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6 hours ago
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It’s “Celebration Day” on bank holiday Monday and it’s making me feel a bit … funny. Dreamed up in 2022, this “civilian Remembrance Day”, or British Día de los Muertos, is intended “to honour those we have loved and lost, as well as those whose lives have inspired us”, according to the website. Perfectly laudable, but something about the idea of being urged to celebrate our dead by Stephen Fry and Prue Leith, to buy a star-shaped badge in WH Smith and share memories on social media with the hashtag #shareyourstar makes me feel cringey.
When I get an instinctive negative reaction to something (except maggots and Nigel Farage), I wonder if I’m being unreasonable. So, am I? Well, yes – no one is forcing me to join in or buy a badge (though they benefit really good charities, including Mind, Hospice UK and the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity). Plus, Mel Giedroyc is involved, and she can do no wrong in my eyes. On top of this, could Celebration Day be meeting a real need?
We’re not great, as a culture, with death and grief, though I think we’ve improved somewhat: from grief podcasts to death cafes and a flowering of extraordinary memoirs, we’ve found more spaces and ways to articulate and respond to bereavement, at least the fresh and seismic kind. But that’s just the tip of the griefberg. I’m not sure we’ve processed all those pandemic deaths very well, for a start. Our desire to move on and not look back is particularly painful for those who lost their beloveds without any of the usual – vital – ritual and communion, and for those whose grieving felt frustrated, freighted with anger or distorted by trauma.
Other types of grief defy easy categorisation and response, too: how about grief that feels disproportionate to the closeness of your relationship? When you were peripheral to someone’s life, but their loss hits you hard, your grief can feel overblown, even intrusive. When the death of two less than intimate friends blind-sided her last year, the writer Daisy Buchanan described her “disenfranchised grief”. Then there are deaths you “should” have got over by now: prolonged grief is even considered a pathology in the United States. I know I’m not alone in feeling vaguely embarrassed mentioning my dead mum, imagining people thinking, “Is she still going on about that?”
So might a Celebration Day help? Anything that normalises talking about death more, or that shushes the inner voices that tell us our feelings are wrong, our grief is too intense, too prolonged, too mixed with other feelings or misplaced, is good news. Plus, grief of all kinds is notoriously not fun; indeed, it’s conspicuously lacking in the kir royale and bunting department. Why not, indeed, pick a moment to celebrate?
But we already do, without Prue Leith’s prompting. The lovely online gallery Projecting Grief, which explores creative responses to bereavement, features some sublimely celebratory stuff, from Marianne, who used lipsticks her mum (who “always had her face on”) left behind to make explosively colourful photographs and sculptures, to Suchandrika, who created a standup show around her long-dead parents. Asking around, I discover a group of friends who organised a dance in honour of one of their number who died last year, sharing a memory of her every time they danced with a new partner. Then there’s the family who throw outrageous pudding parties in memory of their sweet-toothed nonna. “At some point we have to use her catchphrase, ‘More cream, dear?’” A friend orders his late father’s favourite rum baba whenever he sees it on a menu; another eats her gran’s “Alice Jones Memorial Ice-Cream” walking the seafront at Criccieth.
There’s a lovely specificity to these and I think that’s partly what puts me off Celebration Day: it feels too generic for our special dead people. We miss them – from partners to piano teachers, however long they’ve been gone and however ambivalent our experience of their lives or their dying – for who they were. That’s how we should celebrate them, whether that means getting a tattoo, shouting at a squirrel or pottering down the allotment. If the spirit moves you to celebrate on Monday, wonderful. But if it doesn’t, no one needs a hashtag to celebrate the dead, how and whenever they like.
