Bedroom tax plans are a levy on the grief of the poor
When I lost my son, preserving his room for a while was a help. But poor and grieving families may soon be denied this choice
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'I needed to find ways
of keeping links to him. In his room I could stand and imagine him
being there.' Photograph: Charles Schug/Getty Images
If I ask myself, where is Eddie? I can say he's in my head and
he's in the heads of everyone who knew him. I've kept nearly everything
he left behind after he died. For a while, these sat in his room which,
for a while, I left almost as it was. I couldn't leave it exactly as it
was, because he died in the bed. The reason for keeping my son's room
intact wasn't because I was working to some formula for grieving. At the
time, the help I looked for didn't come from being told what rituals or
behaviour I should follow; I put my energy into finding out what
happened to him and why. By turning him into a piece of biology, I was
trying to make his death less personal, less a matter of it having been
him alone.
This was only OK up to a point. I also wanted to still be with him. He very lovingly took the piss. Relentlessly. I missed that badly. By keeping his room as it was, I could kid myself that he was just away, at a friend's house, with his girlfriend, on a trip somewhere. The empty room of someone who has gone to college, or is on holiday, is not much different from someone who has just died. We live in rooms. Then we don't. He didn't take the room with him.
The writer Raymond Carver figured this out in a poem in which he says that he's locked himself out of his room and finds himself looking in and seeing that he isn't there. Thanks to religions, we have imagined ourselves dead. I find them interesting but not much to do with me. Carver, though, keeps it simple: death is an empty room. What he can't say is what anyone will make of that room. Sometimes I went in. Sometimes other people did. I would sit on the bed, and look at Eddie's things, usually without handling them: hockey sticks, broken bags and holdalls, medals, books, his school work, his sax, his didgeridoo, his notebooks. For a while, his smell stayed in his clothes. He had used the aftershave Jazz, and there was still a bit left in the bottle. I used to breathe it in.
When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it's really happened. My feeling was: that's plenty of realism, thank you very much. I also needed the opposite: ways of keeping links to him, without them being painful. His room could do that. I could stand in the room and imagine him being there. I could remember the morning I found him in there dead. By sitting where he sat, I could imagine being him.
I'm more at ease with this working of the memory than I am when looking at photos. Photos seem to mock, as if the person is alive but I can tell it's just a bit of photographic paper with marks on it; inert material pretending to live. Memory seems more alive. So sitting in his room felt active. I was doing something with him.
Lucky me, I had the luxury of being able to preserve the room for as long as I wanted. Though we talk of death as the great leveller, in many ways it's the opposite. Death is shot through with the details and colours of the lives that were lived. Visit a country house and you are invited into a reverence for the sequence of deaths on display in the paintings and statues. It seems to say: we're the kind of people who can defeat death, we pass life down a chain, and when we pass life to each other we pass this glorious place to each other too.
The history of the poor is a history of not being able to do this. Under government plans, a bereaved family will become eligible for the bedroom tax after three months – an incentive to clear out the room, to get rid of the kinds of things I was able to keep. It's more of the same: with poverty there often comes a disruption of place. Migration, war and developers do a lot of disrupting. You leave your home, or your home is destroyed. If you don't move, the person who owns it can move you. There aren't many paintings or statues for you to commemorate this. The up side of this is that you live for now. The down side is that it all seems to confirm that your life is of less value than people with big country houses.
The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure. This government has inverted this and used the power it has over those who live in council housing to cut their standard of living.
With the proposal about the bedrooms of those who've died, they are cutting quality of life. Rich people are using the power they have to force poor people to do things that they, the rich, never would or could force on themselves. The rationale that this is "good for the economy" is a lie to conceal something simpler: by transferring wealth from poor to the rich, it's good for the rich. If that means being cruel, so be it. They are working to the rule that death is the great unleveller.
This was only OK up to a point. I also wanted to still be with him. He very lovingly took the piss. Relentlessly. I missed that badly. By keeping his room as it was, I could kid myself that he was just away, at a friend's house, with his girlfriend, on a trip somewhere. The empty room of someone who has gone to college, or is on holiday, is not much different from someone who has just died. We live in rooms. Then we don't. He didn't take the room with him.
The writer Raymond Carver figured this out in a poem in which he says that he's locked himself out of his room and finds himself looking in and seeing that he isn't there. Thanks to religions, we have imagined ourselves dead. I find them interesting but not much to do with me. Carver, though, keeps it simple: death is an empty room. What he can't say is what anyone will make of that room. Sometimes I went in. Sometimes other people did. I would sit on the bed, and look at Eddie's things, usually without handling them: hockey sticks, broken bags and holdalls, medals, books, his school work, his sax, his didgeridoo, his notebooks. For a while, his smell stayed in his clothes. He had used the aftershave Jazz, and there was still a bit left in the bottle. I used to breathe it in.
When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it's really happened. My feeling was: that's plenty of realism, thank you very much. I also needed the opposite: ways of keeping links to him, without them being painful. His room could do that. I could stand in the room and imagine him being there. I could remember the morning I found him in there dead. By sitting where he sat, I could imagine being him.
I'm more at ease with this working of the memory than I am when looking at photos. Photos seem to mock, as if the person is alive but I can tell it's just a bit of photographic paper with marks on it; inert material pretending to live. Memory seems more alive. So sitting in his room felt active. I was doing something with him.
Lucky me, I had the luxury of being able to preserve the room for as long as I wanted. Though we talk of death as the great leveller, in many ways it's the opposite. Death is shot through with the details and colours of the lives that were lived. Visit a country house and you are invited into a reverence for the sequence of deaths on display in the paintings and statues. It seems to say: we're the kind of people who can defeat death, we pass life down a chain, and when we pass life to each other we pass this glorious place to each other too.
The history of the poor is a history of not being able to do this. Under government plans, a bereaved family will become eligible for the bedroom tax after three months – an incentive to clear out the room, to get rid of the kinds of things I was able to keep. It's more of the same: with poverty there often comes a disruption of place. Migration, war and developers do a lot of disrupting. You leave your home, or your home is destroyed. If you don't move, the person who owns it can move you. There aren't many paintings or statues for you to commemorate this. The up side of this is that you live for now. The down side is that it all seems to confirm that your life is of less value than people with big country houses.
The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure. This government has inverted this and used the power it has over those who live in council housing to cut their standard of living.
With the proposal about the bedrooms of those who've died, they are cutting quality of life. Rich people are using the power they have to force poor people to do things that they, the rich, never would or could force on themselves. The rationale that this is "good for the economy" is a lie to conceal something simpler: by transferring wealth from poor to the rich, it's good for the rich. If that means being cruel, so be it. They are working to the rule that death is the great unleveller.
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