“Was it for this the clay grew tall?”

I picked up a book a few months ago at a charity shop called The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink. I bought it for £1.50 because it was cheap, and because reviews inside the cover read “How we can survive unthinkable pain and eventually, slowly, mend” and “Heartbreaking…inspiring” and “This love letter to a beloved sibling is richly rewarding.” When I finally started reading it last month, I couldn’t put it down. Until I had to put it down. 

Many unimaginable details in this story weren’t just imaginable for me, but gut-punchingly recognisable. The author had been very close to her teenage brother who was hit by a car, suffered a brain injury, and eventually died after his life support was removed eight years later. Sacrificial care and steadfast hope characterised this family’s response, like ours when our oldest son Chas suffered a similar traumatic brain injury fifteen years ago. Our outcome was literally the best case scenario one hoped for; theirs literally the worst.  It was slightly incredulous to read someone else’s personal experience of a boy on a ventilator, of feeding tubes and pressure monitors, of hoists, anti-seizure drugs, and back-breaking hospital bed-sheet changes. (“Did you think we were the only family to go through that?” I asked myself.) Cathy described her inner world of trauma so well, it really made an impact on me (and many others).

Among the curious mix of feelings I had reading this book was a desire to sit quietly with this young, suffering sister and console her.  I also felt the cold shudder of a near-miss, as in “Whew, that was our worst fear… the outcome we were told to expect for Chas all those years ago. It didn’t happen. It never happened. He’s really fine.”  Even if present grief may have stifled an effervescence of felt gratitude, I was at least convicted of some exceptional reasons to see that my cup overflows. I also found myself wanting to sit with the mother of that family and hear her voice. That was my role in the whole gig, after all.

E.g. One harrowing chapter kicked off with a description of the godawful case meeting, which was attended by the parents and not the author, at which they would be told grim realities about their son’s progress and prospects. Reading this, I was immediately sitting at the long, wooden table in the low-lit, wood-panelled board room at Tadworth Court, Frank by my side, surrounded by neurologists, speech and physical therapists, and other professionals who would tell us both things we wanted to hear and what we were afraid to hear.  Those meetings every few weeks during his rehab were hard. We’d put on our bravest faces as we looked around the table at these mere mortals and asked them to predict Chas’ future. Their predictions would prove to be about as reliable as if they’d taken it in turns to rub a crystal ball in the middle of the table.

“Boy, oh boy, that’s just not how it is,” I suddenly wished I could tell the Gretchen of 15 years ago–that stunned young mother who worried so hard and worked so hard to recover a certain and conventional future for her son. “Woman, you’re going to have to learn how to live without knowing how things will turn out.” As evocative and raw as Cathy’s writing was for me, I kept reading. Perhaps there were other things I needed to tell my former self. 

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Then I came to the most improbable chapter title. It momentarily took my breath.

‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’ 

I was stunned and slightly puzzled to see this printed at the top when I turned over the page. It is the literal and figurative question I would ask the universe if I thought I was likely to get an answer. Our son Clay was always one of the shortest kids in his school year, right up until the year before his death. Then he grew tall, taller than me, and slender. And he was Tall. And then he died, at eighteen years old. 

Was it for this the clay grew tall? turns out to be the penultimate line of a poem called Futility, by British wartime poet Wilfred Owen, about the imponderable questions that surround a premature death. A soldier intends to move the body of his newly-dead comrade into the sun to wake him since “always it woke him, even in France.” If anything will rouse this lifeless body, “the kind old sun will know” – a sun which once woke all of life from “the clays of a cold star”.  Author Cathy Retzenbrink was reminded of the poem when they wheeled her paralysed and semi-conscious brother outside to get some fresh air on a sunny day.

Was it for this the clay grew tall? Many millions of soldiers died fighting in WWI (including Owen himself); he had reason to ask, ‘What’s the point?’ If all that living, that sun-wakening and sun-ripening, just ends before coming to fruition, why did the sun bother to conjure life from the dust at all? 

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Was it for this the Clay grew tall? I can ask this question like the soldier in the poem– as a mere expression of hopelessness and not really a question at all. Persisting in that direction is sure to sustain my crummy state of mind. The poet’s feelings about the death all around him are understandable, and the verses are a compelling expression of them. Yet if I want to make a serious enquiry of it, I need to ask… What would it look like for a life to have meaning or purpose?

Not only did Clay have a future ahead of him which was undoubtedly interesting and full of potential, but his presence added significant light and laughter to the rooms he entered. He was gentle and kind first, and adventurously intelligent second. He loved people well, and animals too. Clay grew tall because he ate and drank and breathed and had all the other biological requirements for human growth, but was there some kind of purpose to all that growing up? If so, was death at 18 consistent with that purpose, or was that purpose disrupted by his premature death? 

I don’t think many parents avoid those sorts of questions lurking around in some form or another after they lose a child. If I never articulate these questions, I risk my emotions making their own irrational conclusions, like the poet’s hopelessness, which can lead to despondency or cynicism. 

If I only skim the shallows of these questions without taking fresh account of the implications after the profound loss of Clay at 18, I risk making do with flimsy answers.  Easy answers that formerly made sense now tend to leave other pesky questions popping up unpredictably—like bobbing for apples in the autumn. For example, I might be quick to agree with you that “Of course it wasn’t part of the purpose of Clay’s life to die at 18!” but for a parent, if not for those less proximate to the loss, this can send those submerged apples bursting toward the surface: questions that all begin with “Why…?” 

Progress, for me and for other suffering parents I have observed, is learning how to live in the presence of open questions, at least for now. “Was it for this the Clay grew tall?” is as good a formulation as any.  It may seem like small progress, but to live in the presence of these questions requires vast swathes of soul space. To live with them has required an expansion of my capacity for those most human qualities of curiosity, empathy, love, understanding and tolerance. I’m not bitter, and I’m not bobbing for apples, which leaves me with more capacity to recall all the ways I loved Clay, and all the ways he loved me too. 

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