THE DAUGHTER JODIE PYKE

Bereavement is a dreadful thing, even in fiction

“I can’t understand the plan that our Lord has for me,” almost wept Josiah Pyke to his teenage daughter Jodie. She was seventeen, in the sixth form at Brumpton College and doing well enough to win prizes on speech days. But this was no ordinary day. Her mother, the beautiful Ophelia, had been growing ever weaker as secondary cancers spread through her body. Time had been growing short, and now time was over.

“Maybe there’s no plan involved, Dad,” Jodie told him. “There doesn’t have to be, you know.”

“That’s exactly what your mother would have said,” sighed a heartbroken Josiah. “But the truth is I’ve only ever had two loves in my life and I woke up next to them both when they were unexpectedly dead!”

“But you hadn’t known the first one in years,” protested Jodie, “as I understand it she was a teenage heart-throb who left you high and dry as soon as you went off to University. But mum was different. Mum was the love of your life and she wasn’t killed violently on a river bank but passed away quietly in her sleep. She had been suffering, you know, and it was best in the end.”

“Of course I know! It was me who tried to keep her spirits up during all that chemotherapy! But the good Lord wanted her and there was nothing science or doctors could do to save her.”

She put one hand on his shoulder and gave it the gentlest of squeezes. “She wasn’t happy,” she whispered, “the cancer was one of those that knew no bounds and it had devoured just about all of her. You knew she would die...”

“But I never said goodbye!” he almost exploded, “I never said … that last … goodbye. And she was too young to die, much too young.”

“It’s not easy to say a final goodbye when someone’s still alive,” she said quietly, “and right up to the end, when the pain killers weren’t numbing her too much, she was her old lively vital and vibrant self.”

“And I woke up next to her cold body when she should have told me how she felt and let me help her through it.”

“Dad, you’re being daft. You know how she felt. And you were there, right at her end, as she drifted slowly away. She wouldn’t have known, dad, she wouldn’t have known anything about it, so what could you have done?”

“But what about the Hereafter…?” he almost wept, and in the tragedy of a personal moment of grief it seemed to him that he could hear his own father’s voice almost ranting in his head.

“I think mummy was right,” whispered Jodie, bravely she thought, but it needed saying. “I don’t think there is any Hereafter. I think it’s all an old story, an ancient belief by men who looked at the stars and saw gods...”

That upset Josiah even though he’d heard the same kind of thing from his now deceased wife, who had always done her best to tell him what she did and didn’t believe without hurting his feelings or offending his faith.

“I believe, Jodie,” he said simply.

And Jodie left it at that. It was neither the time nor the place to debate such things as belief with a man whose wife had just died during the night.

An ambulance had arrived to take her away and now there was a mournful, almost sepulchral silence in between the words they spoke to each other, a tangible thing that seemed to even lower the temperature of the vicarage.

“What about school?” asked Josiah after a while. “Mum wouldn’t like...” He couldn’t finish the sentence because how could he know what his wife would want her daughter to do on the very day she left her for the great darkness in the skies? And that’s what it was to him at that moment, a huge and yawning darkness in which no light glimmered, no star shone its feeble twinkling light onto Creation and nothing moved or breathed or had its being.

“I told Michael,” she said, “he’ll pass it on.”

“Michael Stubbs?”

“Yes, dad. Michael Stubbs.

“He understands because it’s not so long since his own mother … passed … away.”

“She took her own life, which is a mortal sin,” Josiah told her, automatically.

“Dad, the only sin was what life did to her,” Jodie told him, quite firmly, “and if life is controlled by the god you pray to several times every day, then it was his sin and nothing to do with her.”

“I don’t need this now,” cried Josiah, “but I do need my faith. I do need belief. I do need the certain knowledge that Ophelia and I will meet again when my time comes, that she, or her spirit, will be waiting for me, whole again, and unique and wonderful.”

Jodie wanted to challenge that, but was wise enough to do nothing of the sort. She wanted to tell him that parts of her mother had long since been disposed of after extensive surgery that had tried to save her life but hadn’t quite managed to give her more than an extra year or two. She wanted him to know that he would never meet his dead wife again, not in the flesh and not in the spirit, but it would have been a cruel debate to have started there and then as he fought back the tears that threatened to overwhelm him.

“Michael says he’s sorry, dad,” she said instead.

“He’s turning out to be quite a star,” said Josiah, “bearing in mind the inauspicious start he had.”

“It’s not his fault that his dad worked away, and for long hours,” said Jodie, “but he was a good dad when a good dad was needed, after his mother … did what she did.”

“I know,” nodded Josiah.

“And he’s growing up. I like him,” confessed Jodie, and felt it necessary to add “I like him quite a lot. And he’s asked me...”

“He’s asked you…?” The conversation was getting to be the sort that Josiah had dreaded ever since his angel daughter had been born, that one day a boy would ask her something that would take her, in the end, away from him and Ophelia. But Ophelia was gone and now it was only he who would bear the burden of separation.

“He’s asked me to sing in his band,” said Jodie, blushing slightly.

He knew she had a lovely singing voice. She’d been in the church choir until the school exams meant she didn’t have the time any more. Choirs need practice, and so did Shakespeare, she had said.

“Has he got a band?” asked a surprised Josiah. Things happened these days that left him behind and yet there had been a time when he’d had his fingers on the very pulse of village life. A band? In Henstooth? With Michael Stubbs?

“Of course!” she replied. “They do old sixties covers, the more folksy stuff and there’s some really lovely music out there if you’ve got the time to sort it out. He does that. He’s got loads of old records. I think it takes his mind off...”

“His mother?” asked Josiah.

She nodded. “And me,” she blushed. “I told mum before she died and she was so pleased for me. Michael thinks a lot of me … and stuff.”

“Stuff?” asked Josiah, more than surprised. Ophelia hadn’t mentioned it to him, hadn’t let on that their daughter was on the mind of a boy in the village.

“Mum understood,” sighed Jodie, “she understood so well. She told me Michael will be good for me. She told me she knows that he has always loved me, ever since he was a naughty little boy in infants’ school.”

“Well I never,” sighed Josiah.

This last few moments had taken his mind off his grief even though Ophelia had been part and parcel of the conversation. It was as if, in death, her spirit was still around them, guiding them with its endless wisdom and illuminating the many paths that might lie ahead.

And for the first time in ages he began to wonder what the truth behind life and eternity really was. And, a tiny thought begged, was there really a god anywhere in the vastness of forever? Or was it all a fairy story wrought for the feeble and weak? And how would he ever know?

He sat down, and wept, and Jodie left him in order to tidy up the kitchen.

© Peter Rogerson 09.04.18