National Mourning

How are you feeling after the last few weeks of national mourning over the death of our dear, beautiful Queen Elizabeth II? I honestly feel drained, partly my own fault for following every cough and spit the BBC televised to its anxious viewers. Then through a collective consciousness, I caught the dreaded infectious grief bug and no doubt happily passed it on to others mainly via my Instagram account speaking to people I’ve never met, comparing feelings. Some were down the road, others in other countries but primarily we came together and it was grief that made it happen which was why I felt compelled late one Sunday evening to jump on my local bus to The Ritz, not pop in for a cocktail but follow a path alongside it to Green Park bordering Buckingham Palace and like some magical forest just when you thought it was going nowhere it opened out into a vast clearing packed with stunning fragrant bunches of flowers, attached to them were hand drawn pictures many by children and heart-breaking messages. There were hundreds of us all eerily walking around, laying down flowers looking at other people’s arrangements and reading their messages each one telling something about the person who’d left it. Every creed and colour were there, locals, visitors, tourists, was it just the older generation? Absolutely not, the young were possibly larger in number. But what was everyone thinking about and why had The Royal Parks placed in bright green jackets representatives from The Samaritans?

Probably because many of us taking in this visceral emotion The Queen had ignited, were remembering people in our lives we’d lost, knowing that the stoic generation the Queen represented is the canopy we all work, live, love and function under and when we look up and it’s not there it disorientates us, even frightens us. The Queens generation is my Mother and Father, my mother died this year so yes I was thinking of her she was a few years younger than the Queen, she dressed like her in her youth, her cornflakes went into Tupperware boxes, they didn’t have central heating, wore proper clothes in the house, a hot water bottle in bed, went to church, wrote letters and labels were for the inside of your clothes not the outside who came up with that crazy idea and why? (We know why)

We have become a fragmented society generally not rooted in a family structure as we once were, we’ve moved around the country and the world, people were contacting me from Kenya, the US, Australia saying I feel homesick I just want to be back. A little like Covid (in the beginning) we came together we were united and for some of us there was an odd comfort in that unity. Every Remembrance Sunday there are less at the Cenotaph, so it’s us who are in our 60’s, 70’s and 80’s who are becoming the new Canopy of the world and we have a hard job because some of those little tadpoles are in all sorts of trouble and this is why employers all over the world should be taking us on to complete their teams because we come with knowledge, stability and guidance.

Anthea x

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