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| In utter anguish I stood at the steps of the altar in my church, gazing at what was no bigger than a wooden brick placed before the altar and adorned on either side with spring flowers. And this was it. Thirty-two years of life condensed into this tiny measure of ashes. The next fifty years or so years conspicuous by their annihilation. Going through my mind, a parade of poignant memories – a beautiful little boy, aged seven, wide innocent-eyed, keenly interested in a lesson I was giving; enthusiastic in his response; young, healthy, intelligent, receptive and analytical in that wonderful way of all naïve yet fast-learning children. The white shirt and red necktie of first Communion day, the photos in a dusty album alongside my son, both smiling, toothless wonders of that special day. And now, my son married, a father, enthusiastic teacher, content and fulfilled, the other child here, now finished and at the end of an existence of misery, disillusionment, drugs and violence. He died alone of an heroin overdose in a corner of a London Underground station – I don’t know whether this was accidental or suicide; either way it was driven by hopelessness and despair. To die alone is so sad. We are (mostly) all greeted in, we deserve to be greeted out. I stood motionless, an overwhelming sense of inadequacy sweeping over me – ‘The Sin of the Silent’ kept going through my brain. The sin of we, the great corporate silent – those millions of us who are always frantically too busy living our own lives to notice the desperate and the emotionally excluded, who are too deeply wounded to ask our help. They survive on the edges in the shadows of our neglect until the day death beckons in glorious relief and they die alone, utterly alone. And we who remain have the gall to recite platitudes, clichés and convenient sound bites from the Bible – we keep our corporate guilt well sealed behind airs of condescending sorrow and pity for the deceased. We often say ‘at least now he is at peace’. What a cop-out! What about before this ‘now’? The years of anything but peace! Where were we? Who noticed? Who asked? Who offered – reached out? On hearing a mother telling her young teenage son that suicide was a selfish act, I burned with unspoken anger, selfish? Who is selfish? The person who has come to the end of a ghastly road, unaccompanied, or those who walked a parallel road which never touched? No matter how compassionate we think we are, we are all guilty, sometime or other of looking the other way. Unhappy, emotionally excluded people can be very hard work, reaching out can mean difficult commitment – commitment is a journey into the unknown, it can be an intrusion into our complacency. C.S. Lewis said ‘Once we have opened the lid of the coffin of our selfishness, we are leaving ourselves open to vulnerability.’ And so I looked at this tiny wooden box, alone in this large empty church and I cried inside at the missed opportunities brought about by the many coffin lids kept tightly shut over the years. Too late to open them now. Suddenly, a memory fluttered past of that eager young child flying a splendid paper aeroplane across the classrom twenty-five years before, and I stood a little longer in the evening light and I wept the tears of one of the many silent sinners. |
