We have seen it round the seasons now, our son's memorial stone. It lies, a
gently curving boulder in a bed of pebbles amid rough grass, and three mown
paths lead us to and from its quiet presence. In winter the letters stand
out damp, sharp and dark against the frost; at sunrise and sunset they seem
deep and black-
shadowed, and at noon almost fade in the direct light. When the grass is high
as a hayfield the stone feels like a secret; after mowing it shines pale
from far across the garden. A bird, a pied wagtail, has developed the habit
of sitting on it, so from time to time its guano must be hosed off.
Its form is natural, a giant porphyry pebble from the bottom of an Italian
riverbed; visitors who knew Nicholas or read his book The Silence at the
Song's End began, quite spontaneously, to bring it smaller pebbles from
places he knew, or played in as a child, or from their own gardens. So it
lies among friends. His name is modest, half-hidden round the side; the
words which face the sun and rain are from his poem: “I sing inside myself
the one wild song, song that whirls my words around until a world unfurls my
ship's new sail I catch the dew and set a course amongst the ocean curls”.
A garden memorial is, of course, a private thing; not like his book, which now
is any reader's. But we let it be photographed as an illustration to a
modest but important booklet, the latest guide to commissioning from
Memorials by Artists. This unique organisation has a sister branch, The
Memorial Arts Charity; together they exist to foster the traditional
letter-cutters' art and enable the commissioning of proper memorials in an
age of machine-cut gravestones.
Memorials by Artists acts as an agent, adviser and go-between in the delicate
process of making a memorial in stone or wood; the sister charity supports
young talent with letter-carving workshops and an apprenticeship scheme, and
next year is founding The Art and Memory Collection, a national collection
of contemporary memorial art in six major sites, “so that the public can see
a wide variety of the finest examples of lettered works with a memorial
theme”. The pilot exhibition ten years ago at Blickling Hall in Norfolk had
an extraordinary response, not least among families who found that walking,
gazing, stooping and reading among other people's stone tributes helped them
to talk about losses of their own.
I had known slightly the founder of all this, Harriet Frazer, for years before
I dreamt I would need her services so soon. I had found her publications
fascinating, although the guide to memorials for children and young people
brought me to tears every time. Harriet began the work when her
stepdaughter, Sophie Behrens, raised by her since early childhood, committed
suicide at 26 and the family found it hard to contact a good stonecarver.
It was in the aftermath of our son's death, however, that I really learnt
about the logistical and emotional processes you go through when
commissioning a memorial, whether gravestone or garden plaque. Now, as she
publishes the new edition of her guide, the way is made still clearer for
future mourners.
Our own progress was, Harriet says, a fair example of the way it goes. The
newly bereaved do not always know what they want: how could we? Older people
may have thought and talked about their memorials but many have not, and no
young person would. In the shock of death, families have ideas that later
change sharply. We, for instance, felt strongly that we wanted wood, not
stone. Stone just felt too heavy, too inorganic: we balked at the cold
finality of it, just as we had opted for cremation and scattering at sea for
this strange, free young spirit. On the other hand we did want a memorial;
and walking in Harriet's Suffolk garden, kept as a wilderness of examples
for just this reason, we developed an inchoate affinity for one of the
craftsmen: John das Gupta. The piece we saw was nothing like what we wanted
- a tall monument to his father, with text by Tagore - but we were drawn to
the man who made it, without quite knowing why. Harriet, quietly at our
side, agreed that we would get on. “I have a feeling for putting people
together,” she says modestly. “I once worked in a Jobcentre, and that was
the satisfaction of it.”
We asked Das Gupta if he would work in wood, and took him pictures of
Nicholas's ship and a sheaf of his writings. His sister said that she wanted
something big, “visible from space!”. He came to look at the site - a
hillock at the end of the garden - and sent us balsa-wood maquettes and
drawings. We liked them, but then we changed our minds completely. We
realised that we wanted stone: smooth, permanent, comforting stone, warm in
the sun, reflecting light.
We threw ourselves on his inventiveness, and a short while later Das Gupta
said that he had found a 3ft-wide, beautifully rounded boulder of immensely
hard porphyry from Italy and that the text could be carved on it, not
without difficulty, but he was visibly excited about the idea of working in
that ancient stone. He made sketches. We took a leap of faith and said, “do
it”, signed the commission, paid half and waited.
Months later I visited his back garden in Walthamstow, northeast London, and
saw it half-finished, unimpressive but possible. Later still, he arrived
with his heavy burden in the back of a van, and we laid it in its place and
stood around. It was wonderful. The letters and whorls curve with the
polished stone, echoing the curving, whirling, living lines of the poem. We
threw water on it and watched how the letters stood out as it dried; over
the seasons we have grown ever fonder of it. It is only a thing, not a
living joy like a person, yet it feels fitting and dignified and the right
thing to have done.
Talking to Harriet, you learn how often this emotional process is repeated and
how delicate is the balance between grief, anger, anxiety and taste. You
could, of course, find an artist and commission directly, avoiding the
agency percentage, but while our direct conversations with Das Gupta were
useful and even therapeutic, I was relieved that we hadn't.
Harriet has sensitive antennae and long experience, personal and professional,
of bereavement and of the letter-cutter's art. Where fonts, stone, words and
design are concerned, her input is invaluable. The balance between
characterfulness and dignity differs from one family to the next; she
understands both needs and respects the evolving feelings of clients (you
may set out wanting “Darling Snooks, we miss your cheeky smile” and after a
few months revert to a more thoughtful tribute or reflection of the dead. Or
you may start from a stance of stiff dignity and slowly remember the
playfulness of the person before he or she grew ill). And if - it is
mercifully rare - the finished memorial suddenly looks wrong to the client,
Memorials by Artists mediates and brings in other artists to give a view.
This is, after all, a contract of several thousand pounds; mixing money and
grief is never a smooth process.
Most important of all, if it is a headstone the agency advises and negotiates
on the difficult matter of public regulations. Council graveyards have few
religious or ideological restrictions, but may be fussy about height and
shape; churchyard installations cause all sorts of difficulties. Many
parishes forbid pet names - “Danny” or “Grandad”, insisting on formality;
images unrelated to the Bible may be rejected. A tennis racket or a child's
gerbil may be forbidden, for instance, though a teddy bear slipped through
the net once when it was pointed out to the church authorities that the Old
Testament is full of bears.
Annoyingly, as the commissioning guide points out, many creative and engaging
images and words in old churchyards would be banned today. As for text,
there are also pitfalls. Christian dread of the occult means that in some
parishes you may not be allowed to “address the dead” on the stone - hence
“Goodbye, my darling” or even “Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”
might not be accepted (the traditional RIP, of course, stands not for “rest”
in peace but “requiescat” - “may he rest” - addressing God, not the
deceased).
All these stormy waters can be traversed gracefully, therapeutically, with
guidance. And, of course, diversity shines in the garden or indoor memorials
- plaques, wooden staves, steel-cut letters round a tree, stained-glass
windows. In the public sphere, Memorials by Artists organised the making of
the Bali bomb memorial in London with its flying doves.
When you read their beautifully illustrated publications, the stony comfort of
the work is overwhelming. And the advice is heartfelt and simple: not to
rush, not to feel it is something to get over with or worse, a dreaded
full-stop. Grief, like graveyard earth, needs time to settle. And like the
earth, it has its own vitality and bears new fruits. “Don't be in a hurry.
Don't set an urgent date,” Harriet Frazer says. “And never say, ‘This is the
last thing we can do'. It isn't.”
But it is a good thing. I look at our stone now and know that an artist
deployed feeling and attention and skill, in memory of one unique person. We
made that happen. It is only an echo in stone, but an echo nonetheless.
Memorials by Artists publications from www.memorialsbyartists.co.uk
, tel 01728 688934 or via e-mail.
The launch exhibition for The Art and Memory Collection - a national
collection of contemporary memorial art - will be at West Dean Gardens, West
Sussex, from April until November 2009
