Woodland farewell

 

She wanted no fuss. No ceremony, no gathering of people wearing their ill-fitting, moth balled best. No one there out of duty  and the hope of a cup of tea with cake afterwards. Just her family- meagre at that- and me.

It was the farewell we had talked about for several years on my trips to see her. It had been a game of sorts initially, both of us making light of the day that was approaching as if on the incoming tide that twice a day covered the salt marsh near her home. An ebbing away from life that little bit more each time I saw her.

Then as her illness progressed and the certainty of her going felt more real to us both, the laughter gave way to a silence in which her thoughts and mine met and danced together in the sunlit room overlooking her garden towards her “ blue remembered  hills” in the north.   

She loved her garden, a rebellion of wildflowers and ivy cloaked trees. A small patch of woodland dropped into the pristine neighbourhood which caused disgust to those who like things neat, but to her brought delight. In that garden, she taught me the beauty of the ordinary and the value of simple and that a raindrop on a petal can look like a pearl.

And then on a day in August when I hadn’t been  there to say goodbye, she died.

 Driving to her funeral in a car filled with regret and anger at the traffic around Birmingham, I held my memories of her close in my chest, letting only the tears escape and be seen by the one who was there alongside me to mourn.

There had been rain the day before making the wood smell busy with life; of leaves decaying underfoot and wildflowers heavy with a late summer scent. The trees, grateful for the rain bowed down with the weight of their saturated leaves.

A row of tall oaks, standing sentinels on the border of the path from the car park watched us as we silently made our way towards the spot in the wood that had been prepared earlier.

We were a slow procession, as her casket wobbled precariously on the shoulders of its bearers struggling  over the rough ground. The few of us following, mindful of the puddles and mud that marked the path to her grave.

A deep hole had been dug into the terracotta-coloured earth in which a blackbird as if tugging a  trapped elastic band  was collecting his supper of worm before flying off in a squawking  flash of black and gold at our arrival.

“Was he the early bird?” I asked and laughed to myself knowing she would also laugh at the joke; such was our friendship.

The simple cocoon  made from felt she had made herself was lowered into the ground in silence as even the birds seemed to have stopped their song in that moment. Then as if to welcome her back into the earth, and to offer us a gift of hope, a shaft of sunlight squeezed through the trees highlighting a small fern, its fronds already beginning to take on an autumnal hue.

“Bury me in a wood where I can return to the earth” was her request. No headstone marks her grave, no inscription engraved to chronicle her life, but over the passing of time that patch of earth will grow back as wild and as beautiful as before.

But she will still be gone.