Good morning,
The words of Jessie Buckley dedicating her Oscar win to ‘the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart’ have been echoing in my mind throughout this week. She picked up the Best Actress award for playing a grieving mother in Hamnet. The film reimagines the lives of William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway as they cope with the tragic death of their 11-year-old son.
This idea of the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart moves us beyond the saccharine pinks and yellow flowers of Mother’s Day to the reality that motherhood is wild and earth-shattering and terrifying. My goodness can it be joyous, too. But for many mothers, it is all those things – sometimes all at once.
Sometimes the chaos of a mother’s heart has to deal with the worst things imaginable: the death of a child.
On Thursday night, I hosted an event in conversation with Gee Walker at Chester Cathedral, exploring black motherhood and grief. Gee’s 18-year-old son Anthony was murdered in a racially aggravated attack while walking near his home in Merseyside 20 years ago.
In the book by Maggie O’Farrell upon which the film Hamnet is based, are these words: “Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never forget that they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”
I had planned to ask Gee Walker at the end of our event what gives her hope, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I resisted the urge to wrap her grief up in a tidy bow, to end on a glib message so we could all go away feeling better.
This Easter, Christians will celebrate Jesus’s resurrection – the great story at the heart of my faith. But perhaps what many of us also take from Holy Week is that resurrection doesn’t erase the reality of the brutality of Christ’s crucifixion. His mother watching it all at the foot of the cross.
Gee Walker told me she finds solidarity in “Mamma Mary”, as she describes Jesus’s mother”: a mother who – just like her – experienced the nightmare of watching her son die and not being able to do anything to help, not even be able to hold him. Gee described doing the little that she was able to –while Antony lay dying- holding tightly to his feet while police and paramedics intervened.
In the months following Anthony’s death, Gee’s family started the Anthony Walker Foundation, raising aspirations of schoolchildren and providing comfort to other grieving families. For her, it’s through this work that Anthony lives on. So too did Mary mother a movement that took her son’s message to the ends of the earth.
Perhaps the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart” is that even when it is broken, it can speak life.
USA