Where were you when your mother died? Wherever it was, the answer, of course, would be ‘not in a good place’. Given the choice, though, most of us would want to be with her to the end, holding her hand and telling her how much we loved her.
But if the heartfelt personal revelations from Princes William and Harry last week taught us anything, it is that life can be nasty and random and cares little for happy endings.
In my case, any chance of one was shattered when I was ten years old and I was called into my headmaster’s office at school to be faced with my dad sitting there red-eyed and reeking of whisky and my headmaster telling me to sit down.
The reason my mother hadn’t been there in the morning to make my breakfast, he said, was because she had been rushed into hospital during the night and died. Unsurprisingly, I sobbed and asked what was going to happen. ‘You’ll have to be a big girl now, and make your own breakfast,’ he said.
The gift that William and Harry have given us by speaking out so poignantly about their own experience is that they don’t blame their family for doing what they thought was best at the time
This was the 1970s, after all, and children weren’t factored into any kind of grieving process. There were no groups to join and no therapists in schools. Nor do I recall any of those children’s books we have now that star an aged rabbit or a mummy spider dying – stories that compete with Bambi in reducing adults to tear-stained wrecks.
What my experience did teach me was that, no matter what your age, losing your mother changes the landscape of your life and there are no hard and fast rules over how grief is managed.
When William and Harry walked, heads bowed, behind their mother’s coffin, it was a decision taken by adults thinking they were doing what was best. In their unique regal world, it was important they were seen to be ‘coping’, that the line would carry on.
As William has said: ‘There is that balance between duty and family, and that’s what we had to do.’
I didn’t go to my mother’s funeral at all – my younger siblings and I were taken to Battersea funfair instead. In fact, the funeral was never mentioned. It took decades before it slipped out that that’s why we’d been given that special ‘day out’. My father had done it because he didn’t want us to be upset.
Princess Diana, whose death shocked the world in 1997
The house was stripped of any pictures of my mother and we never spoke of her again.
It was the old-fashioned way: ‘out of sight and out of mind.’ My brother, who was born on our mother’s birthday – she died ten months later – has no recollection of her.
He didn’t have time to build a memory base and that was seen at the time as a good thing. At least I was told she was dead. I have one friend who was suddenly shipped off to boarding school when she was only three and not told her mother had died until ten years later. She must have spent every holiday hoping she would arrive to collect her, but she never did.
Even with the absolute knowledge that your mother has died, you never stop wishing she would come back. Mercifully, the early years have passed when I’d wake in the mornings and think it was all a nightmare before reality kicked in.
Even now, 40-odd years on, I find myself calling on my mother’s powers if I am desperate. Certainly when Phoebe, my 15-year-old daughter, died last May, I focused on the woman who had given me life with a force stronger than life itself.
My youngest daughter was only nine when her sister died and, even though I had learnt the lessons of my own childhood by getting our local vicar to help me break the tragic news in a way that made sense to her, I still, like my father before me, lied to protect my child.
When William and Harry walked, heads bowed, behind their mother’s coffin, it was a decision taken by adults thinking they were doing what was best
Does that make me a bad mother? Possibly. I could have taken her along and made her sit on a hard bench in a cold, grey crematorium alongside her distraught parents and ten adults in mourning, but I didn’t have the strength for that kind of liberal belief in honesty being sacrosanct.
Instead, a month later, she helped me organise a memorial that allowed for joy and celebration. We sang Abba songs and had an African drumming band. Everyone wore bright colours and there was cake. For her, this was, and remains, Phoebe’s funeral. Yes, it is a lie, but one I hope she will forgive one day because being a parent is hard.
The gift that William and Harry have given us by speaking out so poignantly about their own experience is that they don’t blame their family for doing what they thought was best at the time.
Could things have been done differently? Maybe, but hopefully that wretched dilemma will never arise again in their lifetime. As Prince Harry said this week. ‘One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do is to tell your children that your other parent is dead. How you deal with that I don’t know…’ And unless you have walked in those shoes, who can really judge?