One of the great novels on sickness and death is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I have been reading it because of a Norfolk-based interest in the Hanseatic League – his novels are set in German Hansa territory – and because of an unwelcome recent knowledge of death. My brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, died suddenly in February and my son Henry’s father, Julian Sands, has been missing on a Los Angeles mountain for many weeks.
Mann writes about the two aspects of death: “In one aspect, death was a holy, a pensive, a spiritual state, possessed of a certain mournful beauty. In another it was quite different. It was precisely the opposite, it was very physical, it was material, it could not possibly be called either holy, or pensive, or beautiful – not even mournful.”
My brother died in the bath, from heart disease. He had lived alone in a church vestry opposite his home in Norfolk following some personal blows. There was a particular bleakness to his death because it took a few days before I raised the alarm. A post-mortem revealed that 80 per cent of the arteries to his heart were blocked. Nevertheless, he had just completed a panto season of three shows a day while working on librettos, scripts, and (a late enthusiasm) pilgrim routes.
Kit’s shocking death felt material: “precisely the opposite of holy or pensive or beautiful”. But then something happened. First there came a great outpouring of love from all those who had known him: wave after wave of letters and tributes. Stephen Fry captured the sense of love and loss: “Kit Hesketh-Harvey could rhyme anything … the world without him is blank verse, if verse at all. What a hole he leaves, what a giant unfillable hole. “
Secondly, music and religious ceremony offered their consolation of mournful beauty. Kit began his musical life as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and his final piece of work was writing the words to an anthem celebrating a processional cross, the “Cross of the Cosmos”, which contains moon dust and has been mentioned in these pages before (Catholic Herald, September 2021).
Kit was looking forward to attending the first performance of the anthem, in the chapel of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in late February. I took Kit’s son Rollo and my son Henry to listen to it instead. It was a clear, cold late afternoon as we slipped into the chapel to watch the final rehearsal with his co-composer, the baritone Roderick Williams, and Magdalene choir.
The notice on the door was a confirmation that the unreality of Kit’s death was brutally factual. It announced the “premiere of ‘The Vision of the Cross’ by Roderick Williams and the late Kit Hesketh-Harvey”. But then I spotted the artist David Maude-Roxby-Montalto di Fragnito and his wife Patricia, and saw the luminous silver processional cross that David had created, and heard the poetic voice of Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who has believed since he saw the cross in 2016 in its divine qualities.
The cross was carried to the altar, the choir sang the anthem, and then Rowan Williams spoke. He talked, without notes, of pain and loss and of following Christ’s journey from suffering to meaning. He talked of the artistry of the “Cross of the Cosmos” prevailing over dis-order and disharmony, overcoming fragment-ation, becoming the whole. “The centre will hold,” he said. And we prayed for Kit. Both my son and Kit’s son were affected by the service; it was a balm to the rupture and gave death a greater canvas of love and mystery.
Later in the week, the spirit of the tributes was made flesh in a rousing display of love and friendship at Kit’s funeral, held at the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden. We were expecting a congregation of 300 and it was nearer 500. John Rutter sat in one of the front rows listening to his own Gaelic Blessing, which accompanied the arrival of the coffin. John had warned me that its brevity would need some brisk footwork, and he knew Kit would have thought of this with some amusement. The final work was a text of fare-well: written by Kit and composed by his musical partner James McConnel, and sung by our cousin Naomi and her daughter Morwenna. Then we left the church to the voice of Kit himself in a recording of his song “I was Cabaret”. Viscerally present and gone forever.
There was a final pensive evening of a candlelit vigil in the church Kit made his home. It felt companionable to sit with him before the crematorium the follow-ing day. I later spoke to a distinguished Cam-bridge scientist about leaps in the field of bio-logy and longevity. But, said the scientist, he and his peers had failed to give a sense of mean-ing to death. There was a lack of poetry, a neg-lect of empathy. Perhaps it allowed too much attention to be paid to the physical aspect of death, in contrast to the mournful beauty of the spiritual. I remembered a line Kit had written for the “Vision of the Cross” anthem: “Where science cannot grant us sight / illumined by a greater light. Dust may be reordered / Dust we may restore.” This feels like peace.
Sarah Sands was editor of the Evening Standard, and of Today on BBC Radio 4
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