KATY HARRINGTON

A time to laugh, a time to cry

Late at night my mum calls to tell me my aunt has died. I listen to what she says and put down the phone. My head feels like a bowling ball as I fall back to sleep. I wake up feeling fuzzy, I have been grinding my teeth in my sleep. Every morning of my adult life, I wake up and turn on BBC Radio 4 to hear the news, but this morning I can’t. I don’t want to hear John Humphrys’s familiar voice, but I don’t like the silence either. I always felt a special affinity and admiration for my Aunty Anne. Maybe it was her encyclopaedic knowledge, her ability to finish a cryptic crossword in 10 minutes, or because she always made my favourite dessert. I call her daughter and unforgivably cry down the phone while she calmly reassures me that it was the good times that mattered and not her final hours.

I wrote about my Aunty Anne here once before. When my cousin, her husband and young daughter moved back in with Anne while saving for their own house, some issues and familial tensions arose around Anne’s high standards in housekeeping, which my cousin (a whip-smart barrister) was clearly failing to maintain. Anne was particularly dissatisfied with her daughter’s failure to attentively Hoover the piece of carpet under the steps known as the ‘riser’. She read the column, and never let me forget it. The following day my cousin emails me the reading chosen for me. It begins... ”There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under heaven, a time for tears, a time for laughter...” I know this ecclesiastical statement is supposed to be of comfort, but it leaves me cold. Instead I think about one of the last conversations we had, when she unapologetically lit a cigarette and said ‘Well, my goose is cooked anyway’. I’m not sure if it’s a time to laugh or cry. Maybe both.