Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
After this year I had to open the door on 20 years of grief
Esther on facing loss of husband Des
By her own admission, Dame Esther Rantzen has been in complete denial when it comes to grief and loss. Ever since her husband Desmond Wilcox died 20 years ago, she has locked away all her memories – and emotions – behind the door of a barn at her Hampshire home, unable to face the huge treasure trove of mementos, from letters and diaries to cassette tapes and photographs.
“My barn is full of things that I really can’t bear to open up because they’re about my late husband and it would be too painful,” said the 80-year-old journalist and presenter, who also admits to a “fingers in ears” attitude towards her own death.
But confronted with interviewing people about bereavement following a year of unprecedented loss, Esther decided that she needed to act.
“It was extremely tough to decide to face something that I suppose I had to face 20 years ago, but by way of coping, I’d shut the door on. To open the door was what I worried about.”
The couple had three children together, Miriam, Rebecca and Josh, before Desmond died from heart disease in September 2000 aged 69.
In her poignant documentary, Living With Grief on Channel 5 tonight, Esther talks to Mandy,
61, who lost her husband Larry to Covid, after they were both treated for the virus in separate wards of the same hospital.
Mandy tells Esther: “I told him, ‘I’ve got you an ambulance, darling. I’m sorry I can’t save your life because I’m so very ill. I love you, darling.’ I put my hand on his shoulder and I never saw him again. How do you just say goodbye and never see someone ever again?”
Esther, who founded the charities Childline and The Silver Line, believes there should be a “grief line” for people like Mandy as well as an annual Bank Holiday to mark a national day of remembrance for victims of the pandemic.
She says: “Boris has said we will celebrate the heroes of Covid, but what I want is a day of rest – a holiday created in which all of us stop what we are doing and pay tribute to the people we’ve lost.”
Esther, who admits she rarely cries, is visibly moved as she hears experiences of heartbreaking grief from others in the film.
Among them are 26-year-old Durone, whose brother Aaron was murdered aged 24 when Durone was just 11, and Gary, 59, who lost his wife Joy to sepsis when she was just
My barn is full of things I really can’t bear to open ESTHER RANTZEN ON MEMENTOES OF DESMOND
41. She also speaks to 23-year-old Amber, whose mum died of a heart attack four years ago, and Joy, 55, who suffered a devastating ordeal when her parents attempted suicide after her father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
Her father’s overdose took his life, then her surviving elderly mother endured a murder trial before finally being found not guilty.
And Lucy Herd, whose toddler Jack drowned in a pond just two weeks before his second birthday in 2010, says she found her chat with Esther to be a “healing process”. Lucy, 46, of
Wokingham, Berks, says: “It was a beautiful sunny day in August and I took a phone call. I got Jack settled doing some drawing and I went back to my phone call. It wasn’t very long, about three minutes. Then I turned round and Jack wasn’t there and the back door was open.
“I was calling him and I went outside and the dog was sat up by the pond and I just knew.
“I ran up to the pond and he was face down. I got him out and tried to resuscitate him. I remember screaming and screaming for help.”
But she adds: “At the hospital the emergency director put her hand on my shoulder and she said, ‘Lucy, I’m so sorry there’s nothing else we can do’. That’s when my heart broke into
a million pieces and that’s the day that I died. It changed my life and my family’s life forever.”
Just 12 weeks after Jack’s death, Lucy started campaigning for bereavement leave rights after realising some people have to return to work immediately after a loss.
While campaigning she also raised her two children Josh, now 24, and Ellé, 19. Josh is now a lifeguard, working at a leisure centre and school, determined to prevent the kind of tragedy that killed his brother.
Jack’s Law, making paid parental bereavement leave a legal right, finally came into force in April last year.
Lucy says: “Jack was the little boy who blew kisses to the world. He was the boy in the trolley in the Tesco aisle
who would say hello to everyone. He was a beautiful little boy and everything I’ve done has been for Jack.”
In the documentary, Esther and Lucy find common ground over staying with their loved ones after they had died.
“It’s almost that they’re still there, isn’t it?” says Esther, her voice faltering. “I stayed with my husband as long as I felt he was still there.”
Esther says she has now tackled her fears and sorted through Desmond’s things. “My barn is now available for my grandchildren, when they’re allowed to visit.”
■ Esther Rantzen: Living with Grief is on tonight on Channel 5 at 10pm.
That’s when my heart broke into a million pieces and that’s the day that I died LUCY HERD RECALLING THE AGONISING DEATH OF SON WHO DROWNED IN POND
In a long white robe and with a large crucifix round his neck, Rev Jason Bray leads a terrified young family in the Lord’s prayer. A circle of candles flicker in the dark of their freezing front room.
The couple and their toddler daughter had come to his church the Sunday before, telling him their house had become eerily dark and icily cold, with fleeting shadows darting around.
Jason, with a young fellow priest, felt a “pervading sense of clammy gloom” in the home. He splashed holy water on the walls then gathered them in the living room for a final prayer of deliverance.
But as they began “Our Father who art in Heaven”, Jason experienced the most dramatic moment in his ministry.
He says: “I felt my body somehow arch backwards, as if it were being stiffened and straightened by forces beyond my control. I almost felt as if something was travelling through my spine, and contorting it. But that was nothing compared with what happened next.”
He opened his eyes after the final amen and the house had transformed.
“We were in the same room. But it was also, at one and the same time, completely different. In the space of 30 seconds, it was light and bright, as if the clouds had rolled back from the sun.
“The house was suddenly and unexplainably warm too, as if the temperature had risen by about four or five degrees. I was utterly astonished.”
The dark shadows were never seen again. For jovial Jason, 51, it was all in a day’s work because as well as being the Anglican vicar of St Giles church in Wrexham, Denbighshire, he has been a deliverance minister for 20 years.
He gets about a dozen calls a year. He says: “I usually say, ‘Hi, I’m Jason, I’ve been sent to sort out your problem’, more like the gas man than your conventional Hollywood exorcist.”
Jason describes himself as: “Your quintessential vicar, the guy in the long dress and poncho who stands at the front of church and tells you God loves you.”
He has been trained and given special permission to deal with the paranormal and has documented his experiences of getting rid of ghosts, spirits and poltergeists in a new book, Deliverance.
He has “a sideline in garish waistcoats” and tries to avoid the horror movie image of an exorcist – a word he says is too strong for the Church of England.
He will dress all in black, sometimes with a black trilby and carrying a black bag but he says: “I never walk in and say, ‘I’m the exorcist’.”
His first experience of the paranormal – and what led him into deliverance ministry – happened when he was a young curate and had just moved into a new house with his wife Laura and baby Tom. They couldn’t understand why the house was cold and dank, even with new PVC double-glazing and the heating on full, especially around their baby’s cot.
One night Jason got up to go to the toilet and had an experience which “shook my trust in rational explanations”.
He says: “Having washed my hands, I turned towards the door. It was closed, but I sensed there was something – someone – standing on the other side, staring straight at me.
“A prickling sensation ran through me, from top to bottom. It wasn’t just a sense, it was a concrete vision.
“He – and I knew it was a he – was about my height and wearing a wooden mask. The mask had holes cut for his eyes which were drilling into mine. I real
ised instinctively he was almost certainly a priest like me, but not a Christian one. I began to feel his malice towards me.
“I was absolutely terrified, rooted to the spot and unable to breathe. After what felt like minutes I summoned the courage to raise an arm, place limp fingers on the handle and pull the door towards me. There was nobody there.”
Jason told the parish vicar, who blessed the house and sprinkled holy water the next day. Jason said the “change was instant”.
During his next placement, at Newport Cathedral in South Wales, he started to join the trained deliverance minister on exorcisms, to gain the necessary experience and training to take on supernatural activity on his own.
Before a visit he talks to parishioners
about their problem but he never knows what he will find when he turns up with his trusty bag containing holy water, salt, candles and a crucifix, as well as vessels to celebrate holy communion.
He has experienced everything from poltergeists destroying vases and sending cutlery flying out of drawers, to the ghost of a young man who kept appearing naked in his grieving boyfriend’s shower, and a woman haunted by a swarm of ghostly rats crawling under her duvet at night.
One family came to him in panic after their whole house shook in the middle of the night with such force they thought a juggernaut had slammed into it.
He says: “The couple and their teenage son and daughter had only just moved in and strange things had started to happen, classic signs of poltergeist activity, such as shoes moving around seemingly on their own. The son had seen figures moving in his bedroom and was too frightened to stay in the house.
One night, at about 2am, everyone in the house felt this crash. They all ran to the windows, fully expecting to see half a lorry sticking out of the front of their house. But there was nothing there.”
Jason discovered the previous occupants, a deceased elderly couple the wife had a particularly bad temper, adored the house, but the new owners had completely gutted and rebuilt it.
Again, after praying around the house and saying the Lord’s prayer in the living room, the apparent hauntings stopped.
He said he believed the previous owners “may have found a way of holding on, maybe in the fabric itself, which had then been so cruelly rip out”. Jason says the three main type supernatural activity are polterge place memories and true haunting
He believes poltergeist activ contrary to the film of the same na is not evil spirits or ghosts of the unq dead but a release of pent-up ene most often linked with kids and te finding it difficult to express themse
He says: “It is caused by someone and present who may be undergo significant trauma or stress an unable to communicate their distre
“The theory is the energy that bu up inside them is released in the w
around them. Things move around, there might be knocking on walls and doors, and it affects electricity too, so lights can turn on and off.” He thinks place memory – an event in the distant past etched into the fabric of a building – is often triggered by building work.
He says: “An example is the Roman soldiers seen roaming through the basement of the house next to York minster, or ghosts of monks and nuns people have seen in Borley Rectory in Essex.
“There is no attempt to communicate with the living, it’s almost like watching a film. The ghost isn’t really there in any real sense. Whenever I deal with these I’ll ask the person if they’ve had any major structural work done, and they almost always say: ‘How did you know?’”
A true haunting is when there is an attempt to communicate with the living, and can be “very frightening indeed”. Such as when Jason’s friend Pete’s dead boyfriend Craig kept appearing in the shower and spare room and a photo came off the wall.
Jason said Pete was not particularly bothered, his main concern was that Craig should move on but “other people were terrified out of their wits”.
But not every haunting Jason is called to turns out to be otherworldly.
It can be as simple as a radiator needing to be bled or issues with rotting vegetation and a home’s drains.
Deliverance by Jason Bray, published by Hodder and Stoughton, is out now.