Article

Christmas survival

Comment

21 December 2023

7 min read

Dealing with death at Christmas

On the darkest December day, a grim anniversary is recalled.

Jean Kabasomi

Jean is a consultant working with financial and Christian organisations. She also writes and broadcasts.

A moody sky overshadows a shingle beach on which a lone empty deckchair stands. A pier with funfair is in the middle distance.

Brighton Pier.

Nick Fewings, via Unsplash.

Thursday 17th December 2020 - a day I won’t forget.

Christmas 2020 was already proving to be a little strange. The UK was in this weird place of tiered restrictions, a sort of semi-lockdown approach. In London and the southeast, we had a bit more flexibility than folks in the north of the country, but people were not really out and about. Most people were saving their interactions for Christmas Day, so the streets were mostly quiet.

Like virtually everyone working in the financial services, I was working from home. The night before, my older brother had left the house after an argument and not come home. My younger brother and sister were concerned about his whereabouts. His phone kept going to voicemail. They were worried. There wasn’t much to do or anyone to see because everyone was regulating their behaviour and saving themselves for Christmas. I, on the other hand, was more nonchalant about his ‘disappearance’. My view was that he was an adult and had a habit of doing ‘immature things’ to get our attention. I thought, ‘He would come back home when he needed to.’ Little did I know how wrong I would be.

At about 4:50pm, as I was winding up and about to log off at work, I saw a police car in our street. My room is on the second floor of our house and my desk is positioned so that I can look directly out of the window onto the street in front of our house. The police car stopped in front of our house. The officers got out and opened our gate. I remember I went downstairs and said, ‘The police are here.’, just before the doorbell rang. I was slightly annoyed, I remember thinking, ‘What silly thing has my brother done now?’

My Mum invited them in. But they wouldn’t speak to her. They were looking for my sister. This seemed really weird at the time. Mum kept asking them what they wanted. But they wouldn’t reply. They just kept saying that they needed to speak to my sister. They wouldn’t speak to my sister in front of all the family, so they led my sister outside into the garden. It was dark outside. We couldn’t hear what they were saying because the back door was shut but we could see my sister’s reaction. She was deeply distressed. My Mum was beginning to get upset too, because she could see my sister through the window. They came back into the house. The police remained silent. It was just strange. My sister kept saying that we all needed to sit down in the living room. Mum kept asking the police what was going on but they remained silent. My younger brother and I were also frustrated and wanted to know. ‘Just tell us what is happening’, I remember saying. But my sister kept saying that we needed to sit down and go to the living room.

We finally all sat down and then one of the officers began to speak. I don’t remember his exact words but it was something to the effect of ‘A body was found this morning at Brighton Pier. From the belongings found on the body, we have identified that it is the body of your brother.’

At this point, I don’t think any of us really understood what he was saying. Someone must have asked, ‘Does that mean he is dead? Are you saying he is dead?’ ‘Yes.’, was the response. ‘How did he die?’, was the next question. Again, more weirdness. It seemed that they didn’t really want to use the word suicide, but that’s what it was. We kept asking for more details. What time? How did it happen? Was there anyone with him? But nothing was forthcoming. It all felt like a cover-up. And then it was over. They left and it was just us left to process it. It all seemed so surreal.

That evening is all a bit of a blur. I am quite a practical person - I knew I was leading a bible study meeting that evening. So, I messaged, the pastor in charge to say I wouldn’t be able to lead it that night. After that, the next feeling, I remember is annoyance towards my brother. I felt it was selfish on so many different levels. Why did he have to do this? How does it solve anything? Why is he always looking for attention? Why would anyone do something like this just before Christmas? I remember feeling he had destroyed Christmas for us forever. Why didn’t he just say something to us? We had just started playing tennis on weekday mornings before I logged into work, why didn’t he mention he was upset then? My younger brother and sister were deeply disturbed and didn’t know what to say or do. Both were blaming themselves. Mum was totally shocked. I kept thinking and saying that he didn’t mean to do it. It was just a mistake that he couldn’t undo. If we weren’t in this quasi-lockdown situation, maybe someone would have noticed him in the water sooner and he would have been rescued? Maybe someone would have been walking along the Pier that night, seen him in the water, jumped in and pulled him out? We didn’t need a hero, maybe someone would have seen him in the water and just called 999? Maybe someone would have noticed him pacing up and down, and tried to speak to him before he went over the edge?

The run-up to Christmas that year was extremely difficult. The government announced a full lockdown again and my family had to travel to the morgue in Brighton to formally identify my brother. I chose not to go with them, I felt at the time, that I wasn’t ready to see my brother’s body. We also had a tree in our garden whose roots had ruptured the sewer pipe, causing our bathroom to flood. It was all one big mess.

I am in charge of the Christmas shopping operation in our house. Christmas is my favourite time of the year. I love the carols, the weather, the darkness, the cosiness, the services at church, the Christmas TV schedule, the food and the opportunity to rest, pause and reflect. I love everything about Christmas. But now it felt weird celebrating Christmas. The delivery came. On Christmas day, I cooked, my sister baked. But it was all just so sad. We sat in silence through a lot of it just eating. Sometimes we spoke about the days leading up to my brother’s death. At different points throughout the day, one or all of us would be struggling to hold back our tears or silently sob. That period was one of the most difficult periods of my life.

I do not have to be in a state of constant mourning throughout the Christmas period. Neither do I need to pretend or ignore that I haven’t experienced death at Christmas.

Three years later, Christmas is still my favourite time of the year. Why? Despite everything, I still believe in the hope that came into the world at Christmas through Jesus Christ. It is that hope that helped me pull through that time. I held on to the comforting words I found in the Bible. I found people who supported me and worked through my grief on the Bereavement Journey. On this course, I discovered that it was okay to be angry, guilty, disappointed and sad about death. It was all part of the process. It was okay to grieve differently from my siblings and my Mum. I didn’t have to force them to feel like me, nor make myself feel like they did. As we began to piece together my brother’s final days, I slowly understood that he had his own mental struggles and sadly was unable to find the help he needed.

I learnt that grief involves the whole person – the body, soul and mind. I understood why I sometimes felt exhausted and at other times I was wide awake. It all made sense when I suddenly felt sad on my way home from my first time at Wimbledon. The body has a weird way of remembering things even when you think you are okay mentally, so I wasn’t surprised when I got a severe migraine exactly three years to the day that my brother didn’t come home. My faith does not mean that I understand everything about my experience neither does it mean that I can’t lament, question or be unhappy about the way things unfolded.

For me, Christmas is still a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the birth of Hope. But it is also a time of solemnity, even of grief. As the years go by, this will get easier but probably won’t go away. The two feelings are not mutually exclusive. I do not have to be in a state of constant mourning throughout the Christmas period. Neither do I need to pretend or ignore that I haven’t experienced death at Christmas. Rather, the most honest thing I can do is to acknowledge both feelings and take each day as it comes.

Article

Character

Comment

Justice

Music

2 July 2025

6 min read

A fan’s eye view of the fall of Sean Combs

We believed he was a good guy because we wanted to believe someone was

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

Sean Combs, 2019.

Justiceonthebeat, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the weeks-long trial of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs draws to an end, the world at large has seen an insight into his life that we wish we hadn’t. Combs has just been convicted of transportation to engage in prostitution. Combs had pleaded not guilty and vehemently denied all allegations against him.

Podcasters and influencers have kept us up to date with every twist and turn of the prosecution’s case, along with a jury member being dismissed and a bizarre visit from Kanye West. Trials of powerful, successful men (and it invariably is men) have become a semi-regular occurrence in the last few years. The #MeToo movement brought justice for victims of abusers like R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein. But something about the Diddy trial feels different. For hip hop fans of a certain age, the accusations against Diddy were both shocking and hard to accept. Let’s take a deep dive into why that might be.

For fans who are forty or older, one night looms large in the history of hip hop; the 1995 Source Awards, which distilled the entirety of the East/West coast beef into one evening. West coast rap music was in the ascendence, and New York, the birthplace of rap music and hip hop culture, was not coping with it very well.

The atmosphere was further exacerbated when a red-shirted man, as big as a house and twice as broad, took to the stage. Marion ‘Suge’ Knight was the head of Death Row Records, a West coast label that had been hoovering up talent like Snoop Dogg, 2pac and Dr. Dre. Suge was an intimidating presence to say the least. His red shirt was a sign of his affiliation with the ‘Bloods’, the notorious L.A. street gang. It was an image of notoriety that Suge leaned into and it was well-earned. In his award acceptance speech, Suge said the most infamous lines he was ever to utter:

“Any artist out there wanna be a’ artist, and wanna stay a star, and don't wanna – and won't have to worry about the executive producer try’na be all in the videos, all on the records, dancin’ – come to Death Row!”

This was widely perceived as an attack against Sean Combs, ‘Puffy’ or ‘Puff Daddy’ as he was known back then. As the head of Bad Boy Records, Puffy was not content to simply be behind the scenes; he constantly interposed himself into the songs and videos of the musicians on his label. Whilst these interventions might seem annoying to some, the success that Bad Boy’s artists had achieved couldn’t be argued with, and as a New York native, the audience at the Source Awards saw Suge’s words as an attack on one of their own. So, when Puffy took to the stage later, a response to Suge’s barbs was hotly anticipated.

But on that occasion, Puffy took a different approach. He acknowledged that he was the executive producer in question, and added: “contrary to what other people may feel, I would like to say that I'm very proud of Dr. Dre, of Death Row and Suge Knight for their accomplishments... and all this East and West [conflict], that needs to stop. So give it up for everybody from the East and the West that won tonight. One love.”

In this interaction, we saw the aggressive antagonist Suge be met with nothing but love and respect from Puffy. It seemed like a refreshing antidote to the perception of rap music being only violent and misogynistic. Without wishing to overstate the point, Puffy showed that hip hop could be measured, mature and positive. This was an image that, until recently, had held for decades. Yes, there was a fair amount of hedonism thrown in to his public image, but that is priced-in to the cost of being a fan of famous rappers –the excess comes with the territory. For decades we have been dealing with this false dichotomy that Suge Knight was the ‘villain’, and Puffy was the ‘hero.’

This image of Puffy as, at the very least, a decent man, was further underscored following the deaths of Tupac ‘2pac’ Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. aka Christopher Wallace. The murders of those two impossibly talented, painfully young men, less than a year apart, represent the point from which all other historical events are judged as ‘before’ or ‘after’. One of the things that came after was Puffy’s release of I’ll Be Missing You, a song in honour of B.I.G, his most popular artist and friend. Sampling The Police’s Every Breath You Take and featuring Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, on the chorus, Puffy evoked explicitly biblical language with lines like:

“It's kind of hard with you not around, / know you in heaven, smiling down / watching us while we pray for you / every day we pray for you.”

These combined with the images in the video, hands in prayer, candles, children dressed in white all served as a fitting tribute. It could have been mawkish, but it met the moment and consolidated Puffy’s good guy image in our heads. We believed he was a good guy because we wanted to believe someone was. Other hits followed, with videos filled with shiny suits and relentless dancing; it was fun, and served as a counterbalance to the grit and grime of gangsta rap. For over two decades, Puffy, now going by ‘Diddy’, had an image that fans still associated with lightness and positivity. Critics like Murs from HipHop DX led conversations painting Diddy as the Superman to Dr. Dre’s Batman. Rumours about Diddy would occasionally surface, but without the mainstream media devoting much time to them, they were easily dismissed. That was until Cassie Ventura, Diddy’s ex-girlfriend, filed a civil lawsuit.

If there are any lessons to be learned by his fans, they’re lessons that have sadly already been learned by fans of countless other powerful and successful men.

In late 2023, Cassie’s lawsuit accused Diddy of rape and sex trafficking. These allegations were explosive, but just one day later, both parties reached a settlement. The fire of Ventura’s accusations was dampened down by the release of the joint statement a day later. It seemed as if the whole thing was over and done with before many hip hop fans could even hear the news, let alone process it. Fans of Diddy clung to shreds of denial, whilst noticing that no-one else from the hip hop community seemed to be springing to his defence. Almost as if the people who knew him in person had a very different image from that of the persona he cultivated.

But Cassie’s lawsuit was the first crack in the dam. Law enforcement agencies began investigating, Diddy’s property was raided and by the time CNN got their hands on the surveillance video of Diddy attacking Cassie, the dam had well and truly burst. The video from a Los Angeles hotel dated March 2016, shows Miss Ventura attempting to leave one of Diddy’s freak offs 'parties'. Only to have Diddy chase her down the corridor, grab her and violently assault her. Each kick, drag and object thrown at her slammed another nail into Diddy’s reputation. The ensuing apology he posted on his Instagram was completely invalidated by his earlier statement that his accusers were making false claims in search of a “quick pay day.”

For those that loved Combs’ music and what it meant to us, it felt like something repellent had crawled into it and died, forever tainting those songs by association. If there are any lessons to be learned by his fans, they’re lessons that have sadly already been learned by fans of countless other powerful and successful men. Firstly, the more powerful a person is, the more they can hone and control their public image, and that they must be taken with a grain of salt. Secondly, always be ready to question a dichotomy. Is this really a hero versus a villain? Or in this case, an example of two demonstrably evil men, one with substantially better public relations.

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