BBC Radio 4 2016-05-20

BBC Radio 4 2016-05-20

Good morning, though there isn’t much that’s good about it for the families and friends of those who died on EgyptAir flight MS804, as a massive search is underway for the missing plane. Whatever the cause turns out to be, their grief and bereavement will not be moderated. There are many tragic stories emerging, from the British father who leaves a wife and two small children to that of a young man from Chad currently living in France whose mother had just died. He was on his way home to grieve with his relatives. In Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native, one of the characters says “the fates are against you”. That’s how it must seem for that family.

Although the bereaved know that learning the cause and the details of the plane’s last moments will not assuage their grief, they will want to know what happened. Love isn’t a generalised feeling. We love people in particular and in every circumstance of their lives, even in and through the moments of their dying. On many funeral visits I’ve listened to spouses and partners offer me a minute by minute account of how their loved one died. By describing it, they are not denying death’s reality but often thankful that the person they loved did not die alone. Sometimes we say that we’d like to go quickly, but most religious traditions ask for deliverance from sudden death. It’s included as a specific petition in the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer.

It was as a young priest more than thirty years ago that I came to know Philip Toynbee, for many years the doyen of literary reviewers. He moved to the Welsh countryside and found himself a near neighbour of an Anglican contemplative community of nuns, the Society of the Sacred Cross.

It was an unlikely match between someone who’d been fairly bohemian and sisters following the religious life, but they became very close. When Philip was dying of cancer I recall him doubting whether to have a final operation. It was a risk. He didn’t want to die on the operating table. He said “that would deprive me of the proper stages of dying, and I want to learn all I can from it”.

Rare is the person who approaches their death like that. But the deprivation of sudden death and the infliction of sudden grief are both greater than we may imagine. Perhaps today as we remember the victims and families of the EgyptAir disaster, we may cast our net of sympathy much wider to include all visited by sudden death or sudden grief.