Grief and routine

Text 1: Two Cups, by Bernard Ashcroft

An original short story extract.

For four months after Joan died, Norman went on laying the table for two. He did not decide to. His hands did it, at half past seven every morning, while the kettle was boiling: two cups, two saucers, two spoons, the marmalade for him and the honey for her, the honey with its spoon standing up in it because she liked it set.

He would sit down and eat his toast and read the paper, folded the way she had hated, and when he had finished he would wash up both cups, his own and the clean one, and put them back on their hooks. It did not seem strange. It seemed, if anything, the one part of the day that made sense.

His son noticed in March, on a visit. Martin stood in the kitchen doorway with his car keys still in his hand and looked at the second cup, and at the honey, and his face did something complicated.

“Dad,” he said. “You know you don’t have to do that.”

Norman looked at the table. He saw it, for a moment, the way Martin was seeing it: the empty chair, the spoon in the honey, an old man who had lost his wits. He felt his face go hot.

“I know,” he said. “Force of habit.”

The next morning he laid one cup. He sat down in front of it, and the kitchen was very large around him, and the clock above the cooker was very loud, and the toast was dry in his mouth and would not go down. He got up after a few minutes and stood at the sink, holding on to it with both hands.

Then he took the second cup down from its hook, and filled it, and set it in its place across the table, and sat with it while the tea went cold.

Text 2: Black Shoes, by Ciaran Moylan

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The shoes were new for the funeral, black lace-ups from the shoe shop on Main Street, a size too small because they had run out of the right size and there was no time to order. My mother had stood in the shop with her coat still buttoned and said they would do. I was nine. My brother Declan had been fourteen.

I do not remember the service. People are surprised when I say this, but it is true. I remember the shoes. I remember the pinch across the toes as I walked up the aisle behind the coffin, and the squeak the left one made on the tiles, and how I concentrated on that squeak, on making it stop, all through the hymns, because if I thought about the squeak I did not have to think about what was in the box.

Afterwards, at the house, there were sandwiches and whiskey and a great many adults talking quietly. Someone gave me lemonade. I sat on the stairs and took the shoes off and looked at the red marks they had left across my feet, and pressed them, and it hurt, and I was glad of it.

For a long time after, my mother kept on with everything. She went to work. She did the ironing on Thursdays. She cooked dinner for four, and every evening for most of that year she scraped the fourth plate into the bin without a word, and none of us said anything, because we could see that she could not stop.

Every Saturday night she polished our school shoes in a row on newspaper by the back door: my father’s, mine, my sister’s. Declan’s were still there at the end of the row. She polished them too.

‘Both texts suggest that grief makes ordinary routines impossible to bear.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss how the characters respond to their loss
• explain how far ordinary routines become unbearable
• compare how the writers present grief

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.