The time has nearly come when we must acknowledge the profundity and grandeur of the death of our late Queen. Many mourners don’t feel the full depth of their loss until the funeral itself. We sometimes delay the harsh reality till then by engaging in busy work. We may have shielded ourselves from the inevitable sense of irreparable loss via the rituals, spectacles, processions, proclamations, and the huge national show of love and allegiance that have accompanied the lying-in-state.
The long, depressing days of tomorrow lead us to the brink of the grave, to the last lament, and to the frosty beginning of a new period, the character of which we do not know but which will be substantially different from the previous 70 years.
Shakespeare, as so often, has fitting words for the new generation as they contemplate the vast events through which Elizabeth II so gently guided us, and as the last of the wartime generation, including our Queen, walk slowly off into the twilight, leaving the rest of us to manage for ourselves: ‘The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/ Shall never see so much, nor live so long.’
Mail on Sunday: The best way we can honour the Queen is to emulate her
In a way, let us hope that we shall not see so much: the withering away of an empire, the dramatic transformation of our landscape, even a change in how we speak our own language, so that recordings of the Queen made at the start of her reign now sound impossibly archaic.
By any standards, her life was extraordinarily long. It began when the battleship and steam train remained in the vanguard of modernity, and urgent news came by telegram. It ended in the age of gene-editing and the smartphone. And yet here we still are, one of the most civilised, prosperous, peaceful and well-ordered societies in the world, in no small part thanks to the stability and order brought about by the wisdom of the Queen who has now gone.
How can we best commemorate her? There are discussions about conferring a title on her, perhaps ‘Elizabeth the Good’. There will no doubt be monuments and statues. But surely the best way of remembering her life, and of keeping her in memory, is to emulate her, from the very top of our society to the very bottom.
Her virtues at first sound quiet, even meek: silence when speech is not necessary, restraint at all times, a temper kept when it could have been lost, a life lived modestly rather than extravagantly, a constant recognition that goodness and courage are to be found among all classes.
But we must hope for these virtues (and those of us who pray should pray for it) in our new King, who will tomorrow perhaps find himself more alone than ever before in his life. We must long for them from our politicians, our Civil Service, our educational institutions, our courts and our police. So very much depends on how the men and women in those positions conduct themselves.
However, we should also nurture and encourage these virtues in ourselves, in all we do and think and say. For Elizabeth II taught us, in her long decades on the throne, the enormous strength that lies in many things our noisy, urgent, fevered age has tended to forget or scorn – patience, thrift, modesty, civility, gentle humour and plain good manners.
As we contemplate and mourn the enormous gap that our late Queen has left in our national life, we can now see that these things added together are as mighty as an army with banners. And our best memorial to her will be to adopt the virtues she maintained when it would have been so easy to lay them aside.