Other people, particularly the parents of teenage boys, felt a combination of
painful compassion and shocking impotence. I know because I was one of them.
I was at university with Rosen and I knew him a little. Two or three of my
friends knew him really well. He was a lion, no doubt about it - a leader of
the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students who famously occupied the
university's Clarendon Building in the summer of 1968; a columnist for
Cherwell, the university newspaper, but banned because of his remorseless
attacks on the ultra-conservative All Souls College; the author of a sharp
domestic Jewish comedy called Backbone, which got taken up by the Royal
Court in London. The university authorities liked to think of him as a
world-class trouble-maker, and he hated to disappoint them. On finals day,
when students are meant to wear the archaic uniform known as subfusc, Rosen
turned up in black-dyed plimsolls, bow-tie fashioned from a bandage, and a
card with the words "A Carnation" fastened to the pocket of his jeans
jacket. Aspects of this period also make an appearance in Carrying the
Elephant. The point is, whatever you thought of such gestures, he was
irrepressible, bold, original, the embodiment of a particular radical
chutzpah, an unruly coalition of Marty Feldman and Bob Marley, and the
thought of him now dumb with grief and cowed by tragedy was highly - to use
a later, weaker, word - inappropriate.
One of my sons is the same age, to within a few months, as Eddie would now be.
I think I met Eddie, very briefly, as a boy of nine or ten. When I heard of
his death, I found myself in unexpected trouble, alternately tearful and
then full of self-contempt at the notion of weeping for someone I hadn't
known. I then spent several hours pacing around uselessly and wondering
whether to write to Rosen or not: write as a fellow father, and you dangle
in his face the fact that your own Eddie - Simon, actually - still lives and
thrives; don't write, and you are achieving precisely what? I did write in
the end, but in a working life spent writing, two lines have never come so
hard.
I don't mention all this, I promise, to try and secure a footnote in someone
else's publicly known trouble. I mention it because I know of few parents
who at such times do not project themselves into this worst of nightmares.
It is a strident reminder about whom the bell does indeed toll for. What
would you do if your child, your almost-man, were snuffed out? How would you
live if you were - cold word - predeceased? How would you be? I don't think
these questions are necessarily morbid, nor some flirtation with the far
boundaries of self-pity. I think they are an acknowledgement of the salutary
force of one's worst imaginings, and of life's capacity for, well, ending.
It happened again just the other day, after the Bali bombing, when I
realised that my other nearly grown-up son had a few weeks ago been
frequenting the night club that was destroyed. All three of my own adult
children have lost close teenage friends to accidents of various sorts, and
every time I find it hard to focus on the parents for fear of seeing a
weight that would crush me if it were planted on my shoulders.
I was anxious about seeing Rosen precisely because he had been in the
nightmare for real - still was as far as I knew. What to say, how to be,
around such a subject. How to presume on his articulacy. It's not as if he's
pushing a new comedy series. We met in Spitalfields, just round the corner
from where his late mother, the aforementioned Connie, had been at school.
As it happens, this question of other people had been in his mind a good
deal. I asked him if he was ever aware of being at the heart of something
that was too big for other people, never mind himself, and he nodded
instantly. "Definitely. I didn't resent anything that anyone said. Some
wrote screeds and some a very little. And some maybe were a little clumsy
about it, or whatever, but it's all totally fine however they try to come to
terms with it. A close friend of mine from film school lost his only son in
a strange motorbike accident in his early twenties. He's an artist and a
film-maker and (after Eddie's death) he sent me a beautiful little picture.
Everyone was coming from different positions in their lives. I wondered how
I had responded to the death of his son, and I think I was absolutely
pathetic. I remember him standing in front of me and saying, 'I don't know
what the purpose of life is any more,' and I looked back at him and didn't
know what to say. I think I just said, 'Oh, right.'
I could totally excuse anyone saying what they did or did not say. What people
say at such times is not a reflection of what they feel."
The funeral, he says, was crucial. At first his father, the retired
educationalist Harold Rosen, now in his eighties, was reluctant to go,
fearing it would be too upsetting. But he went in the end, and wrote a poem
for the occasion. It was read by a friend, and was by all accounts an
extraordinarily moving moment. The church was bursting with people of all
ages; there were songs sung, letters read, recorded tapes played. It was,
says Michael, "just stunning". He reckons that for parents in such
circumstances it is vital to ensure that the funeral is something that won't
be regretted in any way. "You have to be selfish about it. There must be no
impediment to you grieving, or doing whatever you want to do, nothing to
distract you from the matter in hand. You can't be dealing with the fact
that the lady down the road wants to be there with her daughter."
We talk of coping, that catch-all word that falls so far short of the mark in
such a context. We even begin to talk of coping strategies, but he cuts it
short by saying that anyone who is still alive after losing a much-loved
person is coping, even if they are wailing and weeping and banging their
head against the wall. Eddie had worked backstage on the West End production
of Miss Saigon, and not long before his death had completed a stage play of
his own, called Good Morning? It was about three people waking up together
in a strange flat and trying to piece together the circumstances that had
got them there. It was produced in Edinburgh last year to some very
enthusiastic reviews, demonstrating rather poignantly that he was taking
after his father.
But the true memorial to a life so savagely truncated is Eddie himself. Though
it might at first sound surprising to those who have not been similarly
bereaved, myself included, Rosen's relationship with his dead son is, in his
own word, dynamic. This is how he describes the process: "Your side of the
bargain is dynamic. You are changing. As you do something new, you find
yourself looking back at the death, or at what happened after the death.
That changes. I find myself re-evaluating all the things he did, what they
meant. The further away I am looking at his life synoptically, the more I
can have memories of him at two, or three, or five, or another age. The
experience in your brain is not chronological or sequential, it's all around
you. If you say 'Dave' or whoever, it might mean that tomorrow you are going
to meet him for a game of cards; whereas if you say 'Eddie' to me, it might
mean the last bit of his life, or the middle, or the early part. I can
relate to different bits of it, depending on where I am at myself."
A few months after the tragedy, Rosen met a younger woman called Emma, a radio
producer and researcher, and they now live together with their daughter of a
year and a half. He says it is wonderful to be "engaged and engrossed with
someone, without there being any reason for it to be interfused with
Eddieness. I gather others find that guilt-inducing. It doesn't make me feel
guilty, it just means I can accommodate Eddie more easily."
Happy ending? Not a bit of it. It's not an ending of any kind. It seems
nothing ever is. But it sounds like a very promising start. Carrying the
Elephant: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Michael Rosen is published by Penguin
and is available at the Books Direct price of Pounds 6.79 (RRP Pounds 7.99)
plus 99p p&p, on 0870 160 8080; www.times direct.co.uk/books (online pricing
may vary)
Meningococcal septicaemia
* Meningococcal septicaemia is an infection of the blood caused by the
meningococcal bacteria neisseria meningitidis. This bacteria is carried by
10 per cent of the population, but only in a few cases does the bacteria
overcome the body's immune defences and get into the bloodstream.
