Cradle Songs for the Solstice
omnia cooperantur in bonum
I will never remember anything before the Summer Solstice, 1984. I’ve not long turned four years old. My siblings and I are in the garden building the outline for a house with grass cuttings from the lawn mower.
I have replayed the memory so many times, the shape of the chaos starts to warp. The clothes we are wearing change colour. It is no longer summer. The leaves have fallen. There is snow on the ground. My mum has rushed her to the outside tap. The tap is left on and water spills down the side of the house. The sun starts spinning. The baby is in my dad’s arms. The house floods. The water crashes out of the upstairs windows.
When my mum comes out to check the baby, she finds some of her face is blue. The whole world shifts. Her face twists in a way I’ve never seen before or since, and she asks us a series of questions that we will never forget but also never quite remember.
She rushes the baby into the kitchen, giving her mouth to mouth along the way. We all follow her in a procession. Mum runs the tap, signs the cross, and baptises her, splashing it over her body. Her movements are too quick.
I don’t remember the family doctor arriving. I don’t remember the police or the parish priest turning up, but I hear them all discussing the chicken pox spots that covered her body, and I look down at my own pox spots that have finally crusted over. My older brothers had experienced red rashes, peeling sandpaper hands: signs of scarlatina, but I don’t remember that.
I remember other things following that day. We were sent to friends and extended family members to give my parents time to grieve. I’m not sure what I did at my aunt and uncle’s, but they told my mum that I had led their son into mischievous ways.
I remember the baby coming back to the house before the burial. She was kept in the dining room on the round white ceramic table, wearing the silk ivory dress meant for her baptism, in a wicker baby basket with white sheets spilling over the edges. It seems more like a shrine than a room, especially when my mum lights the candles.
A lot of people avoid my mum or cross the road when they see her coming. A woman stops to talk, and I hear my mum tell her that she has lost the baby. I misunderstand this phrase, and knowing that our baby Beth is laid out in our dining room, I wonder if there is just one part of her that is lost, a component that might fix her and bring her back to life. I search in the garden when I’m home, by the pampas grass, on the swing hanging from the weeping willow, in the secret garden.
My mum’s catholic friends come and drink spirits in the kitchen. This life is made for suffering.
My dad digs a rose garden in her memory. That week is the only time in my life that I’ll ever see my dad cry.
We have lots of photos of Beth after she died, but only six pictures of her when she was alive, all taken on the same day, all kept in a cubed photo frame. My older sister is featured in three of them, holding Beth in her lap. The other three are of Beth lying on her front on her changing mat, proof that she was strong enough to lift her head and shoulders, proof that she was alive, developing, and testing the limits of her body.
Beth hadn’t been baptised before she died, so the catholic church refused to do a requiem mass for her. If my mum is upset that she can’t have the service in the Catholic Church, she hides it well. Unbaptised babies go to Limbo, because they die with original sin, she tells me stoically. I’m confused because I’ve played a game of limbo dancing under the feathery plume of a strip of Pampas grass, leaning back as far as I can as I move underneath, but I’ve not heard of this Limbo place. I don’t understand what happens there and why Beth can’t go to Heaven. Mum tells me Limbo is a place of eternal happiness, but you don't experience the beatific vision (visio beatifica) the state of happiness that believers will experience when they see God, face to face, in heaven. 1
I don’t understand the rules, but I know that God and the Saints are always watching. I’m furious with them for taking her spirit but not letting her into Heaven. The ceremony is held in our house. My mum writes the service herself. We walk in a procession the short distance from our house to the parish burial ground. Our Catholic priest has agreed to do the interment at the graveside.
My sister and I each hold a basket full of pink Rosa Canina petals and we scatter them onto the coffin as the adults sprinkle the earth. It’s the core memory I always come back to.
I don’t remember much from the months that followed, but my mum told me I wouldn’t stop crying. She was worried about me the most because it seemed like a non-stop outpouring. That’s not to say it was an act, just that it was noisy and performative, as if I was the designated griever. The rest of my siblings held it in their jawlines, steadfast, stoic, suffering mutely. I suspect their grief is heavier, entangled, enduring. Sibling loss can shift roles and distort identities, but we’ve never gone deeper than the surface of how it rewrote the shape of our family.
Back when we all still lived at home, we’d gather at her graveside each birthday and every summer solstice, the anniversary of her death. After prayers, we’d scatter off across the graveyard, reading the names on other headstones, hiding behind elaborate tombstones and carvings of angels and prayer books.
Possibly because my first sense of self awareness was born alongside my grief, each poetry book I’ve written seems to birth this pain anew. I have written and rewritten my sister’s death into every poetry collection, finding myriad ways to essentially say the same thing. Perhaps it is just a way of preserving her. Here we are again, I think, as I look for a new way of telling, a new parasol, a new shudder that could take me back, to describe all the ways that particular solstice day changed us all.
In some cultures, dying on the solstice or equinox means the soul slips away at the height of light or at the still point between darkness and the dawn — the universe pausing to let just one life end.
Call it metonymy but I’ve always wondered: what taste in shoes might she have had? It’s oddly one of the only answers I have ever wanted. Something visible, ordinary, to anchor her spirit to this material world. Just this morning, after reading this, my mum confessed a similar thought at the time: that Beth would never experience the taste of ice-cream.
This week I’ve been reading Ann Oakley’s Fracture: Adventures of a broken body, where she writes about the therapeutic function of writing, that:
…it’s a way of organising experience … of associating traumatic events with non-traumatic ones, thereby making them more bearable. The imagination is a tool in the creation of new interpretative structures which bring the relief of closure. Narratives about traumatic events aren’t simply true stories, recitations of facts; they’re thoughtful impositions of coherence on experiences that otherwise essentially lack meaning. p22
The engraving on her tombstone reads omnia cooperantur in bonum, which translates to all things work together for good. It’s stoic, calm, faith-based. The idea is that suffering, no matter how senseless now, ultimately has meaning in God’s plan.
Maybe that’s why I keep writing what I now conceive of as cradle songs. I’ve been trying to shape something coherent out of this sadness that touches every part of my existence. I can trace this longing through each of my poetic sequences — especially Bettbehandlung and Eight Songs of [Mothering] and [Capacity]. It’s a search for order, resolution, closure; an attempt to make that memory bearable, to render meaning from the tragic fact of infant death.
Thanks for taking the time on your solstice to read this.
1
Once taught widely, limbo was quietly set aside by the Catholic Church in the late 20th century and officially reconsidered in 2007, when theologians affirmed hope that all unbaptised infants could be embraced “to the mercy of God”.
https://www.dorothylehane.co.uk/
