The apple tree and conversations on dying

As part of Dying Matters Awareness Week, Michelle Summers writes a personal reflection on death and grief:

“When I die, bury my ashes under the apple tree in the garden and have done with it”, my mum used to tell me.

These were the light hearted conversations on dying that we had in our house and were usually met with a casual eye roll from me and a “shut up mum, we don’t have to talk about that for a long time yet”.

Then came the day I had to think about ‘those things’. During the darkest of days of my life, when sepsis cruelly took my mum from me with no warning, just four months after becoming a grandmother.

As the only child of divorced parents, the responsibility fell to me to make the arrangements.

Burial?

Cremation?

What would mum really want?

Surely, she wasn’t serious about the apple tree. Was she?

I had visions of me digging up her beloved garden in the dead of night (out of eyeshot of the neighbours) to bury her ashes before the new owners moved in.

And what if, after deciding they wanted a perfectly manicured garden, they decided to ditch the apple tree and dug up mum’s ashes? The horror!

In the depths of my grief these were the thoughts running through my head.

In the end, I abandoned the apple tree and opted for a traditional Christian burial with a plot in the graveyard back home in St Helens, where I grew up and where the rest of our family could visit and lay flowers.

I brought some of her ashes home with me to Bedfordshire, where I live now – and where I planned to scatter her ashes in the woods that we visit with the children. I had grand ideas of scattering them, so she could ‘watch’ her grandchildren play.

Lovely idea, but almost six years on, mum’s ashes remain unscattered – in a tub at home –  because I still agonise over whether I did the right thing, and whether I should buy an apple tree for my garden. 

Conversations about death and dying are hard and heart breaking. No one wants to consider a time when they’ll lose the people they love, but if the last decade of loss has taught me anything – these conversations are the greatest act of love we can give.

2019/20 was a hard year for me. Like a lot of people in the country who had been affected by Covid, I was grieving.

My mum died in August 2019, and a month later my friend died after a long struggle with bowel cancer.

The following year, my school friend died of a brain tumour – leaving behind four beautiful children, and then a much-loved former colleague and friend shared the devastating news she had an inoperable tumour on her brain.

I couldn’t talk about it. I was mute.

I went back to searching the Gardeners’ World website looking for the perfect apple tree.

Grief had taken its toll.

As usual though, my friend took the lead and showed me that conversations about death can be joyful (I know!), insightful and healing for everyone involved in the process.

At her funeral, her friends talked about their conversations about dying, how she had embraced her faith and spent hours discussing how and where she wanted to die.

She died at home, surrounded by her beautiful family.

At her funeral I learned how she’d planned every aspect of her funeral – even down to the photographs, music and readings. So very brave, so very personal and so very typical of her.

Her funeral wasn’t about death, it was a celebration of her, the life she led, the love she shared and the memories she’d made with everyone who loved her.

As we mark Dying Awareness Week, it’s made me start to think about my own mortality and how I’d want to spend the final days of my life.

We talk about death and dying quite openly at home. Mostly in the context of Grandma. We look at photos, talk about who she was and the memories we have of her.

After mum died, I attended some grief sessions led by CHUMS – mostly because my then four-year-old son was really struggling to process and express his grief. They recommended a wonderful book called No Matter What, which tells the story of two foxes.

At the end of the book, the small fox asks the large fox what happens when we’re dead and gone, and whether love goes on.

Large explains that the stars twinkle in the night sky, despite having died a long time ago. He explains to the young fox that “love like starlight never dies”.

That’s a message for my children now, but when they’re older we’ll have more detailed conversations, and there won’t be an apple tree in sight.