It Helps To Talk

Since I’ve entered the murky grey world of bereavement and grief, I am drawn to the experiences of others who are similarly grieving. Re. people’s strange and inadequate response to grief and bereavement, I read an interview with writer Julian Barnes who says, “Grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail.”

This is an excerpt from an interview with him in The Telegraph.

Julian Barnes seriously contemplated suicide after the death of his wife, he has disclosed.

The author, a former Man Booker Prize winner, worked out precise details while grieving for Pat Kavanagh, his wife of 30 years.

In his new novel, Levels of Life, he writes for the first time about coping with her death from cancer, aged 68, in 2008, and attacks friends whom he believes were too cowardly to speak her name.

He describes Kavanagh, a literary agent, as “the heart of my life; the life of my heart”. He goes on to note: “Grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail.”

He adds: “You might expect those closest to you in age and sex and marital status to understand best. What a naivety. I remember a 'dinner-table conversation’ in a restaurant with three married friends of roughly my age.

“Each had known her for many years – perhaps 80 or 90 in total – and each would have said, if asked, that they loved her. I mentioned her name; no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke, being p----- off at what struck me not as good manners but cowardice.

“Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worse of them for it.” Barnes, who has been known for more cryptic works, also admitted considering suicide after her death.

“The question of suicide arrives early, and quite logically,” he writes. “I knew soon enough my preferred method – a hot bath, a glass of wine next to the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife. I thought of that solution fairly often, and still do.”
 

The distressing thing here is how his friends find it so difficult to even talk about his late wife. Yet talking about those we have lost, or just sharing our unhappiness and grief really helps. It is so desperately unkind and thoughtless to ignore the elephant in the room and not allow people to express their suffering and comfort them.  
 

I spoke to Teflon-dad today and he is also going through the same emotions as Julian Barnes. His wife, my stepmother, who he has known for over thirty years although they have only been married for three, has terminal cancer and has about six months to live. Teflon-dad is absolutely heartbroken, his teflon-coating has broken and he is as devastated as you might expect. I shall have to find a new sobriquet for him. We bond regularly over our shared anticipated loss, and the wonderful thing about all those close to me is that they accord me the same respect as if I were grieving for a child, not a dog.
 

I am luckier than Julian Barnes in that respect.