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

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.

Column

Character

Comment

2 May 2024

4 min read

How to react in an era of social media outrage

Media executions and the quality of mercy.

George Pitcher

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

A man in a suit stands on a gallery above a cavernous space in which are rows of desk

Huw Edwards stands above the BBC news room.

BBC.

The story of Huw Edwards presents challenges to anyone who wonders how to respond appropriately. The news anchor is back, on the news agenda rather than presenting it, having resigned from the BBC on “medical advice”. In news terms, it seems a long time ago – nearly a year – when stories emerged that he had paid a teenager for what are blushingly called “explicit images”.

His departure, rather belatedly said to have been inevitable, follows disclosures that he has continued to draw a very handsome BBC salary during his suspension from duty – and one that the corporation would rather not still be paying when it publishes its annual review of figures shortly.

The difficulties come when, putting aside prurience and distaste, one scrutinises why exactly the life and career of Edwards have been ruined. The police wasted little time last year in concluding that there was no evidence that a criminal offence had been committed. All that is left is a salacious whiff and the knowledge that Edwards has suffered a depressive breakdown of some sort

But that’s more than enough to make a major story in the era of peak social-media faux outrage. Think Philip Schofield, life ruined by stupidly lying about a fling with a much younger colleague (of consenting age). Think Caroline Flack, a reality actor with demonstrable mental health issues, hounded to her suicide. Think even the internet-sleuthing landslide that threatens to cover and suffocate comic Richard Gadd’s “true story” Netflix movie, Baby Reindeer.

While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

So how to respond to the Edwards resignation? The question supposes that we must indeed respond and that might contain the principal point. A senior news anchor with the BBC is a public figure. As such, he (or she) needs to be trusted by the public. Consequently, Edwards is called to a higher standard of behaviour than that of his invisible viewers.

Serious people in serious jobs need to be taken seriously. And anyone caught with their pants down, literally or figuratively, cannot look serious.

Yet that still doesn’t supply us with a response (beyond “don’t be an idiot”). Actually, it rather complicates matters. It’s easier if a crime has been committed, because we can take refuge in justice, reparation for the victim and punishment for the perpetrator. None of this seems to be available in Edwards’ case.

Some will reach for forgiveness under these circumstances. But that’s insufficient, since for most of us Edwards has done nothing more than read the news off an autocue and speak for the nation during royal events.

We risk disempowering a real victim if we forgive on their behalf, so it’s inadequate to talk only of forgiveness in this circumstance. While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified.

In any event, forgiveness is a quality of compassion, the latter being the virtue to which we might most usefully aspire in response to the circumstances in which Edwards suffers. The root meaning of compassion is “to suffer with”, as in to share and, in doing so, profoundly to understand the suffering of another. In popular parlance, it might be to walk a mile in their boots.

To view the media execution of Edwards with compassion is to walk a mile in his boots and to accept, with humility, that we can be as fallible as him. Vitally, this is to show mercy rather than pity. The latter is filtered through human experience – Pieta is a Renaissance artistic meme, which invariably shows the Virgin Mary’s essential humanity at the deposition of her son from the cross.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified. Shakespeare’s famous line is given to Portia in The Merchant of Venice. One of the things it tells us is that to pity is human, but to be merciful is divine.

It’s from theological, cardinal virtues that mercy flows. But it’s born of compassion, which has its Christological source in the suffering (or Passion) of Christ, in which the human condition – sin, frailty, pain, death – is shared with the divine.

That’s a worldview that holds Huw Edwards in its gaze. It’s a wholly loving gaze that seeks to share his despair and failure, which is the ultimate act of compassion. Edith Cavell, the nurse who was shot as a spy in Flanders in the First Word War, came very close to it when she said before her execution: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Edwards doesn’t (literally) face a firing squad, so direct comparison is invidious. But our response might still be a compassionate one. We may not be able to walk a mile in his boots. But we can try.