Subject Matter.

Any death is a tragedy but…

Well OK not any death. I suspect I’ll struggle to feel anything more than relief when Putin dies. The only sadness I can imagine feeling when Trump passes is for the tidal wave of conspiracy theories that will sing him to his rest.

Similarly I must admit that when Thatcher died I punched the air, unlike my Uncle who by all accounts was holding her hand shortly before she went. I could only respond to her ending as an icon of a selfish and destructive ideology but my Uncle, I assume, experienced her death as the loss of a person. A mentor, a friend? Perhaps she represented things for him too, his era ending. Maybe, through her death he was able to witness from a safe distance some of the emotions he’d avoided by not visiting his own mother as she died of Parkinson’s many years earlier. I don’t know. He also avoided meeting me, writing with creditable candour that he didn’t linger on the past. He’s now as dead as both his sisters. All of these people are just characters. The dead leave a space we cannot fill but their outline is ours to define.

I recently read this fascinating piece by Dr Sabina Stent about the artist Gertrude Abercrombie, The Jazz Witch. Stent notes “As is always the way, her name and acclaim grew after her death”. Though this stings like painful irony, really it should be no surprise. Art made by the living belongs to its creator, carries them in it. Only the art of the dead can mean what we want it to and be ours. Similarly a life being lived is the get-it-on-the-page pass, the vomit pass of biography. Only by dying do we finally deliver a draft for editors to make sense of. Death transmutes flesh into story. The author becomes the subject and we can love them for what we need them to be.

Appropriately I can’t now find the exact quote, but in my memory someone (probably Borges) wrote how the death of (I’m guessing) Eva Perón instantly changed what her life had been. People spoke as if she lived knowing how she would die and her every action before this point became a step towards it. In my memory of my life (less backed up by documentary evidence than I thought) I read this quote shortly after the death of Diana Spencer in Paris. I think its hard for anyone who didn’t live through that moment, perhaps harder still for many who did, to look honestly at how powerfully the nature of who and what Diana was changed the moment she died. How quickly it became impossible to tell her life, to imagine her life, without the nature of its end framing all that came before.

In truth, death rewrites us all. As someone who loves stories, one of the most sharply painful parts of losing my parents was having to endure listening to their lives retold by the celebrant at their funerals. In both cases a very nice stranger with no narrative training came to our house, gathered a handful of biographical details and then wove these into a well worn template speech. In all the funerals I’ve ever attended I’m always struck by how, when this eulogy comes, I never quite recognise the person. Or I recognise too clearly not them but some bland template person with hobbies and interests. Like my parents personalities had been spitballed by some horrible writers’ room then pitched back to us by an exec. Yeah, great guy that, uh, Michael? Mike maybe? Mike. Bird watching and um, environmentalism. Devoted to his wife. Got an OBE. Road named after him. Pillar of the community. It becomes embarrassing. Who is this guy we’re cremating? That’s not my Dad.

What I did not realise then was that this feeling was the truth of what had happened. They were not my parents anymore. They were not people. They were just stories.

Of course some people do not wait to die to become fictions. That the late Queen is being remembered by the laying of Paddingtons shows that she is not being remembered at all. The Bear Queen, the Bond Queen, these were simply roles she adopted as part of Her Majesty’s Service, much like the story of Service itself. Beyond saving us the deep humiliation of having Liz Truss on our stamps, the precise nature of the service the Queen actually performed for her nation is complex.

I understand the Monarch’s role as a focal point for national identity. Surprisingly I agree with Thatcher on this - “there’s no such thing as society” or rather, not society but nation. The reality of nation, the millions of us, is too complicated, too numerous, too messy a thing to understand your part in it. A family is something you can join, something you can know. However all the work in this relationship is done by the audience. Like a child meeting Mickey Mouse, the magic is not in the suit or the actor wearing it.

The view of Monarchy as Service is, like most traditions, not that historical. God Save The King speaks of His victory over His enemies not His Kindness or His Care for his population. But the lesson of Diana’s death remains the emotional midpoint of Elizabeth’s reign, the transformation where the ending of the narrative was forged. The audience spoke with their tears, their cellophane and flowers. We want someone like the someone we liked to believe Diana was. Someone on our side, someone on the side of the vulnerable, someone in our Service. And so the Royal family, trapped in the original and most lucrative constructed reality show ever invented, had no choice but to follow the story and appear to become that. In this sense at least, Charles, like his mother before him, has become our humble subject.