Explainer
Comment
Death & life
4 min read

What they don’t tell you about when someone you love dies

Sharing her experience of her husband’s death, Yvonne Tulloch charts grief’s journey and shares signposts to help. Part of the How to Die Well series.

Yvonne Tulloch is Founder and CEO of AtaLoss, helping bereaved people find support and wellbeing. 

A group of grieving friends with their hands on each others backs.
The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash.

Turn on the news and death is all around us. Yet somehow, we think it will never happen to us.  In one sense that’s good. We have a child-like innocence that protects us from the harsh realities of life.   

A few years ago, as a church minister, I thought I knew about death.  I’d been trained to take funerals and had supported families when a loved one had died.  But it wasn’t until I was bereaved myself - when my husband died suddenly of a heart attack - that I realised how little even I knew.  

Although busy, life had been good until then.  My husband had a successful job, my own work was going well and our three children were flying the nest and finding their feet in university.  Little did I know that in one, short phone call from a colleague, our lives would change forever.   

Simon had been found dead in his hotel in Spain, and I was faced with telling each of the children and his mother, the worst news anyone could convey.  Concerned about social media the news was embargoed until all family members knew, then I had to go to Spain to find, as well as identify the body, and bring him home.  I had to work out our finances – no one knew what we had to live off – close accounts and put things in my name.  I discovered our house wasn’t insured, nor our car for me to drive, that bank accounts were frozen, and that no organisation is geared up to help.  Everyone insists on speaking to the account holder or seeing the actual death certificate before being willing to oblige.  I had a funeral and thanksgiving to organise – two big occasions in just 3 weeks - and a mountain of admin to deal with, which would be difficult at any time.  

Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.

We’ve been a death-denying culture, I now realise, for many years. With death invariably happening in hospices or hospitals, we’ve pushed death away and pretended it doesn’t happen.  Consequently, we’ve lost knowledge of bereavement and the art of support.  We’ve tended only to think about preparing for funerals and then counselling if the person isn’t doing well.  But what about all the other help that’s needed?  Understanding and support is necessary in all manner of ways.  Bereavement is one of the most stressful times of life, affecting everyone sooner or later and every part of their life.  Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.    

At first most of us are shocked or emotionally numb; we run on adrenaline and we’re in survival mode.  At the funeral others can think we’re doing well, and we can too.  But it’s after, when the real sadness tends to hit, when the future must be faced and by then support has dropped away.   

Many of us experience a roller coaster of changing reactions and responses which we don’t recognise as us or don’t associate with grief.  

There are the physical reactions, for instance. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I was cold and I shook for months, I had a heavy ‘weight’ in my gut and was taken to hospital three times with suspected heart problems - our bodies are always in tune with our emotions.   

And there are the psychological reactions.  We can experience anxiety, anger and guilt; we can’t concentrate or remember, or function to do the most basic of tasks.  I kept thinking I was seeing Simon and had a psychosis which made me feel separated from the world.  We can think we’re going mad.  

Grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing.

For me help came from two initiatives I was fortunate to find: Care for the Family’s Widowed Young Support and The Bereavement Journey course run by a church in London.  In each of these I discovered others who had been bereaved, who understood what I was going through and who helped me to navigate the alien territory I found myself in.  They also helped me to understand my spiritual responses which had been the biggest surprise.  I had never doubted my Christian faith but with bereavement, that too was challenged, and God, who had always felt present, suddenly disappeared.  I realize now that this is natural.  Grieving is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning, and therefore some of whatever meaning we had before the person died, will deconstruct as we grieve. 

Roll on a few years and I’m on the other side, running a charity helping people to understand that in our death-denying society bereavement impacts greatly, and that grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing.  Support is needed in various ways which we direct to through our signposting website ataloss.org.  And I’m helping people myself through The Bereavement Journey course to find healing and hope, offering also spiritual support for the faith questioning I find most people have.  Unfortunately, though, because we’ve neglected death, many haven’t been supported through a bereavement in the past and are carrying loss which is unresolved.   

Article
Comment
Film & TV
Politics
Purpose
4 min read

BBC scandals turn the spotlight on its lost mission

When it's good it's great but when it's bad it’s Babylonian

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tim Davie in a blue suite smiles
Tim Davie, BBC boss.

I’m a great fan of the BBC. Generally speaking, I like and admire its journalists and its output and, occasionally, I take its and the licence-payer’s shilling. 

I may be increasingly unusual in choosing to be woken by Radio 4’s Today, but love it because of, rather than despite of, its presenters’ impertinent and interruptive style with politicians. Its radio drama is seductive. I admit to having assiduously followed The Archers, until (literally) I lost the plot at Covid. Short radio drama series can be compulsive listening, such as Al Smith’s first-class Life Lines, featuring Sarah Ridgeway as an ambulance call handler. 

As for TV, I’m showing my age – The Repair Shop, Antiques Roadshow and Professor Alice Roberts’ archaeology in Digging for Britain. Ancient Top of the Pops repeats accompany Friday evening drinks. 

But back to the journalism. Say what you like, the BBC’s news output is the world’s benchmark. It has consistently hired best-of-breed reporters, particularly on the foreign stage. Whatever politicians of both the left or right claim, depending on their circumstance, it is even-handed in its analysis.  

Newsnight under Victoria Derbyshire is immeasurably improved by its slick, half-hour, after-dinner sofa format. It disassembles the pompous and hypocritical, from Trump apparatchiks to Jeremy Clarkson at a farmers’ demo, his stammering and panicky “classic BBC” attempted dismissal now cheekily deployed in its own advertising. 

But – and you’ll know the “but” was coming – there’s the dark side. There has recently been a litany of managerial let-downs, any of which could have put a more commercial enterprise out of business. Conservative governments have customarily been most prone to traducing the BBC, possibly because they think it should know its place, which is not so much below the salt as serving at their table. 

So it’s quite the new thing for a Labour culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, further to undermine the credibility of its Director-General, Tim Davie, by listing its “catastrophic” failures on his watch. The BBC has just had to apologise (an occurrence now as regular as Gary Lineker’s controversial tweets) for failing to discover, let alone disclose, that the 13-year-old narrator of documentary Gaza: How to survive a Warzone was the son of a Hamas high-up. 

A separate external review has also found that BBC bosses failed adequately to protect staff on MasterChef from presenter Gregg Wallace’s invasive behaviours. And the corporation has had to apologise this month for broadcasting antisemitic chants by the vile act Bob Vylan at Glastonbury. 

It’s not all about Davie’s alleged shortcomings. As the BBC itself might put it, other director-generals are available. George Entwhistle resigned over a Newsnight crackpot report on a child-abuse scandal; Greg Dyke over Lord Hutton’s report into how the BBC reported the David Kelly suicide affair under the Blair government. Then there was the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand “prank”. Let’s not, please, lift the coffin lid on Jimmy Savile again. And so, one is forced to say, it goes on. 

Is the BBC uniquely wicked and/or mismanaged? No. But it’s huge and visible. I have a theory that it’s a British institution which, like others, is a victim of its imperial past. It was nurtured in a post-Reith period, when being of the BBC was like carrying a British passport (“His/Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…”). It not only believes in, it was a child of, its own propaganda. The derring-do of its great foreign correspondents was founded on the unquestioned might of empire. 

That leads, inevitably in a post-imperial age, to hubris. It’s like Babylon, the metaphor rather than the great Mesopotamian city. Once indestructible under emperors such as Nebuchadnezzar, sacker of Jerusalem, it was destroyed by its own vulnerabilities. The scriptural allegory from Genesis is that Babylon raised the great tower of Babel to reach the sky and oversee a world that spoke its one, true language. In his wrath at their pride, God scattered its people, now unable to understand each other, for they’d come to form their own languages. 

See how that works? The BBC has come to believe in itself, rather than its mission. And consequently, it has lost the ability to communicate, both internally and externally.  

It’s not alone. The Church of England has the same post-imperial problem. So does any elected government after about a decade. It’s the jobs of Archbishop of Canterbury and Prime Minister, as well as Director-General of the BBC, that can only end in tears. 

They should get together, these people. Work out accountable corporate structures that can work in the 21st century. Create top leadership jobs that are possible to do, rather than appoint emperors who turn out to have no wardrobes. 

The point surely is not that they are humiliated, but that they have to be humbled. They need to demolish their towers, stop babbling at each other and learn to speak a common language again.  

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