Written by Edward Lucas in The Times
23 April 2026
On Monday morning she was sitting in bed drinking whisky, reading The Times and fuming about Trump. On Tuesday she was drifting, and on Wednesday afternoon she took the last breath of her 97th year, with my sister and me holding her hand and head. As I began to tell friends and family about my mother’s death, I stressed our gratitude for such a speedy, peaceful and companionable end.
Messages arrived in their scores, from friends of 80 years’ standing and from ones she had just made; from tennis partners (she played until her late 80s) and fellow poets, from godchildren and great-godchildren (we’d lost count); from former colleagues and pupils of my Oxford philosopher father. The missives were by turns terse or florid, stylish or laboured, original or quote-laden (even a whiff of ChatGPT), but all heartfelt — and balm to our souls.
We don’t do death well in this country: palliative care is shamefully patchy. We too often leave clutter and muddle (please, consider Swedish-style döstädning, or death-cleaning). We are hobbled by American-style euphemisms: “passing” is surely for exams, not the end of our earthly life. But we do condolences beautifully. In a line worthy of Emily Dickinson, a friend wrote: “One’s mother and father never go away, they remain inside one’s head and heart, whatever we believe or hope about the future life.”
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As my siblings and I sift and share these, I have some advice to anyone notifying loved ones of a death, or comforting them about one. First, the telephone is a bad way to break sad news, and the least effective way to express sympathy. The timing is usually inconvenient and gulping silences, at either end, are awkward. Phone calls are transient one-offs while written condolences give comfort to many, and for years (I have been rereading some that came after my father’s death: thank you, again).
Second, don’t strive for perfection. A simple, prompt message with a line of detail is fine. Third, avoid sentimentality and drama. Not all deaths are tragic. Some are timely or a blessed release.
The main thing is to write. It doesn’t matter how well you knew the person who died: it’s the living you are dealing with. You need not be intimate friends, though a letter, received out of the blue, may strike previously unheard chords. A friend of my daughter’s, who had met my mother only once, wrote: “She told me the story of the day she met her husband… I can only hope to speak one day about my own husband so fondly.” I hope so too. It also doesn’t matter whether you send the message by text, email, social media, in printed messages with bouquets or by a beautiful handwritten card. What matters is that it arrives. Condolences remind us that we are not alone in our loss and that our loved ones live on in the minds of others.
The best ones complement or restore our own memories. Our old family photo albums, with their tiny, faded pictures, spring back to life. A stonemason, one of seven children in a cash-strapped clerical family that my parents supported, wrote to recall a favourite childhood garment: a parka that I’d outgrown, and long forgotten.
Messages from behind the old Iron Curtain echoed my mother’s interest in eastern Europe, which sparked mine. I recall her tiredly sitting at the kitchen table in our Oxford home after cooking the family supper (hot food always, and with pudding), writing letters to Leonid Brezhnev (“The Kremlin, Red Square, Moscow USSR”) on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Pamphlets about jailed nuns and persecuted philosophers littered the house, bringing home to us dictatorship’s cruelty and crimes.
She visited me in Prague under communism, forming an immediate bond with my closest dissident friends. She invited them to stay in Oxford: a seemingly impossible dream. Months later, the nation’s jailers were gone and the visit a reality.
For the bereaved, these memories of adventure and merriment balance sadder recent mental images of frustration, indignity or worse. Most of those who have written understand the vital point: a death is not just an occasion for mourning but can also be a chance to celebrate a life.
Many highlighted my mother’s literary talents (in her late 80s she published a poetry book). These were fired by the need to catch up. Her formal education stopped at 16; such things were wasted on girls, her austere naval father reckoned. He was baffled when she insisted, in her 20s, on a university education; and in theology, to boot. Paternal incomprehension stiffened when she moved to work in a slum parish in Poplar. Religion was for Sunday mornings, not for life. My mother revered many family traditions, but broke that one.
Her piety is even more unfashionable now. Kind thoughts outnumbered prayers, and only one letter has mentioned lighting a candle. We will make up for that at the requiem mass.
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 