There are, as far as I know, few great novels which explore the experience of bereavement if you know of any I would be glad to hear about them. The one which I find most truthful and moving, is Susan Hill’s In the Springtime of the Year. It concerns the death of a young forester and his wife’s coming to terms with her grief and widowhood. It is not explicitly religious but it resonates with Christian faith in a profound and subtle way.
The first half of the novel explores her anger and deliberate self isolation as she cuts herself off from her neighbours in the village; but then something changes with the spring and the preparations for Easter when all the graves in the churchyard are decked with flowers on Holy Saturday. That morning she had enjoyed food again for the first time. She felt she had never eaten food before. It was a new gift, everything was a gift, and what she knew above all else, was that she must take it, take it and be glad, not only for her own sake but for Ben’s. That was what he had been waiting for, and wanting.’ On Easter day she goes to church for the first time since Ben’s funeral. She becomes aware not just of the other village people there but of all those who had ever prayed there; the air was crammed and vibrating with their goodness and the freedom and power of their resurrection, and she felt herself to be part of some great, living and growing tapestry, every thread of which joined with and crossed and belonged to every other, though each one was entirely and distinctly itself.’ She wonders if she is going out of her mind. And yet the flowers and the people and the hymns are real and living and beautiful and give her the determination to put aside her self pity and be well. She longs to share her new feelings with the other villagers but her previous behaviour has made them suspicious and uneasy in her presence. They move away, and she finds herself alone again as if nothing has changed after all. But she knows that the fault is not in the world but in herself. She goes home feeling utterly confused and falls asleep on the grass under the sun. She dozed and remembered the flowers in the churchyard, and seemed to be on the brink of some very simple, very great truth which would explain everything about her own life and about Ben’s, and about his death and all the life and death of the universe.’ When she wakes the confusion and fear seem to have gone. Somehow, somehow she might yet save herself.
No.
She stood up slowly. Something else had fallen into place. She had no power to save herself. And that was the meaning of Friday, and today. Nothing she herself had thought of or done or felt since the day of Ben’s death had any significance, for feelings were not truth.’
Gradually Ruth gathers the courage to go and talk to the man who was with Ben when he died as a result of a rotten tree breaking off and falling on him. She asks him the question which in her grief she has so far been incapable of asking, ‘What actually happened?” Her husband’s friend replies;
I sat by him. Just sat on the ground. On my own with him. It… I’ve never known it like that. I’ve never been with death before, seen it come over a man and take him. I’ve been with it often enough. But I’ve never felt the same. What was true, what was true about it, once and for good. I couldn’t doubt the truth after that. After sitting with him there in the wood. Touching him. It was death and – and life. I’d never doubt that now. Never. It was inside me and all around. And him. A change…… some great change.’
And so the process of her grieving moves on. She helps the young curate and his wife as they mourn the death of their three year old daughter. She sees in them some of the same emotions she has gone through. She goes to see the dead child she had not wanted to see Ben’s dead body. All she can do is be with the parents and in some way help to carry their grief by simply being there. Talking to the curate she finds herself struggling with his loss of faith and loss of meaning in life. All she can say is Sometimes I seem to understand.’
Then her sister in law the spoilt daughter of her family who has always resented Ruth comes to her house. She is unmarried yet pregnant and has come to Ruth for shelter from her own family. And so Ruth goes to Ben’s family to try to bring about reconciliation; she tries to talk to them in a new way nothing dramatic happens but life moves on and slowly one senses things will change, building on small ways on the changes that are gradually taking place in Ruth.
Why spend so much time describing this novel as we approach Easter? Because it makes sense but in a disguised way of the Easter message. There are words and phrases that echo the gospel but hardly so that you would notice. What we see is in Eliot’s words, the hint half guessed, the gift half understood,’ a moving from isolation into a deeper sense of common humanity, a belief in the possibility of change but a recognition that we have to trust in the power of something outside ourselves to bring about that change, something which is beyond the realm of feelings which may deceive us, but which relies on a holy intuition that puts us in relation to others in need. It is there inside us and around us, a change some great change. If Christ is risen, then we are risen.
With my love and prayers for a happy and blessed Easter,
Fr Stephen
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker