Three moments in time:
When I was about eight, someone at school died during the holidays. No one ever said anything, either to the parents, or to the boys when we came back, which was slightly strange, as they hadn’t even had time to erase his name from the school lists for the following term. Even the most obtuse of us, meaning me, must have wondered what was going on.
A year later, the same appalling headmaster called my cousin and I into his study one evening to tell us that our grandmother had died, and that we were to go to her funeral the next day. ‘I want you to be very brave,’ he said before he told us. ‘No tears. We don’t want any tears at all. We don’t have tears here’. Tosser.
About fifteen years later, a fellow officer left the army to avoid a richly deserved promotion that meant he would have had to lie even more about his sexuality. The rest of us, who either knew or had guessed, scratched our heads and watched him go off to live in great happiness in New York until Aids took him, as it did 32 million others, seven years later.
I could go on (and so could you, if you are of a certain age) but welcome to the late twentieth century. It was how we still were. What these three things have in common is, of course, that they foreshadow a quantum leap in our emotional maturity over the coming half century, together with a growing respect for how people are, rather than how they appear against a photo-fit image of the ‘average’ human.
My son, Tom, is currently plodding his way across 100 miles of the glorious South Downs Way in three days, in honour of his friend, Miles, who took his own life back in March.
He is raising money for the Samaritans, and what has impressed me every step of the way is the manner in which Miles’ importance as a human being is celebrated, and not hidden, by all his friends. No one is ducking the truth of how unthinkably bad things must have been for what he did to be the best option, far from it, but they are flying his flag high, and enabling those who were closest to him to understand just how much he meant to the wider world. And how much he continues to mean. And, deriving from all that, how much we need to care for each other’s welfare, even when we appear well.
Tom made a little video on the last of his training walks, and shared it. He talked not just of the money he was trying to raise, but of the need to ‘reach out’, and look out for each other. It is powerful in the simplicity of its message, and is something that my generation, faced with a similar situation, could never have got close to doing, even if they had wanted to.
Our world is beset with huge problems at the moment, of course, but it just helped me to remember how stunningly far we have come.
Please be under no pressure, but if you would like to grasp an opportunity to support the Samaritans, (who are coping with more calls than ever right now), and perhaps to raise a glass to Miles, follow the link below.
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