Amazingly, he lifts the book at the end, out of sadness into something else. He does it without sounding false or pretentious or sentimental. He ends with candles. In the daytime, we walked about randomly looking at street markets, buildings, the river. We weren’t revisiting a place we had shared. If anything, it was new. I have no idea why all this felt soothing to me but it did. One time, we walked past the entrance to the Montparnasse cemetery. Neither of us knew at that moment what kind of cemetery it was but on a whim, we decided to walk in. In fact, it’s one of Paris’s two huge secular cemeteries, full of monuments to some of France’s most famous people – or indeed, people from other countries who’ve died in France. Walking about among them was a strange relief. I think it made me think of Eddie as gone and now in some way in the company of the dead. I don’t believe in the afterlife, so what I mean is that just as there were monuments and stones there, with people visiting them, so I was already beginning to make monuments and inscriptions in my head. Not real ones. Not even blueprints for one that we might make. The imagined place in my head, the place that was Eddie, was like one of the tombstones in the cemetery. The word ‘companionable’ came to mind. I felt like I was in good ‘company’ urn:lcp:michaelrosenssad0000rose:epub:3736adfd-9263-4c7c-8f95-7d0897bdaa28 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier michaelrosenssad0000rose Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9777cc8v Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781406317848 What makes me most sad is when I think about my son Eddie. I loved him very, very much but he died anyway. Rosen’s poems for children always see the world from their perspective and can be counted on to induce giggles – “‘Don’t throw fruit at a computer’ / ‘You what?’” – especially when performed by the poet himself: he doesn’t have 98m YouTube views for nothing. He is learning to adapt to virtual school visits, “a kind of informal telly”, zooming into the camera with one eye: “then my dad came in and said ...” He has written more than 200 books and counting, including greedily devoured favourites Chocolate Cake, Fluff the Farting Fish and Monster. His most recent books for adults include The Missing, an investigation into the fates of his European Jewish relatives during the second world war, and his 2017 memoir So They Call You Pisher!, a lively account of growing up the son of Jewish communists in postwar Pinner: “Not the most encouraging place to start a branch of a political organisation aimed at world revolution.” Then there are the two books he wrote in response to the death of his second son Eddie (he has five children, including Eddie, and two stepchildren) from meningitis when he was 18 just over 20 years ago: Carrying the Elephant, a mixture of prose and poetry, and Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, illustrated by Blake. “I loved him very, very much,” Rosen writes, “but he died anyway.” Rosen likes to say he is ‘recovering’ rather than ‘recovered’. Covid has left him with a hearing aid in one ear, dizziness and breathlessness

And after getting home, the physios (anyone who has been in the marvellously pushy hands of NHS physios will recognise Rosen’s account of them) ask about his long-term objectives. The first illustration shows a person who is sad but pretending to be happy. How can you tell if someone is really feeling sad? Ouch. It doesn't get any easier when you learn what makes Rosen most sad. His son Eddie died when he was 18. "I loved him very, very much," Rosen says, "but he died anyway." I knew about this book. I had even heard Michael Rosen talking about it on the radio and liked the idea. But I hadn't read it. How did that help? It put what had happened into the context of the human race. It showed that Eddie’s death wasn’t just or only something that had happened to me, to his family, to his friends. It was something that happened to the human race and was part of the human story. We live with bacteria. Bacteria live with us. This is how it’s been for millions of years. We evolve with each other. The death of Eddie was a moment when the bacterium was so successful it failed: it killed its host and then died with it. To know these things helped me, and still does. It’s the only way I can make sense of it. Any other way feels to me senseless. I don’t believe in a fate or destiny that governs us. I don’t believe that it’s the will of a being outside life on Earth. I don’t even think any kind of “will” comes into it. It’s biology.At one point, by a high wall, we came across a woman crying. There were flowers and photos on the grave. We stood with her. She spoke to me. She said that the grave was for her son but I noticed that she could hardly speak through her crying. I said that we had just lost our son too. I told her it was an illness. She said that her son died in an accident. When? I asked her. Ten years before, she said. A wave of feeling came over me. The moment she said that, I felt a mix of sorrow and fright. It was desperately sad that this woman was so consumed by grief, but it frightened me that she was this sad so long after the event. I then thought something that may seem heartless. I said to myself – I most certainly didn’t say it out loud – “I don’t want to be like her in 10 years’ time.” Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-10 06:01:11 Associated-names Blake, Quentin Boxid IA40171218 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

I don’t remember the next few minutes. I remember at one point thinking or saying, “Why have you done this, Eddie?” as if he had done this thing to me. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, though. Why or how could I have thought at that moment that I was in any way involved in him getting whatever it was that had killed him? I guess it’s part of how we see the death of those we love: we see them withdrawing their love from us. If ever, in our past, people withdrew their love from us as some kind of punishment, then someone dying can feel like that too. I guess I have sad thoughts every day. But I try not to be overcome by them’: Michael Rosen. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer It has now been 23 years since Eddie’s death. For the most part, Rosen has succeeded in escaping incapacitation. “I’ve tried not to be burdened by it,” he says. “I talk in the book about ‘carrying the elephant’.” Rosen hands me a postcard replica of an engraving of a man struggling to carry an elephant up a hill. “I bought that in Paris,” he goes on, “and it’s a great reminder. You know, I’m not carrying an elephant. At the time I thought I was. Eddie’s dead and I’m carrying all this grief and it’s bigger than me – it’s as big as an elephant. But not any more. Even with this Covid thing, or with any of that other stuff, I’m still not carrying an elephant. So this picture, it inspires me.” When I first read this book, I was teaching a children's literature class. In that context, I loved it because it talked about emotions without pandering to kids, without being gooey or cutesy or saccharine.When I ask Rosen if he would have written this book had he not almost lost his life to Covid, he says, “Probably not. No.” Becoming perilously unwell – “poorly,” as the doctors described it, as though he had a mild cold – has brought to the surface several other troubling periods in his life. “Freud’s got a word for it,” he says. “What does he call it – condensation? When one thing happens and you pour into it all your feelings from other places?” As Rosen was feeling “sad about being ill and being feeble it sort of drew in, like a vacuum cleaner, all this other stuff.”