IN EARLY 2023, first my elder son’s father after which my brother died inside weeks of one another in shocking circumstances. My first response — common among the many 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 within the psalms and in sacred music. When my son Henry went in quest 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 wouldn’t be alone, and that his companion can 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 within 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 few weeks later, he was writing the words to an anthem by Roderick Williams for a processional cross, consecrated by the previous Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams. I hoped that, during a time when the chances were stacked against Kit, he had found comfort in liturgy.
HIS funeral service was on 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 switch the darkness of death into the dawn of a recent 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 on the last. This is the unfolding mystery. I reflected on Psalm 142: “When my spirit was overwhelmed inside me, then thou knewest my path.” The image of a pilgrim was near 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 a number of the lovely neglected churches, particularly round Thetford.
But it took on a further significance for me — especially the road from the Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales: “This world is but a thoroughfare of woe And we’re pilgrims passing from side to side.”
The extraordinary promise of the funeral service is a route from darkness to peace and joy. And I believed of the processional cross and its message: who understands human sorrow higher?
FOR me, as for a lot of others, Handel’s Messiah — and particularly the text of “He was despised”, from Isaiah 53.3 — is the very best method to understand desolation as a human experience, and answers the query of God’s place in human suffering.
I’m a trustee of the Science Museum, and tread calmly there on religious belief, but in death it’s faith that provides poetic meaning; an evidence concerning the decay of cells is insufficient to conjure up the terrible awe of the journey from the living to the dead.
The musical type 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 accomplished the music for it. The entire cantata was performed on 11 November 2023, Remembrance Day; however 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 importance of the requiem in Robert Chase’s book, Dies Irae: “Music has played a big role in the assorted rites of passages observed to sanctify this journey from life to death. For nearly two millennia, the Christian quest for everlasting peace in a more perfect type of existence has been expressed in a poetic-musical structure referred to as the Requiem.”
The creator 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 develop into the leading theme of the Mass for the Dead — is all over the place to be found: rest, and sleep, and peace.” A medieval pilgrim has written on the partitions: “There is light on this darkness there may be music in these tombs.”
PEACE was what I most ardently looked for my brother. He died from an exhausted heart, operating at 20 per cent of capability while he was writing and performing, amongst other things in his customary role as panto villain on 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 of 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 finished: then Lord, in thy mercy, grant us protected lodging, a holy rest, and peace on the last.”
Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine: light perpetual shine upon them. The way of reconciliation, for me, has been to think about those we’ve got lost bathed in a radiant light. When I objected to Kit’s living alone within the dusty makeshift vestry, he answered that I had not seen the sunshine pouring in through the stained-glass window in the toilet — the place where he died.
Sarah Sands is an creator and journalist. Her book The Hedgehog Diaries is published by New River (Books, 24 November 2023). Constellations and Consolations is out there in audio at Austen MacAuley publishers.
