We are mourning the death of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Second. I’d like to explore why her death – and life – has been so impactful and reflect on grief.
Queen Elizabeth has been the UK’s longest-serving monarch. For most of us, we cannot remember a time when she was not the figurehead of our nations. She has been a consistent and stable presence in our lives.
Any summary of the Queen’s life of service is going to be brief and incomplete, so I shall not attempt that. Here are a few things that stand out to me about her and her role over the 70 years she reigned. The Queen was a hard-working member of the Royal Family, but also rooted in her family life, mother, sister, grandmother and great-grandmother. She saw her children join the armed forces, marry, divorce, become parents, and forge their way in the world. We watched this and saw her joys and sorrows. She navigated the challenges of changing expectations about the monarchy, and how roles in the 20th and 21st century responded to ideas about service, the empire and commonwealth, family, and duty. She held weekly meetings with the Prime Ministers that served our countries and appointed 15 Prime Ministers in her reign.
Through these things, we saw a person we admired, a role model and ambassador. For many of us, she was one of the few strong female role-models in a childhood littered with ‘give us a twirl, Anthea’, ‘my beautiful assistant’ and Page 3 ‘models’ in the tabloid press. The family ‘unit’, lifestyles and working patterns in the 20th and 21st Centuries in the UK have all changed beyond all measure. In such turbulent times, she was a constant and consistent presence.
We also saw how she grieved. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 was the first mass-screened death of a member of the Royal family, where the Queen’s public role and family role played out on our television. The Queen Mother died in 2002, and the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, died in 2021. Many of us will remember the late Queen describing him as her ‘constant strength and stay’, and the photograph of her alone at his funeral in St George's Chapel, in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
Throughout her life, the Queen has spoken openly about the bedrock of her Christian faith. This is another aspect that is a constant: her belief in something bigger than herself; a strong moral compass during a period of great societal (and familial) changes, and the recognition that a life of service is a life well-lived.
But why are we so impacted by the death of some-one we don’t personally know? Here are my thoughts.
Humans are a social, and sociable, species. We are also dependant on each other to survive. “Our brains are wired to respond to other people, probably more than they are wired to do anything else” says Matthew Lieberman University of California, LA. He is the author of the excellent book, ‘Social: why our brains are wired to connect’. This is one of the books that I recommend with monotonous frequency! His research also suggests that physical and emotional responses are the same whether we are responding to a friend when in their company, reading a book about a person, or watching something on the television or computer. This suggests that our brains do not differentiate between what we see when watching footage of the late Queen, compared to the loss of a close friend or relative. By being ‘wired to connect’, we have the same grief-response – that’s why we are so impacted by her death.
One thing we can also recognise about grief, is that it reminds us of past losses. Being bereaved is not something we ‘get over’; rather it becomes assimilated into our being, it may become less raw or painful, but it is always there. Lois Tonkin is a Grief Counsellor, and has described grief as something you ‘grow around’ the grief does not go away, but you become bigger. You can read about growing around grief here. The death of the Queen may have triggered in us reminders of people we have loved and lost.
Sometimes, we turn to fiction because it can explain and make sense of the world in a way that non-fiction cannot. For me, Max Porter’s “Grief is the thing with feathers” is one such book. Bookshop.org describes it thus: “In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.”
There are so many things that I loved about this book. It was a non-linear exploration of grief, which for me made perfect sense. It has a crow as one of its main characters, and in my opinion, crows make everything better. It displayed raw emotion as something not be afraid of, and it put the death of a character as a central feature.
Perhaps this is the final thing to note about the death of the Queen; it has brought death back as a central feature for us, too. The Queen would probably have been familiar with The Book of Common Prayer, noting that “In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord?” I rarely quote Wikipedia, but here I must break my own rules, as this prayer has its own page! It speaks, to me, of a lasting desire to make sense of death, grief and loss, and the search for comfort. When faced with grief, we also search for hope, and so I end with this poem from Emily Dickinson, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’:
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
About Jane: Jane is a Wellbeing Consultant with a Master’s Degree in Applied Positive Psychology, the science of happiness, and is based in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK.
Jane is the founder of Adopting Positivity, a trading name of Autonomous Ideas Ltd., of which Jane is a Director. Jane is a Trustee for Home for Good, Suffolk, and an Adopter Voice Champion for Adoption UK.
Jane is co-founder and co-organiser of the Positive Psychology Summit:UK, a two-day In Real Life opportunity for Positive Psychology Practitioners to get together to learn, share and support each other, and host of online In Conversation events.
She is a fellow of the Positive Psychology Guild and an accredited Trainer. Autonomous Ideas Ltd and the Positive Psychology Summit:UK are organisational members.
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