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For a last moment the Queen

is everywhere
Her image is fixed over the streets. The rest of us are merely passing

Sep 16th 2022 Share

By Ann Wroe

T
ime and again we have heard the word in recent days. Britain is mourning the
Queen’s “passing”. The Queen has “passed”. Not passed away – a more solemn
antecedent, which brought to mind a collective do!ng of tall hats – but simply
10% passed, like a "gure in a procession, or a shadow on the wall.

The word might seem apt in the Queen’s case. That is how she "gured in people’s lives
in Britain: smiling brie#y on the news, walking along a line of children, waving in an
open carriage that moved at a brisk clip – or, the only time she appeared in the #esh to
me, behind the tinted window of her o!cial Rolls-Royce as it came down Birdcage
Walk in the rain. On state occasions, from the upper windows of The Economist’s
former o!ce in St James’s Street in central London, we would watch for the moment
her gorgeous gilded carriage shone suddenly between two rows of buildings, and then
vanished.

In a more general way, the ubiquity of “passing” is understandable. “Death” and “died”
are di!cult words to say, harder to face, brutal as a curse. Immediately the images
crowd in of yellow skin and skulls, dust and shrouds and tilted gravestones; collapse,
black absence.

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There is a "nality about death that people instinctively want to soften, both for their
own sake and for others’. For those, like me, who believe in the soul’s immortality,
death is a word that immediately needs clarifying: physical death, the death of the
body. “Passing” on the other hand suggests continuity, a breezing through the scene, of
someone whose spirit is bound elsewhere.

P
assing is the stu$ of everything we experience in the world. No one steps into
  the same river twice. No piece of music and no acting role is played the same
way twice. In the mirror, we ourselves are never precisely the same. Clouds,
moods, troubles, time, all surge continually past.

Nothing is dependable; nothing lasts. The rule

applies to monarchs as much as to anyone else
On the Mall, in these strange September days, the seasons run together in confusion.
The crowds in their thousands hold bouquets of summer, sun#owers and roses
mostly, many wrapped ecologically in paper rather than cellophane. Yet they walk
through sloughs of brown, crisp leaves that have already fallen, November-fashion,
from the old plane trees. And in the mist of morning, after brief night rain, the trees
have also recovered their light-greenness, which is almost of spring. Everything
changes, nothing is dependable, nothing lasts. The rule applies to monarchs as much
as to anyone else.

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Yet, as with most euphemisms, “passing” simply won’t do as a death-word. It is weak

and frail; it has no substance and no resistance. It is like the gun-salutes in the park,
which trail o$ in smoke, or the bell-ringing which ends in echoes sinking under the
hill. It is the passage of a ghost. Nothing remains.

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We took it for granted, this constancy and constant
presence
“Passing” does not begin to evoke the struggle and heft of life, the work and sweat of it,
the weight of the person lost, whatever their class and condition. It even suggests
indi$erence, as if the person who has died bestowed barely a glance or a thought on
those around them. It is the most inadequate word imaginable for someone of the
Queen’s discipline and devotion to her subjects, whose work was the hard graft of
building the monarchy for the modern age. She “passes” with just a glint of a crown
and a sweep of her long velvet robes, disappearing somewhere on the other side of
Admiralty Arch. And we turn our attention to who, and what, comes next.

E
xcept that many of us do not. In the days of mourning many of us have
encountered the Queen in the same #eeting way as before, but now it is she
who is steady and we who are carried past. She is no longer con"ned to her
palaces but presiding everywhere across the nation, on backlit displays at bus stops or
on notices quickly placed in the windows of cafés and letting agents.

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Our "gures, jumbled and re#ected, pass across hers. At my local underground station,
and by the departures board at St Pancras, she is suddenly there on the wall, larger than
life-size, crowned and jewelled, ruling over the barriers where we heedlessly tap in and
out to a thousand destinations.
 
In a way it has always been so – ever since we were "rst acquainted, a continuous quiet
occupation of our minds. We took it for granted, this constancy and constant presence.
Now we "nd ourselves the passing show, suddenly and strangely unmoored without
A
her.

Ann Wroe is The Economist’s obituaries editor. Her previous articles for 1843 magazine
include an ode to the sun and why wild swimming is a sham

photographs dougie wallace

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