Life, Death and Flowers

 Yesterday, before we went out for dinner with friends (hooray the world is getting back to normal) we were watching the football. Well, I wasn’t watching football but I did start watching when I heard what had happened. For many people watching someone collapse will have been very triggering. We don’t see death, we don’t talk about death but it is part of life. 

Although everyone watched, open-mouthed, unable to remove their eyes from the screen, once they were over the shock there was all-round criticism of the BBC. Why did they show us so much? There are laws to stop journalists intruding on shock and grief. It’s just not ok for us to be watching death. However, this was a little bit out of their control, the cameras were watching something else when it happened. They were watching a footballer. Yes, they should have stopped watching but that’s shock for you.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I’m conflicted about this. It seems that the public have an appetite for death. Fictional death is very popular but that’s different to real death. We are all going to lose people we love to death but we don’t really know what to expect. We pretend that it’s all going to be fine. We think we will glide over it, it won’t affect us but it will. When our loved ones die it will hurt. It will hurt a lot. It will hurt for a long time - maybe forever.  However, if we don’t know what we are in for it could hurt more than is necessary.

We all watched the football pitch, hoping to understand and willing him to be alright. Luckily, he was in a place with a defibrillator and he survived. What we won’t know is what happens next. Some people survive but not for long, others survive to live a reduced life and others make a full recovery. 

We won’t follow this man to find out exactly how his life has changed but his family will. People watching whose loved ones collapsed in circumstances like this who weren’t saved may feel angry. There are so many things in life that can make the pain of grief worse, though. It could have been the jumper department of Marks and Spencer at Christmas or the smell of Lily of the Valley in the woods. We can’t remove all the grief triggers from life.

So, this morning, with death on my mind I’m off to nose around some posh people’s gardens so that people who are dying of cancer can do so in a place where people know what to expect without being told there’s no room for them, so that their relatives can have less grief-triggering moments and maybe even eat, sleep or close their eyes like a normal person.