Leaving Rowan

This week, after 19 years in the UK, I will return ‘home’. We are moving not to Seattle but to the tiny town of Tillamook, on the coast of Oregon. Instead of the Kilburn High Road, the Pacific Ocean will stretch to our doorstep. Jonathan will serve the United Methodist Church, I will serve my Anglican curacy, and the kids (ages 5 and 3) will enroll in school and nursery. We are taking bets on how quickly they lose their London accents.

Packed in my luggage is a large jar of Marmite and a souvenir map of the tube system. Jonathan will travel with a new keychain, in the shape of a double-decker bus. Each child has chosen their favourite cuddly toy for the long flight. We leave behind Jonathan’s family, the city that we love, and the Methodist manse that we call home.

We also leave behind Rowan.

Our first child would have turned 7 this summer. His beautiful, terrible 39-minute life changed my own forever.

Afterwards, dazed with grief, Jonathan and I conducted a whistlestop tour of burial sites across Greater London. To describe the experience as ‘distressing’ would be an understatement. We discovered woodlands with name markers in disarray, and a cemetery hawking a mass grave for infants. We learned that ‘baby death’ is an aesthetic of its own: gravestones heaped with plastic toys, deflated balloons and mouldering teddy bears. We encountered eye-watering prices, as high as £7,500 for an infant-sized plot.

We came close to despair.

Then, at the suggestion of our gentle funeral director, we arranged a visit to Brompton Cemetery. On a sweltering afternoon, Jonathan and I stepped through the gates – and we knew this would be Rowan’s resting place. Butterflies flitted amongst Victorian masonry and sweet peas in full bloom. Marble angels and stone crosses peered out from the tangled vegetation of high summer. Unlike other cemeteries, with their manicured lawns and painstaking uniformity, Brompton rejoices in biodiversity.

As one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’, Brompton Cemetery opened in 1840 – just one year after Highgate to the north. Over 200,000 people rest here in peace, including Emmeline Pankhurst and Dr John Snow. Today, the Royal Parks charity manages the site, which – after a long hiatus – is a working cemetery once more.

Jonathan and I decided to bury Rowan at the base of an evergreen oak tree, between a cocktail inventor and a nanny. What better neighbours for our newborn son? Although technically a cremation plot, the cemetery manager kindly agreed that we could bury Rowan intact. On the day of the funeral, I held his wicker coffin on my lap as the hearse wove through the streets of central London, from Piccadilly to Brompton. Inside the cemetery, as the car inched toward the grave, Jonathan and I sang to Rowan all the silly songs and lullabies that we had sung while he was growing inside me. He would be as loved in death as he would have been in life.

Previously, like many people, I had given little thought to dying. It would happen someday, somehow, in the far-off future. Rowan’s life and sudden death brought the future into focus. With our first child buried, our own deaths now loomed in view.

I needed discussion partners; I assumed that the people around me would cooperate. I soon learned, however, that ‘bereaved mother’ casts a terrible pall, and that nothing kills a conversation quite like death talk.

So I decided to organise the conversations I craved. In collaboration with the Royal Parks, I began convening regular Death Cafés at Brompton Cemetery. Death Café is an international movement that brings people together to talk about any aspect of death and dying. During the pandemic, I shifted the programme online, and at Lucy’s request I organized a parallel programme for the community of St James’s, Piccadilly. It has been a great privilege to facilitate these discussions. Time and again, participants would tell me that they found in the Death Café a space for conversations they wouldn’t – couldn’t – have in normal life.

I began to wonder how I could link the Death Cafés to my professional work as a researcher and mediator. With Marianne Rozario and the public theology thinktank Theos, I co-authored the report Ashes to Ashes: Beliefs, Trends, and Practices of Dying, Death and the Afterlife (Theos, 2023). Over several months, we interviewed health professionals, faith leaders, death industry professionals, charity workers, academics, community organisers and members of the public. Arching over the project were two questions:

How well – or not – do we talk about death?

As a society, how can we do it better?

You can read the report here. A related podcast series, hosted by the Susanna Wesley Foundation, University of Roehampton, is also available here.

Sooner or later, we all will die. When the time comes, Jonathan and I will be composted (the eco-friendly option) and buried with Rowan at the base of the oak tree. There is room for Brecon and Julian, too, although we hope that life will lead them to love-filled places of their own.

Rowan is a paradox: an aching absence and yet wonderfully, joyfully present – right at the heart of our family. Eagle-eyed Julian can spot a rowan tree at 100 paces – particularly at this time of year, with branches bursting with scarlet berries. ‘Look, Mummy,’ she shouts. ‘It’s Rowan!’

For now, five-year-old Brecon speaks matter-of-factly. On the death of our neighbour’s cat: ‘He died and it was really sad. But we can look at pictures and remember him.’ As Brecon grows older, no doubt his experience of Rowan will shift and settle in new ways. May he always find in Jonathan and me a safe space for his questions.

Our living children pay frequent visits to Brompton Cemetery. Whilst Jonathan and I scrub bird poo off their brother’s tombstone, Brecon and Julian chase butterflies and play hide-and-seek around the base of the oak tree.

I feel so fortunate. Rowan, through his death and burial, enlarged my understanding of what it means to lay a loved one to rest. The experience has sharpened my grief for a war-torn world that deprives dignity toward the dead and those who mourn. In death, Rowan knows a peace that I will never take for granted.

How do I feel about leaving my child? It’s hard not to feel disloyal. For a while, Jonathan and I considered hiring a grave-care company to plant flowers in our absence. A cursory search, however, left us feeling overwhelmed and outpriced. Moreover, seven years’ experience has taught us that between the squirrels and the massive roots of the oak tree, precious little will grow there.

We will leave the grave as is. To all the people who have offered to visit Rowan: Thank you. (He’s in the south corner of the cemetery, just off the path that runs parallel to the Fulham Road. Look for the oak tree, the cocktail inventor and the nanny.)

Four feet underground, wrapped in his simple shroud and resting in his wicker coffin, Rowan turns slowly to earth. From eight timezones away, as I begin my new life and ministry on the shores of the Pacific, Rowan will tether me to London – and to the deep peace that awaits us all in death.

A prayer from the burial rite of The Episcopal Church

In your boundless compassion,

console us who mourn.

Give us faith to see in death the gate of eternal life,

so that in quiet confidence we may continue

our course on earth,

until, by your call, we are reunited with those who

have gone before; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Photo credit: Ian Trayner