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
Community
Nationalism
5 min read

I protested against the Unite The Kingdom protest

The need to see one another

Thomas is a writer exploring the intersection of faith, politics, and social justice.

CCTV footage show two rival protests divided by a line of riot police.
CCTV image of the rival protests on Whitehall.
Met Police.

I don’t know why I was so concerned about the horses. I kept noticing them swaying through the sea of shivering bodies. I was so drawn to them that I tried to take a photo, a rare occurrence for me, but I was too far away. The horses riders, dressed in full riot gear, were being pelted with beer bottles. Maybe the horses were getting hit too, but it felt like they were recoiling on behalf of their riders. 

In front of the horses, engulfing Trafalgar Square, were tens of thousands of “Unite the Kingdom” protestors. From what I could see, they were predominantly white men. Many of them were dancing and waving flags, but a sizeable contingent was furious, drunk, and insisted on attacking any unfortunate police officer in their way. 

Behind the horses, lining the streets of Whitehall, were five thousand counter-protestors, including me. Unlike our opposite numbers in Trafalgar Square, we were trapped, surrounded on every side by St George’s flags, Union Jacks, and, oddly, some Georgian flags too. Maybe the shop had sold out. To my right, I could see the counter-protestors defiantly dancing. To me left, I could see a group chanting “Nazi scum, off our streets” whilst swearing towards the St George’s flags. 

There in the middle, I found myself feeling a curious mixture of discomfort, sadness, and anger. Uncomfortable because I’d been trapped for four hours, stuck on a continuous cycle of rinse and drain. Sad, because I knew that much of the “Unite the Kingdom” violence was built on misinformation and the scapegoating of refugees, a group I know well, and because this fog of violence blew over the counter-protestors as they hurled insults towards the St George’s flags. And angry, because figures like Elon Musk were using their extraordinary wealth and influence to spread fear and lies: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. And that’s the truth. It’s only a matter of time till that happens to towns and villages. It will spread. And no one will have any peace.” Over the years, I have spent many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with refugees and asylum seekers, both in my home and at my church. I had experienced no violence. In that moment, I was surrounded by “leftists”, socialists, and trade unionists, and the only violence I was experiencing was from the glint of beer bottles raining down on the police two hundred meters away. 

I was grateful for the interruption of an elderly lady asking if she could get past. I’d been asked a number of questions throughout the day, primarily because I was one of a group of four Christians holding signs like “Jesus was a refugee”, “love thy neighbour”, and “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”. At the start of the protest, an older lady and a young man joined our circle. The young man asked “I’m glad to see there are some Christians here. What do you think of Christian nationalism? Your religion doesn’t feel much like Jesus?” He was a brave Saudi Arabian refugee with a bright smile, earnestly questioning the fractures in my community of faith. Taken aback by the poignancy of the question, I fumbled a response before being rescued by one of my friends. 

Protest signs written on cardboard.
Tommy's protest signs before the rain.

 

After a while, the older lady started speaking. “Sorry for interrupting. I used to be a Roman Catholic, but I’ve lost my faith. On days like this though, I always want to pray. I don’t feel much hope for the church. A while ago, I went into a catholic church. I asked if the church could do anything about the divisions in our community and the anger at refugees. The priest shrugged and said no. I’m glad you’re here.” Her short, staccato sentences mirrored the tension of the day. I told her about how our church serves refugees, how I struggle with the anger of days like today, and how some of us have forgotten that the bible tells us to welcome the stranger dozens of times. As they walked away, I felt touched by the honesty both the young and old had gifted to four strangers, and I was glad to be carrying our smalls signs of hope. 

The megaphone brought the present back into view with another question. “Could everyone please get ready to leave up the left of Trafalgar Square?” it said. The police had cleared a path for us to leave, the sea of flags artificially parted by riot gear. We were escorted to Green Park tube station, at which point we turned off towards Oxford Street. My wife remarked at how quickly normality returned. I was devastated by the day, but felt too tired to weep. I wasn’t quite the same Tommy that I’d been that morning. The man who shares my name, and the chaos he wrought on my city, had turned a dial in me a little further than it had been turned before. 

I knew that I would have more days like this. In the midst of my discomfort, sadness, hope, and fear, I knew that I was supposed to be there, holding my soggy “Jesus was a refugee” sign, shivering in my damp clothes, and praying under my breath. I knew that I needed to gather other reluctant protestors alongside me, holding their own soggy signs and praying their own prayers. 

And I also knew that there was a better way to carry this fragile message of unity in our increasingly fragile land and increasingly fragile time. As a half-British, half-South African man, I’ve had the privilege of growing up with the stories of the anti-apartheid movement, stories which steward the hard-earned truth that defiant, tenacious, persistent love is the only antidote to hatred, misinformation and fear. As Desmond Tutu once said, “when we can accept both our humanity and the perpetrator’s we can write a new story”. Saturday left me feeling that we desperately need a new story, and that requires us to look beyond the swaying horses and see one another clearly. 

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