An old woman died this week. A very old woman, who had led a long and privileged life. Not always a happy life; her family didn’t have her sense of duty and service…and there’s no reason why they should have, they were born into different times. Some of them clearly have different values, some of them would appear (if the media are to be believed, and I can’t answer that one) to have no values at all. Perhaps that’s what happens with too much privilege, not leavened by a sense of guilt or shame or duty or service, or whatever it is that keeps most of us on the right track. But the bottom line is that an old woman died and suddenly the media are on the streets asking random people how they felt when they first heard that she was ill.
I almost wish that I lived in Windsor, because I’d love to have been that young woman who was randomly asked to justify ‘not being the biggest fan’ – and kudos to her for keeping her cool about it – I’d like to have been asked that question, because I didn’t hear that the woman was under medical supervision, so I didn’t feel anything at all about it. The least I would have felt was surprise given her age, given that she’d recently lost her husband, given that she’d been becoming increasingly visibly frail. I don’t watch the news or read the papers, and I’ve only ever been sort of
remotely interested in the Royal Family, but a certain amount of it seeps through.
Actually, no. Let me correct that. I would characterise my interest in them as “morbid curiosity”. I do sometimes wonder what it’s like in that world; mostly I’m glad I have no need to know. So, cards on the table I do have inherited Royal memorabilia in the display cabinet. It lives on that bottom shelf that I can’t see most of the time and I have been talking about wanting to discard it for quite
some time. Is now the time, now that a whole load more is about to hit the shelves? Cards on the table: I was taken to see the Crown Jewels as a child; on a much more recent girlie trip to London
we visited the Palace and spent a lot of time looking at dresses; on a solo trip to Edinburgh I couldn’t resist a trip to poke around on the Yacht… as l say, a morbid fascination.
The other reason I’d like to have been asked is that I think the follow-up question would most likely have been about hearing about her death. They say we always remember where we were and how we heard about [insert event of note] e.g. Kennedy’s assassination, Mandela’s release,the death of Elvis Presley, the Twin Towers. And I do. I can answer for each of those, though I was a babe-in-arms for the Kennedy one so I have only my parents word for that occasion.
For Mandela I was in my boyfriend’s bedroom watching the walk to freedom while breakfasting on tea and toast. For Presley, in a sleeping bag in a tent on a camp site in south Wales and my
brother tuned in to Radio Luxembourg. My first hint about Diana was the flags at half-mast and I assumed it was the Queen Mother, and I remember her funeral (Diana’s not the Queen Mum’s ) playing on the TV in the hairdresser’s. That was back in the days when I paid other people to cut my hair. The Twin Towers...standing in the reception area at work listening to a colleague talking to her mum on the phone. The 7/7 bombings in London, a dear friend phoning me having narrowly escaped, telling me to turn on the news. I remember what I remember.
So, the Queen. And isn’t it peculiarly British that that is how we refer to her “The” Queen, as if she were the only one in the whole world, and the assumption that if we used that expression in any other country on earth we would expect them to know that we meant ‘our’ Queen, not theirs – if they happened to be a country that also had one. My Dad was not an arch-Royalist by any stretch, but he took the view that we paid her wages so she was “ours” and he always referred to her in his mock-Geordie accent as “Wor Lizzie”.
I suspect I will remember my moment of hearing about this one too, because my first knowledge was a Tweet from Sarah Millican telling the world that in light of the afternoon’s news the show in Halifax would be cancelled. That is such a random way of finding out that your Head of State has died…forgive me for smiling at the incongruity of it.
What I wrote in my journal was simply: the Queen died today. I’m probably supposed to feel something. I don’t.
Then I moved on to write about other things.
As the media circus kicks into gear and people who didn’t spare the Windsors a thought from one costume drama to the next feel the need to sign books of condolence and travel ridiculous distances to lay flowers, what I really feel is a sense of apprehension about what happens to this country now. We have a new King – and Charles has never been the most auspicious name for British monarchs – we have a new Prime Minister, a comprehensive kid who is trying to herd her public-school cats, and we have managed to isolate ourselves from our European neighbours. We are still dealing with the fall-out from the covid years. We are still dealing with an energy crisis. We are still reeling from the impacts of the climate shifts. And because of my own past, can I also say that we are also still not dealing with a housing crisis, fuel poverty and full-blown-actual poverty that has working people dependent upon food banks…and we are, allegedly, a “first world” country. Just saying.
What I really feel right now is that we have no leadership. We have no one (elected or otherwise) anywhere near the top of our governmental infrastructure that I can honestly say that I trust.
It no doubt sounds brutal but I will not mourn the passing of one old woman; I am too busy trying not to worry about the disintegration of society at large. And the economy. And the ecology. Like, the world, in general. I don’t like getting older, but honestly I’m grateful not to be 15 years old right now. I’m grateful to have a large chunk of my life having been lived during the good years.
At the same time, I know that the social media hate-mongers will kick in. I know that the anti-monarchists among my friends and colleagues will vent their spleen a little more violently than
usual and I will have a little less ammunition with which to counter it now that wor Lizzie is no longer at the helm. And I wish they wouldn’t. Whatever we think or feel about the woman and/or her family, the bottom line is not that a very old woman died this week…the bottom line is that she was not the only one.
Many more old women died this week. And old men. And young men and women. And children. Many people died this week. Maybe we knew one of them, or more than one. Maybe they died peacefully, though many will have died in anguish or anger or violence. Some of them will have died unloved, their passing noticed by no-one. Some will have died too soon after taking their first breath to even have had a chance to know that they were in fact loved. So here’s a thought: whether you mourn the death of Elizabeth Windsor or not, spare her passing a compassionate thought – and include in that thought all the others who died this week. Spare a compassionate thought for the humans who come and go alongside us…and maybe just for a moment do not judge them…for we only ever know a little of what is in someone else’s head and heart.
Perhaps if we did this every time we heard of a specific death, if in each case we felt compassion for those who love the one who has passed and deal with the personal sorrow of loss, and if we then extended that sense of loving and holding space for all those who have lost someone in that moment, that day, that week, perhaps if we took the time to realise the enormity of every death for someone…perhaps then we would get better at enabling life.
Just a thought. And one that I think wor Lizzie might just have agreed with.
