An advert for Cirque de Soleil's Corteo popped up on my Instagram feed earlier:
“Meet Mauro, the Dreamer Clown, watching his own funeral. He suits up to perform one last time, to dive into his memories, before ascending to the afterlife in a bittersweet farewell.”
A clown performing at his own funeral. (Click here for trailer )
It took me straight back to a book my mother gave me as a child, The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola.
Set in medieval Italy, it tells the story of a young juggling clown whose special trick is to cascade a myriad of colours until they whirl into a rainbow and then, with a flourish, “now, for the Sun in heaven,” a single golden ball tossed high into the air.
His fame grows. Then as the years pass it begins to wane, along with his skill. He drops the catch. No longer able to entertain, he grows old and poor and is chased from town to town, cold and hungry.
Until one Christmas Eve he takes shelter in a Franciscan church. Watching the beauty of the procession and the candlelit singing, he notices a statue of Mary and the Christ child looking far too solemn for his liking.
So he performs. One last time.
“And now, for the Sun in heaven.”
The following morning the friars find him dead at the foot of the statue. The Christ child is now smiling and in his outstretched hand is the golden ball.
I found that book again on Boxing Day when Mum asked me to look in the bookcase for a guide to Scottish birds she wanted passed on.
“Do you remember getting this for me, Mum? Shall I read it to you for old times’ sake?”
I had forgotten what a tear-jerker it was. Thank goodness my eldest sister Jenny was there. I made it as far as the arrival at the church before becoming overwhelmed, my voice gave way and she quietly took over and finished it.
Conversation then turned to lighter things. My birthday was approaching, falling on my day off, and I was planning to come down to Petersfield to see Mum for lunch. After hearing her commiserate with another sibling about turning sixty, I wanted my slice of attention.
“Mum, when you next see me I’ll be fifty. What do you think of that?”
“Well,” she said drily, “with all your older siblings I should think you’ll be as smug as a bug in a rug!”
Only Mum went her own way in the New Year, and while I'd seen all the signs that this was to be our last Christmas together, nothing prepares you really.
So my fiftieth birthday began at dawn with me sitting cross-legged on the sofa rehearsing her eulogy for the following day, family memories lit softly by candlelight on the piano opposite. Later that morning, birthday life resumed. A circus cake stand and matching napkins from my sister. A Big Top lamp held open by the can-can of an acrobat called Lucy. Balloons and bunting. After a family lunch out locally, a Gibbon board was waiting on the doorstep, a portable slackwire decorated with butterflies.
Mum had taught me butterfly kisses when I was small. The Saturday after she died, a bouquet labelled “The Butterfly Kiss” appeared anonymously on my doorstep. Since then turquoise butterflies have surfaced in small places. On a smart supermarket bag. In a birthday print. On a card from my department covered in messages of support. I am told such things are common after loss, and with my Dad it was, and still is, the garden robin.
It is perhaps ironic that I grew up with The Clown of God, because while Mum had a great sense of fun she was not a fan of circus. A childhood visit to a big top had terrified my older siblings and was not to be repeated. Yet years later, after a major operation in her eighties, I found her in a hospital bed reading about Giffords Circus in The Lady, delighted by anecdotes about Tweedy the Clown, a fellow Scot.
Mum loved the ballet, especially the world of Frederick Ashton, whom she had met over lunch in Washington DC in the 1950s. La Fille Mal Gardée was the soundtrack of our school runs and she would waltz the car along country lanes in time (Click here for Will Tucker's expert clowning in the The Clog Dance), accelerating over bridges at my request so my stomach flipped. Perhaps the circus began there.
Years later at the Royal Opera House watching the ballet, after I had liberally spritzed some Pomegranate Noir during the interval, she was highly amused when the couple behind tapped her shoulder.
“So… is this your wayward daughter then?!”
I really was my mother’s wayward daughter, la fille mal gardée. She had to scoop me out of A&E several times and put up with me running off to Cuba, learning to fly and developing a taste for aerobatics, joining the circus, sailing round the world en famille and generally living at full tilt. And yet, for all my wandering, she was always the steady centre, my lighthouse, guiding home.
Mum had a complete life, leaving behind six children, sixteen grandchildren and a further sixteen great-grandchildren. When we gathered to say goodbye, the tone was one of gentle presence, quiet dignity and stoicism, so entirely in keeping with her spirit. Being the youngest of six, it was a real privilege that my siblings entrusted the eulogy to me, and this time my voice did not give way. When I stood to speak, the tightness in my chest and the jelly legs from minutes earlier dissolved into something steadier. The liminal space where balance lives. A place of flow.
Mum used to say, “Lucy always has to have the last word.” And this time, I spoke for us all.
I remember years before seeing the musical Barnum with my sister Jenny at the Chichester Festival Theatre. It strikes me now that Mum had much in common with Charity Barnum, the grounded, pragmatic foil to the big-top bravado of Phineas Taylor. Towards the end, when Charity dies in her husband's arms, the stage falls dark and small tealights begin to glow like fireflies while Barnum reprises The Colours of My Life. Thinking of that moment gets me every time. Looking back at Barnum and at The Clown of God, it strikes me that those stories were early rehearsals. I did not know then how much they were preparing me. Teaching me how to let go. Circus has always known how to bow out. To release light into darkness. To send colour upward one final time. That really is the power of the arts. A rehearsal both for life, and for death.
“And should this sunlit world grow dark one day, the colours of her life will shine a quiet light to lead the way...”
Katharine Ann Margaret
Dearest Mum
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