1. As the funerals go by in a haze of too many details, grief, and empty platitudes about God, Susan is just sensible enough to notice and wonder at what she cannot wholly account for – their widowed neighbor, Mrs. Goodwin, inconsolable in wild, bubbling grief, the odd bohemians leaving poems wrapped around flowers, the philosophy tutor speaking admiringly of her mother (and no mention of her father), ladies from secretarial pools across London, and the prominent editor of a women’s weekly who sends a beautiful wreath, a thoughtful note, shakes her hand, and murmurs sincere condolences that Susan appreciates immensely at the time but cannot remember an hour later. Others vaguely more familiar also come -- Embassy staff from their time in Washington, local tradesmen and women, and incredibly, even Lord Halifax, comes to pay his august respects. It is as she sends the last hollow note of thanks that Susan realizes just how many people, most who she did not know and never met, came to grieve for her mother.
2. Susan had known, intellectually, that Helen Williams Pevensie was, much like herself, clever, secretive, organized, prepared, meticulous, conversational, brutally practical, and competent; Susan even grudgingly acknowledges that she had learned first from her mother – and not Narnia – the importance of putting on faces (and gloves, lipstick, hair done just so, local customs and conventions always observed, oh yes – Susan’s own black dress, gloves, hat and veil, stockings, handbag and pumps came from her mother’s closet, carefully stored in a box under the plainly inked label funerals).
However, it is only as she sorts through the detritus of her family’s lives that she finds answers in the things her mother had hidden (and of course she hid them, as Susan herself has done) – the poetry and stories submitted (and accepted) under pseudonyms to literary magazines, the sage advice columns and thoughtfully penned responses to grieving wives, young mothers with fussy babies, and women trying to make-do with too little (also under pseudonyms and all meticulously filed and cross-referenced on file cards with the recipes and household accounting); and last, at the very bottom of the sewing basket, under mending that would now never be repaired, there are notes to Mrs. Goodwin – Beatrice -- so exquisitely passionate and explicit, they make Susan herself blush.
Susan weeps, rages, and then what comes after is not acceptance for she will never accept senseless death, but resolve – she rejects life as the once and always and never again Queen and resolves to create as her mother did, love as her mother did, curate, cultivate and share wisdom as her mother did, but to live the life her mother did not get to live, unapologetically and without the shame.
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2. Susan had known, intellectually, that Helen Williams Pevensie was, much like herself, clever, secretive, organized, prepared, meticulous, conversational, brutally practical, and competent; Susan even grudgingly acknowledges that she had learned first from her mother – and not Narnia – the importance of putting on faces (and gloves, lipstick, hair done just so, local customs and conventions always observed, oh yes – Susan’s own black dress, gloves, hat and veil, stockings, handbag and pumps came from her mother’s closet, carefully stored in a box under the plainly inked label funerals).
However, it is only as she sorts through the detritus of her family’s lives that she finds answers in the things her mother had hidden (and of course she hid them, as Susan herself has done) – the poetry and stories submitted (and accepted) under pseudonyms to literary magazines, the sage advice columns and thoughtfully penned responses to grieving wives, young mothers with fussy babies, and women trying to make-do with too little (also under pseudonyms and all meticulously filed and cross-referenced on file cards with the recipes and household accounting); and last, at the very bottom of the sewing basket, under mending that would now never be repaired, there are notes to Mrs. Goodwin – Beatrice -- so exquisitely passionate and explicit, they make Susan herself blush.
Susan weeps, rages, and then what comes after is not acceptance for she will never accept senseless death, but resolve – she rejects life as the once and always and never again Queen and resolves to create as her mother did, love as her mother did, curate, cultivate and share wisdom as her mother did, but to live the life her mother did not get to live, unapologetically and without the shame.