‘MY FAVOURITE PERSON HAS GONE’
Author explains how she’s coping with her grief
Elizabeth Gilbert was in mourning following the death of her partner, fellow author Rayya Elias, when a feeling suddenly hit her.
“I just had an unbelievably strong impulse to shave my head,” she says. “It’s not an unusual response to major life upheaval. If you go to India, temples are filled with women going through grief with shaved heads. It’s a very primal thing to want to do.”
It has been just four months since Gilbert lost the woman she calls “the love of my life,” and while the pain is still undeniably raw, she manages to find pockets of humour. “Anybody who’s lost somebody knows that these are the conversations you have with them after they’ve gone. I could clearly hear her say: ‘You will not shave your head. Not on my watch!’ ”
Gilbert, now 48, had been enjoying a reasonably successful writing career when her 2006 memoir, Eat Pray Love, catapulted her to worldwide fame. Detailing the American author’s personal odyssey from depression following a failed marriage to spiritual enlightenment, it saw Gilbert take the mother of all trips, heading first to Italy where she scoffed pizza (Eat), then moved on to an Indian ashram (Pray) before finding her future husband, José Nunes, in Indonesia (Love).
The book sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.
When you’ve lost somebody of that significance, the question is: who are you going to be now?
When the couple eventually married, in 2007, it provided a fitting coda to Gilbert’s phenomenal publishing achievement. Until two years ago, that is, when she made the announcement that she and Nunes had split, adding a couple of months later that the reason was that she had fallen in love with her female best friend.
In a life already full of surprise twists and turns, this one was a genuine humdinger.
“When we first met, I just delighted in her, I found her extraordinary,” Gilbert says of her first encounter with Elias, a Syrian-born writer, musician, filmmaker and part-time hairdresser. “I definitely didn’t say: ‘There’s the love of my life who’s going to flip my heart and world upside down.’ That took another 12 years.”
The women fast became friends. Elias acted as confidante to Gilbert during the breakup of her first marriage to human rights activist Michael Cooper (Nunes was Gilbert’s second husband), and even accompanying her in 2010 to the British film première of Eat Pray Love (in which Julia Roberts portrayed Gilbert).
However, two years ago, when Elias was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic and liver cancer, Gilbert was forced to realize the depth of her feelings, posting on Facebook: “Death — or the prospect of death — has a way of clearing away everything that is not real.”
They became a couple, holding a commitment ceremony last June. Gilbert looked after Elias during her final months, and she eventually died in January at age 57.
Gilbert has an August deadline to finish her next novel. Understandably, she is still reeling from the loss.
“The grief hits you at weird times, and there are weird triggers for it,” she says.
“And it doesn’t matter how expected it was, or even how welcome it was by the end, because of the pain (Elias went through), there’s still the existential crisis. Where did she go? How is she not here? My favourite person has gone: now what?”
“I think I understood a lot more about death before this. I had it all figured out … and then it happens, and you’re not prepared at all.
“When you’ve lost somebody of that significance, the question is: who are you going to be now? And it’s too soon for me to tell.”