Page 8 - The Plain Truth Spring-Summer 2026

Eva McIntyre

Death, grief and

remembrance

(The price we pay for love)

%'! ) *5 ,!+,(!Ī )5 Ƃ./0 !4,!.%!* ! +" In the scene that follows, God is holding Emily’s guinea
grief was at the death of an animal: my pig and talking wistfully to it about the human condition.
Lpet guinea pig Gilly. I learned another Unfeeling comments
lesson simultaneously: that I wasn’t to express Anyone who has lost a family member or close friend
my grief because my mother couldn’t cope with will know that the crass comments and behaviour aren’t Photo Credit: Ryan McVay/istockphoto.com
it. The day Gilly died, my mother put the clock reserved for the deaths of animals. ‘You’ll meet someone
in the living room forward half an hour and told new,’ my cousin was told after her husband died when she
me I was late for school and I didn’t have time to was in her forties, as if she could just move along and take
say goodbye to Gilly. her inconvenient grief with her.
She became terrified of accepting social invitations after
When I came home from school she had gone, discovering that a single man had been invited to a supper
along with her cage and all her accessories, so party to make the numbers balance, as everyone else was
I never got to say goodbye, to bury her, or to part of a couple.
grieve. Life went on as if Gilly had never existed, ‘Chin up,’ someone said to a newly widowed parishioner
except that she had and I loved her. when she braved her first visit to the village pub after her
husband’s death. Was that worse than the person who
When an animal companion dies, people also have to crossed the road to avoid encountering her? In one parish,
navigate the treacherous waters of some crass opinions the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl who died through
(‘It’s only a dog’) and the defensive responses of others a tragic NHS mistake, found that when she returned to run
(‘Will you get another one?’). Then there are the religious her shop, people would come in and offload their own grief
overtones expressed by some, that the treatment of animals for loved-ones who had died years before, mostly of natural
in death should not be the same as humans and they should causes and in old age. It was as if they had no filter that
be grieved differently. Decades after Gilly’s death, as I was could prevent them from responding to her appalling loss
writing a one-woman-play I was to perform, I decided to in such an abusive manner.
include the theme in a scene. In other cultures, there are practices, boundaries, and
Six-year-old Chelsea has taken part in the funeral of her rituals around grief that are observed by society. People
best friend Emily’s guinea pig, along with Emily’s parents wear black for longer and their grief is visible and observed.
in the family garden: Across Latin America, the feast of All Souls (2 November)
nd
‘So when we got to Sunday School, we told Miss Titley all is a day set aside for visiting the bereaved in their homes.
about it and she said that we shouldn’t have had a funeral Photos of the deceased are displayed and they are talked
and that guinea pigs don’t go to heaven. And Emily was about, celebrated, mourned.
really upset and crying and everything, so I said that I didn’t In my parishes, I realised that our All Souls’ services
agree with Miss Titley. Well, what I actually said was she was were so well attended because they were an island in the
wrong and it was horrible to make Emily cry. Miss Titley made year when it was acceptable to mourn, to cry, to talk about
me stand in the corner with my face to the wall and I wasn’t a lost loved-one and to hear their name read out loud, and
allowed to join in the songs and prayers. I hate Miss Titley!’ for everyone else to hear it too.

8 The Plain Truth Spring-Summer 2026 Find us online at www.plain-truth.org.uk