Why I brought my dead son’s body home, by Michael Rosen

Friends of Eddie, 18, came to say goodbye, children’s author reveals

MICHAEL ROSEN, the children’s author, has revealed he brought his dead son back home from the mortuary so his friends could say goodbye.

The former children’s laureate, 75, who came close to losing his own life to Covid last year, said people ‘came from all around’ to see Eddie, who died from meningitis aged 18 in April 1999.

He believes it was his young friends’ first experience of death.

Rosen found his second son ‘cold’ in bed after he had been experiencing flu-like symptoms. ‘Then we did something quite strange – partly it was his mum suggested it,’ Rosen told the Cheltenham literary Festival.

‘After he was in the morgue, we brought him back to the house. We did that old thing of laying someone out in the house and people came from all around to see him.

‘There is a whole generation of his friends, and they were young, that came to the house and it might have been the only dead person they had ever seen.’ Rosen, who has rarely spoken publicly about losing his son, added: ‘If you’re in the presence of a dead body it does transform the way you think about death... we become slowly aware of it.

‘If it’s totally medicalised then people just disappear, which isn’t much different than seeing them go on holiday to France.

‘We have to say, culturally speaking, if we ship people off to hospital and say goodbye to them and don’t see them again, it is very a “cordon sanitaire” around death.’ Rosen had Eddie with his first wife Elizabeth Steele. His death inspired Rosen’s 2004 tale about grief, Sad Book. The father-offive, who also wrote We’re Going On A Bear Hunt, spent 40 days in a coma last year after contracting Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic.

He was told he had a 50:50 chance of surviving, and when he did wake up he had to re-learn how to walk.

Writing in the Daily Mail this year in support of our campaign for a national memorial for Covid victims, Rosen told how 42 per cent of patients on his ward died.

He wrote: ‘Every time I think of it, I struggle to take it in. I wonder, who were they?’

His latest book Many Different Kinds Of love features diary entries written by his nurses during his time in hospital.