Going home early

 My children did not enjoy school, and neither did I.

Both I and they can look back and pick out many aspects for which we were grateful — friends made, facts learned, all the usual funny moments that still make us laugh, interesting life experience, and a heightened awareness of golden September days (the autumn term started in early September after the long summer holiday) — but in general we didn't like it.

On the last day of each term, when school broke up for the holidays, the children were sent home early. This was always a day to be prized. For me, and for my children, it was such a happy thing to miss the last couple of lessons of the day and go home early.

In our household we talk about death more than most people I know, usually at the instigation of me or Hebe. I'm not entirely sure why. I was closely involved in hospice chaplaincy for several years, and with bereaved people in crafting ceremonies for funerals for many more years after that. And Hebe and I both worked as care assistants in a residential palliative care setting for some time. So our encounters with death have been up close and personal. All my daughters helped me look after my husband Bernard in the time of his dying, but it was Hebe who lived with us, in her little caravan under the spreading oak tree, and travelled with me through the long weeks and months as we saw him safely home. And we have had several other dances with death as family members ended their lives. Finding my father's body in his little cottage, the door left conveniently open. Sitting with my mother-in-law from my first marriage as she breathed her last breaths. Sitting with my father-in-law from that marriage, talking about things that mattered in his final days, singing harvest hymns in close harmony round his bedside. Spending time with my mother during the years of her long, uncertain, reluctant wandering out of this world. One way and another, it's fair to say death has been prominent in our lives.

One of the deepest bereavements for Hebe has been the loss of her beloved cat Ted — valiant ratter, ravishing eyes, a purr like a diesel engine, but also a lame leg and a heart defect. Ted was not an old cat when he died (just as we went into lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic); he was only nine. Ted went home early.

Hebe and Alice often wonder how they will manage their old age. We are not a wealthy family, and we depend heavily on sharing and helping and doing things for ourselves — we live comfortably, but that's because we also live thriftily. Of my five children, only one has (two) children of her own, and one of them has definite fragilities. "Who will look after us?" is a question that lingers in Hebe's and Alice's minds. We know that those five sisters will always be there for one another — but I remember the loneliness of my great-grandmother, once her sisters had gone home ahead of her, and she was the only one left. What then? 

So death and dying is a topic of conversation that comes round for us fairly often. We are intensely interested in the world of light — I have glimpsed it, I can remember it — and in the pathways of the soul that thread their way between this world and the world of light that carries it, surrounds it, over-shines it. We are interested in the light beings who watch over us and help us. We walk along the highway bridging the gap between Earth and Heaven that Jesus opened for us. We look for the signs along the way. We notice the changing landscape as we pass through.

And, in these strange and sorrowful times when so many have died — and the pandemic is only one part of it, there's more to it than that — Hebe has come up with a phrase for the ones (like her Ted) who go before we thought we were ready to say goodbye. She says they got to go home early. 

All of us come here to learn, and to teach, and to make friends and travel along together. Living on Earth is a lot like going to school. 

There are times and seasons – term-times and holidays, hard and hated lessons, and ones we look forward to, with teachers we love and admire and some seriously horrible ones too — but all of us graduate in the end. 

There is leaving home to go to school in the morning, dressed in our strange uniform of skin and bone; there is the experience of meeting the rest of our year group, and searching for friendly faces; there is the awkwardness of playtime and the tensions of finding a partner to go into assembly with us, hand in hand. But the sun begins to sink towards the west, and at last it's home time. And if it's a special day, if you are lucky — perhaps if you have been ill — someone will come to collect you, and you will get to go home early.