Hamnet & Judith and Our Plague

 

Yesterday I finished reading the award-winning novel Hamnet and Judith by Maggie O"Farrell. It is another book which was written prior to the pandemic yet speaks to issues we have been facing during the past 13 months, including death and the resulting grief. The title refers to the twin children of William Shakespeare, one of whom, the son,died at the age of eleven. The cause of death is unknown but O'Farrell attributes it to the bubonic plague, which was commonplace in that era.

The writing is powerful throughout, and the description of the grief of Hamnet's mother Anne, or Agnes, Hathaway, as well as William, is so real. Both parents are haunted by their loss, and O' Farrell tells the story so that Shakespeare wrote his play, Hamlet, as a way of working through his grief, The names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in that time, and the play was written about four years after their beloved son's death.

Agnes in this story is a confident, sought after, intuitive healer who cannot save her own child. She and William encounter the figurative ghost of their boy in what become the excruciating events of everyday life. The play, with the apparition of the elder Hamlet is both witness and catharsis as death is named and explored. Shakespeare's stage notes refer to the deceased king as "ghost."

It is, alas, the priest who offers religious platitudes which Agnes rejects. Others are tongue-tied or overly solicitous. Both of the parents are profoundly changed by their loss. 

As grim as this may sound, this is a novel worth reading. All of us are affected by grief along the way -- it is inescapable and we all must frame our narrative to address it. And the pandemic has brought home the tenuous nature of life and our mortality which we are often inclined to ignore.  

I think of a prayer I used often at funerals and memorials with these concluding phrases:

And since we have been but a hair's breadth from death since birth,

teach us, O God, how breathlessly close we are to life 

-- the life in all it's fullness, which Christ alone can give.