notes on coventry, childermas, and rebuilding from ruins

on Childermas, Coventry's cathedral and carol alike teach us the only way to live with grief is by building new beauty alongside it

This year, for the first time, I spent Christmas with my partner’s family, on the farthest side of the world. It was not only the first year I’ve not spent Christmas with my own family, but the first time in the 29 years of my life that I’ve not woken up on Christmas morning in the house I was born in.

In the months and early years after a death, there are lots of firsts. The first birthday without them, the first New Year’s. The first coming of spring and the first longest winter. The first time a card is signed from one parent, rather than both. There are celebrations and milestones, and sometimes it’s only when picking up the phone to share the news with them that we remember that they’re not around to celebrate with us.

Life goes on in their absence, and families grow around it. My father never met my partner, but since his death I’ve gained his parents, aunts and uncles, sisters and cousins, plus a grandma for good measure. It’s helped, I think, to focus on what has been gained rather than the irreconcilable loss. I will never have another father. There can be no replacement, and to pretend so would not only be an incredible disservice to the man who raised me, but would be an incredibly unhelpful way of dealing with grief. A grief concealed becomes a rot, a poison covered over rather than excised.

But during a holiday focused on family gatherings and the birth of a new child, it can be hard to allow space for our grief to breathe. There’s barely time for grieving at all. We mark anniversaries, birthdays and seasonal holidays for a reason: annual celebrations give us an opportunity to reflect, reset, and recognise our good fortune. Yet we are, at best, culturally uncomfortable around death. There may be a national day of mourning, but this is linked to a monarchy which many do not support, and a country that has brutalised many more others, serving more as insult than equivocation for a regular celebration.

Today, 28th December, is perhaps the closest we have to a day reserved for grieving; for the close, private, sentimental grieving that is necessary and needed. Known in the Christian liturgical calendar as Childermas, or ‘The Feast of the Holy Innocents,’ the fourth day of Christmas commemorates the Massacre of the Innocents, during which King Herod of Judea ordered the execution of all male infants in Bethlehem.

Much of the music and literature associated with Childermas are meditations on motherhood, or more specifically, maternal grief. The Coventry Carol is one of the most famous such works. First recorded in 1534, it was performed as part of the medieval mystery play – travelling theatre tableaus depicting Bible stories – during a pageant put on by one of Coventry’s city guilds. Sung by a chorus of grieving mothers, it’s referred to as a carol, but really, it’s a lullaby-lament:

Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

Thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay"?

What makes The Coventry Carol notable isn’t just that, particularly in its setting by Philip Stopford, it’s a hauntingly beautiful piece of choral music, or that it has survived and been passed down for over 500 years. To me, The Coventry Carol – and Childermas – are noteworthy because they not only give space to, but credence of, grief in a time otherwise reserved for festivities and celebration. And what grief is more acute than that of a mother mourning the death of a child? Birth and death are the two diametric certainties of our lives. And yet we spend much of our waking moments trying to exclude the existence of one from the other. Sung during Christmas, The Coventry Carol places mourning and new life side by side in a manger.

On Christmas Day 1940, The Coventry Carol was performed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, six weeks after the brutal bombing which set much of the city ablaze. Broadcast live as part of the BBC’s Christmas programming, the ancient carol was heard around the world, during a time in which much of the world was mourning. The first Coventry Cathedral was built in 1095, with the second iteration built in its place during the 14th century. On November 14th 1940, this building was destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitz, and the Christmas service was held there mere weeks after, while the cinders were almost still smoking.

Rather than rebuilding on top of these ruins, erasing the brutal illustration of the city’s tragedy, the destroyed Cathedral was kept as a monument, with the new Coventry Cathedral built alongside – rather than on top of – the ruins of the old. Instead of concealing the brutality of war, new beauty was built amongst it.

Love does not erase loss, any more than grief extinguishes the experience of happiness. Salt makes the honey sweeter. Acknowledging loss, which exists like a crater in the living room floor of our daily lives, won’t cause the ground of your own house to cave in. It simply offers a hand, so you can, gingerly at first, and eventually without even thinking, step around it.

Death cleaves our worlds into a before and after, its chasm occupying the liminal space in-between. To prematurely usher ourselves into that tertiary space, or pretend it didn’t even happen, not only is disservice to our before, but ignores the enormous physic marathon that is mourning. But the true beauty of any ‘after’ comes when we pay credence to the griefs of our lives, and allow them to gently exist alongside us.

In Coventry, destruction and defiance, grief and celebration, stand in stark co-existence. With one of the world’s largest tapestries and a stained-glass, full-height window, through which light appears to oscillate like the dance of sunlight on a butterfly’s wings, the Cathedral is not only a testament to craft and artistry, but our remarkable capacity to rebuild and even expand our lives, even after catastrophic devastation.

The experience of loss fundamentally changes us. And when that loss is bound up with love, how could it not? Like Coventry, the structure of our lives are rendered cinders, and those same walls of our ‘before’ selves can never be rebuilt. But new buildings can be constructed, within them may live grace and glory. By giving due space for grief, we give ourselves room to recover. In time, light may filter through those stained-glass windows, making new colours dance amongst the shadows of ruins.