IN EARLY 2023, first my elder son’s father and then my brother died within weeks of each other in shocking circumstances. My first response — common among the bereaved — was disbelief, followed by anguish. In the case of my brother, Kit, as a former cathedral chorister, he had been taught a language for this grief, and I learned it, too.
It was the liturgy of death; and it spoke exactly to human desolation. Kit was a celebrated cabaret singer and librettist, but his education at Canterbury Cathedral meant that he was also versed in the psalms and in sacred music. When my son Henry went in search of his father, Julian, lost on a mountain in Los Angeles, my brother spoke of Elijah. Our worst imaginings were of Julian alone, battling a storm. Kit replied that Julian would not be alone, and that his companion would be “covere[d] with light as with a garment, [he] Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain” (Psalm 104).
For bleak personal reasons, Kit was living in the vestry of a church (where he wrote and composed), opposite his family home. Here, he held late-night vigils for Julian; and here, just before he died a couple of weeks later, he was writing the words to an anthem by Roderick Williams for a processional cross, consecrated by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams. I hoped that, during a time when the odds were stacked against Kit, he had found comfort in liturgy.
HIS funeral service was at the actors’ church — St Paul’s, Covent Garden — and it was there that I felt my heart yield to the priest’s opening prayer in sorrow: “God of all consolation, in your unending love and mercy for us, you turn the darkness of death into the dawn of a new life. Show compassion to your people in sorrow. Be our refuge and our strength to lift us from the darkness of this grief to peace and joy in your presence.”
The turmoil of grief is answered by compassion, and God’s promise of peace at the last. This is the unfolding mystery. I reflected on Psalm 142: “When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my path.” The image of a pilgrim was close to me. My brother had left behind a pilgrim path that he had sketched, across Norfolk, ending up in Cambridgeshire, at Ely Cathedral. His idea was to bring attention to some of the lovely neglected churches, particularly round Thetford.
But it took on an additional significance for me — especially the line from the Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales: “This world is but a thoroughfare of woe And we are pilgrims passing to and fro.”
The extraordinary promise of the funeral service is a route from darkness to peace and joy. And I thought of the processional cross and its message: who understands human sorrow better?
FOR me, as for many others, Handel’s Messiah — and particularly the text of “He was despised”, from Isaiah 53.3 — is the best way to understand desolation as a human experience, and answers the question of God’s place in human suffering.
I am a trustee of the Science Museum, and tread lightly there on religious belief, but in death it is faith that gives poetic meaning; an explanation about the decay of cells is inadequate to conjure up the terrible awe of the journey from the living to the dead.
The musical form of the Requiem evokes this profoundly. With unknowing prescience, my brother had also been working on a Requiem for a fallen soldier in Afghanistan, and Kit’s musical partner, James McConnel, had just completed the music for it. The entire cantata was performed on 11 November 2023, Remembrance Day; but the Requiem was first heard months earlier, at Kit’s own funeral.
JAHJA LING, the associate director of the Cleveland Orchestra, is quoted on the significance of the requiem in Robert Chase’s book, Dies Irae: “Music has played a significant role in the various rites of passages observed to sanctify this journey from life to death. For nearly two millennia, the Christian quest for eternal peace in a more perfect form of existence has been expressed in a poetic-musical structure known as the Requiem.”
The author of the book Requiem, Alec Robertson, reminds us of its origin by introducing us to the Roman catacombs and the prayers for the dead:
“Requiem, ‘rest’ — the word that was to become the leading theme of the Mass for the Dead — is everywhere to be found: rest, and sleep, and peace.” A medieval pilgrim has written on the walls: “There is light in this darkness there is music in these tombs.”
PEACE was what I most ardently sought for my brother. He died from an exhausted heart, operating at 20 per cent of capacity while he was writing and performing, among other things in his customary role as panto villain at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford.
The funeral liturgy has an answering prayer for this. It is John Henry Newman’s “O Lord, support us all the day long of this troubled life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work is done: then Lord, in thy mercy, grant us safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last.”
Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine: light perpetual shine upon them. The way of reconciliation, for me, has been to think of those we have lost bathed in a radiant light. When I objected to Kit’s living alone in the dusty makeshift vestry, he answered that I had not seen the light pouring in through the stained-glass window in the bathroom — the place where he died.
Sarah Sands is an author and journalist. Her book The Hedgehog Diaries is published by New River (Books, 24 November 2023). Constellations and Consolations is available in audio at Austen MacAuley publishers.