Daisy: April 2020

The call wakes me in the middle of the night. I sit up in bed, reaching groggily for my phone. Through a crack in the curtains, I see a crescent moon hanging in the midnight blue of the sky, its faint light making the snow on the summit of Khumbila gleam dimly. I press the phone to my ear, saying ‘Hello? Hello, Mum, are you there?’ into the silence. At first I think the call must have dropped, but then I hear a ragged breath and I realise my mother is struggling to speak at the other end, across the thousands of miles separating us.

She doesn’t have to get the words out for me to know it’s the worst of news. But then she manages, ‘Oh, Daisy, he’s gone.’

All I can say is ‘No’. As if denying it will make it untrue, will make everything okay again, will stop the virus from having killed Davy. And then I’m crying too, my sobs mingling with hers in the darkness.

She tells me she wasn’t allowed into the hospital to be with him when he died. One of the nurses had called her, holding her phone close to Davy so my mum could tell him she loved him – we all loved him – and that we just wanted him home. If he could only keep breathing, hold on, get through this, we were all waiting for him. She said he was surrounded by our love. We were holding him, we were with him.

She tells me that even though he was still unconscious, she saw his eyelids flutter at the sound of her voice. She thought she glimpsed a faint smile. And then he took his final breath, and the nurse was on the phone saying, ‘He’s gone, Lexie. He’s peaceful now. But he knew you were there.’

I let Mum talk, sensing her need to tell me. Then I say, ‘I’m going to come home. When will the funeral be? I need to be there, whatever the restrictions are.’

‘Oh Daisy,’ she sighed, sounding utterly defeated. ‘I don’t think there’ll be a funeral. They’re not allowed now. The bodies have to be disposed of carefully in case the virus can still be spread.’

I lean my forehead against the cold window, wishing I could be with her to hold her and comfort her – and have her comfort me in return. If we don’t have Davy’s funeral, will he be at rest? And will we? How will we ever be able to come to terms with losing him in this terrible way? I’m desperate to find the words to give her some peace of mind, to help her be strong in this moment of complete despair. And then Violet’s words come to me. ‘Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, Mum. Slowly, slowly. We will get through this.’ And I remember what Pema said and so I say those words too. ‘It’s the love in our hearts that makes us invincible.’

I hear her draw a deep breath. ‘Thank you, Daisy. I know you’re right. Davy filled our lives with so much love. That doesn’t make it easier to lose him, but we know we were so lucky to have him, don’t we?’

‘We do, Mum. And we’re so lucky to have each other. Who’s there with you right now?’ I can’t bear to think of her suffering alone. No one should ever have to.

‘Mara and Sorcha are here. They want to talk to you too. I’m putting you on speaker now, okay?’

I hear my daughters crying, calling for me through their sobs, and I try hard to make my voice reach out to them through the darkness, across the thousands of miles separating us. ‘He loved you so much too, you know. He was so proud of you both, always calling you his beautiful girls. I know he will have loved having you there these past few weeks.’

‘But Mum,’ Mara says, ‘what if it was us who gave him the virus? What if we brought it from London? What if it’s our fault?’

‘No,’ I hear my mother say firmly, before I can reply. ‘Don’t ever think it was your fault.’

Gratitude chokes me, hearing her take charge and reassure my girls. Then I hear Sorcha’s voice.

‘We’re worried about you, Mum, stranded there with nobody to support you. Are you going to be okay?’

I try to smile, so she will hear it in my words. ‘I’m fine, don’t worry. We have a great big sprawling family here. There are people I can talk to.’

But I realise how much I just really, really want to go home now, to be with them all there, giving and receiving comfort. ‘The minute I can, I’ll be on a plane back to Scotland, I promise. I’ll contact the embassy in Kathmandu again first thing in the morning and see if there’s any more news.’

‘Okay. On the TV last night they said some countries are organising special evacuation flights to get people home,’ Sorcha says. ‘But Mum, the main thing is to stay safe. We miss you so much, and we want you back, but we couldn’t bear it if you got the virus too ...’ Her voice trails off.

‘What will happen ... with Davy?’ I ask.

‘We don’t know yet,’ replies my mother. Her voice is grim, hardened with the effort of controlling her anguish. ‘We’re waiting to hear. Bodies are being kept in isolation for the time being until the authorities decide what can be done.’

I feel utterly wretched with helplessness. There’s silence at the other end of the line and I can only imagine how helpless they must all feel too.

‘I love you,’ I say. Because they are the only words we seem to have left.

‘We love you too,’ they chorus.

‘We’ll speak again soon,’ I promise, crossing my fingers that the Wi-Fi connection will allow it. Then the call cuts out, as if my words have immediately jinxed it.

I pull the blankets around me and sit, cocooned, watching the sliver of moon quietly set beyond the dark bulk of Khumbila. I remain there with my cheek pressed against the window until the first faint light of dawn spreads across the sky.

‘Davy,’ I whisper, hoping somehow, in some parallel universe, he can still hear me. ‘You were the best dad ever.’

Tashi realises there’s something wrong the minute he sets eyes on me when I finally come downstairs that morning. I tell him what’s happened, and he envelops me in a hug. ‘I so sorry, Mrs Daisy. Make us all very sad to hear your family suffering badly.’

Dipa and Sonam come through from the kitchen and sit down at the table beside me, offering kindness and sympathy too, while Tashi leaves the room. I go through several tissues before I can finally manage to drink some tea and choke down a bite or two of the toast they offer me.

Then Tashi reappears with Pema and Themi. ‘Think you need your cousins now,’ he says.

‘When a person dies and you don’t have the body, what do you do?’ I ask them.

‘When anyone passes, their physical body is no longer of the highest importance,’ replies Themi. ‘We would usually let the body lie in their home for three days so the monks can come and bless it, before it is washed and taken to a high place for cremation. But whether there is a body or not, first of all, every person’s spirit spends a period of transition in the bardo .’ She sees the questioning look on my face and explains. ‘There are six bardos , or states that occur at certain points in our lives when we lose our old realities and they’re no longer available to us. They govern everything from life to death and beyond. The bardo of death is the place in between this world and next. In Tibetan it’s called ship chu shergu , which means forty-nine days, because that’s how long it takes. All souls go there to transition when they’ve finished with their earthly bodies. During that time, we hold a puja – a ceremony to mark their departure and commemorate them with respect – with monks saying prayers and lighting incense up at the monastery. The holiest souls, like the Dalai Lama, are reincarnated, to continue to bring their teachings to the world. But we believe most people who have led a good life this time around will simply go to rest. We all become part of the universe from which we originated, in some form or other.’

Tashi says, ‘Mrs Daisy, would you like us to organise puja for your dad? It help you, I think, and we all can send prayers and blessings for him to make good transition.’

I realise I’d like that very much. It seems so important, suddenly, to do something to mark Davy’s death and remember his life. ‘Thank you,’ I say, managing to smile, feeling comforted at being surrounded by them all so I don’t have to go through this time alone. ‘I’d really like that. And I think my mum would like it too, especially since she can’t organise a funeral for him at the moment.’

‘We make arrangements then,’ he says.

Five days later, on a morning shrouded in thick fog, a little procession makes its way up the hill to the monastery. I walk even more slowly than usual, thoughts of Davy in my mind every step of the way, carrying a yellow silk kata folded around a little envelope of cash, which Tashi has given me to hand over to the monks. He leads the way, followed by Dipa, Themi, Pema and me, with Sonam bringing up the rear. We walk in silence, each pausing to turn the prayer wheels set into the monastery walls when we reach the top. The tall white prayer banners hang limply in the still, damp-laden air, scarcely moving, and any sounds from the village below us are muffled by the mist.

We remove our boots and step inside. The monastery’s walls and celling are richly painted, depicting scenes from Buddhist folklore, and a large gold Buddha sits serenely in the centre, one hand resting in his lap and the other raised as if in greeting as he contemplates us with a benign smile.

Three monks enter, their red-brown robes draped around them, and I bow and offer them the kata . They settle themselves, sitting cross-legged on cushions before a low table, and nod at Tashi. He ushers me forward to a small altar where a butter lamp burns next to three sticks of incense, telling me to light each one from the flame. As I do so, the monks begin to chant.

The perfume from the incense mingles with their deep, rapidly intoned words, filling the whole room, and I sit down beside the others and close my eyes, letting my mind drift as the sound and the scent engulf me. I feel as if I’m floating in a space between two worlds – one real, one imagined – and all of a sudden, in my mind’s eye, I see Davy is there with me. And so are my mother and my daughters. All the people I love the most are here with us. The cold, heavy sense of grief I’ve been carrying in my heart for so long – since Davy’s death, certainly, but probably for far longer than that too – is replaced by something else. Something lighter, filled with joy.

I open my eyes and the illusion vanishes. How can I be feeling such a sense of elation, I wonder, at this awful time? And then I realise. It’s because I’ve been forced to accept there’s nothing I can do about any of it. My old reality is no longer available to me. I’ve had to let go of struggling to regain control over my life, a struggle I’ve felt ever since my divorce took everything I thought I knew from me. I meet the eyes of the Buddha, smiling down at me, telling me to have faith, that this too shall pass. And I smile faintly back.

As the ceremony draws to a close, the monks’ chanting slowly fades and we all sit in silence for a few moments. Then the others get to their feet, and I help Themi to stand, taking her arm as we walk to the threshold and put on our boots again.

We step out on to the terrace together and I gasp in amazement at the sight that awaits us. The mist has begun to lift, and a faint haze of sunlight burns through it from behind us, casting the shapes of our bodies into long shadows over the earth and on to the hillside across from us. And surrounding the head of each of those otherworldly shapes is a rainbow-coloured halo.

‘Look,’ smiles Pema. ‘It’s the Brocken spectre. As I told you, we only see them rarely here. It’s Davy’s way of saying goodbye to you.’

I stand, watching the spectral rainbow-encircled shadows we’ve cast shift and lengthen as the mist swirls around us, then disappear like melting snow when the sun grows strong enough to evaporate the water droplets in the air. Then I walk back down to the teahouse, arm in arm with my cousins, Pema and Themi, their comforting support making me feel stronger with every step.

That evening, once I’ve called my mum and the girls to tell them about the day, I reflect on how many people around the world must be experiencing the same feelings of fear and anguish and loss. I hope they’ll be able to find their own ways to mourn. I hope they have family and friends nearby to comfort them. And I hope, one day soon, we will all be able to come together again, to cry and laugh and remind one another how our faith – in whatever shape it may take – kept us going through the darkest times.