas fairy lights, all had to be preserved as they were — in situ — so that we could remember who she was, rather than drowning in the process of bereavement.
I got home to Amsterdam and left the footage for many months. I only looked through it again because I was triggered by the mounting death toll from the pandemic. Eulogies were on all the news bulletins every night, people cut down in the prime of their lives with families left to make sense of it all. I watched the footage and it haunted me.
I was further down the grief path by now, but still taking hits. You assume these giant pillars are going to be there forever, because they feel so permanent. And yet somehow, you miss the rich texture of their stone: the markings and scars that made them so totemic. None of the details of their lives mean anything until they’re gone, and then it’s everything. Things are loaded with meaning and love, precious but junk at the same time.
You pour over the photos you never looked at properly, the emails and furniture placements. Even an electricity bill has meaning, because it was her electricity bill. Eulogy becomes your permanent state of being.
And now I’m finishing this film I’m having to answer some of the questions I never asked — or ignored — at the beginning. Why bring a camera into the home of your deceased mum? Why not keep this private? Who are you making this for? I don’t have all of the answers yet. Perhaps I never will. I simply felt compelled to act, because she was disappearing from view. And in my panicked effort to capture her life essence in film, I found something else precious instead. An honest, messy portrait of grief.
Bringing the camera to the house was an exercise in control, to make grief dance to my tune. And you can see her response in the film. She’s there, a force far greater than us quietly controlling proceedings, pushing us from room to room. A force of great love and comfort. And that is a lesson I will take from this project: grief is in charge.
So, let go.
Surrender.
Understand that every shattering moment of grief is only love in disguise. Let each of her thunderous waves submerge you, because they will. Remember that it’s your grief, too. There’s no one else that’s you, and there’s no one else that’s them. So, just let go and breath between your tears. Because whatever happens, grief will have her way.
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