Alice Thomas Ellis on hoping to die
And find out what she doesn't know
A dark and funny novelist and a dryly amusing columnist, as in her “Home Life” series for The Spectator, and under her married name Anna Haycraft a creator of cookbooks, Alice Thomas Ellis died in 2005 but her novels remain in print, but the collections of her “Home Life” column in The Spectator do not. “The Summer House Trilogy” was made into a movie starring Jeanne Moreau, Joan Plowright, and Julie Walters. This comes from her autobiography A Welsh Childhood.
Ellis mentions two children who’d died, Mary, who died two days after birth, and Joshua, who fell off a roof and died at 19 after ten months in a coma. She’s writing from her home deep in the Welsh countryside.
We were living here when our second son, Joshua, died, and his death formed a hinge in existence. Everything that had happened before led up to it, and everything that has happened since is only afterwards. He lies in the graveyard across the fields and one day I shall lie beside him and it won’t matter any more. I do not know how people contain such pain. . . .
The place on earth where I come closest to peace is in the graveyard amongst all the quiet dead. I seem to have thought, all my life, of little but death — partly perhaps because of impatience, a yearning to have it over and done with: that extraordinary last thing that we are called upon to do, the act of dying. If we have to do it — I think to myself — I would rather do it sooner than later.
But mostly it comes from the old awareness that I am not whole, that there is something missing: something more important than all the world. Death is the price we must pay for completion. I am astonished when I think that two of my children have achieved this feat and I am left here, not knowing what they know. Simple curiosity is another strong element in this possibly lamentable death wish.
There is a harpist lying in the graveyard whose epitaph reads: “The singer is silent, but not the song.” Another epitaph, roughly translated, reads: “Lord, why did you make the valley so beautiful, and the life of the poor shepherd so short?”
Poetry is another consolation, but sometimes 1 think that in all this peaceful land there is not one spot that has not, at one time or another, been soaked in blood and the tears of the bereaved and dispossessed.
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