Diary of a woman left widowed in an instant
One moment Helen was on a blissful holiday with her husband, the next she was plunged into shattering grief. How did she cope? By writing this searingly honest journal . . .
AS THE waves of the Caribbean Sea lapped on the shore, John Sinfield and his wife Helen bailey were enjoying a well- deserved holiday in barbados. businessman John, known as JS, slipped into the deceptively calm waters for a swim and Helen called out: ‘be careful, I mean it!’
but s he never expected what would happen next.
Within minutes, strong currents swept JS further and further out. Helen heard him call for help and saw him waving, before he disappeared into the depths.
Other tourists bravely retrieved him from the ocean, but after a terrifying ambulance ride to hospital, it was confirmed that JS had died from drowning.
February 27, 2011, would be etched in Helen’s mind for ever — the day she lost her husband of 22 years.
Three months later, to coincide with JS’s 66th birthday, Helen, 46, began to write a blog called Planet Grief. As the words came out, she found that the poignant humour and heart- wrenching memories of her journal were a lifeline to her, and a comfort to many others. now, Helen’s posts have been gathered into a book, When bad Things Happen In Good bikinis. Here we publish extracts from her journey through grief.
JUNE 2011 THREE MONTHS ON FROM THE ACCIDENT ...
BEFORE my unexpected trip to Planet Grief, I loved to cook. The merest sniff of a gettogether and I’d take Jamie, nigella, Gary, rick and Gordon to bed with me, along with a pile of fluorescent Post-It notes and start to plan the menu.
but now those cookbooks taunt me. Like a eunuch surrounded by pornography, I have a vague memory of the urge, but little desire to do anything about it. I no longer cook. I pierce, I open, I assemble. but one day in June after a meeting in London, I find I am standing outside The Ginger Pig — a wonderful butcher’s shop selling rare-breed meat and mouth-watering charcuterie. I have the appetite of an anorexic gnat at the moment; perhaps something tasty from the Ginger Pig’s deli counter might tempt my comatose taste buds back to life.
I stand behind a couple choosing what they want.
They’ll have a little bit of that and some of that and how about two of those. It could be JS and me deciding what delicacies to buy. We loved food shopping.
And then an assistant asks me what I would like, and I look at the array of produce and say bleakly: ‘A Scotch egg please.’
‘Just the one?’ Her tongs quiver over the tray. ‘Just the one,’ I confirm. She bags up the solitary golden orb.
‘Will there be anything else?’ she inquires, handing me the bag, the contents of which fit perfectly into the palm of my hand.
I shake my head, hand over some coins, scuttle out and, dizzy with grief and oblivious to those around me, steady myself on a waste bin and howl in pain at the searing loneliness of buying one Scotch egg.
AUGUST 2011
FIVE MONTHS ON…
IT’S been the most shockingly tearful start to August I’ve ever known. I’ve sobbed the length of Oxford Street, at the bus stop and on the bus; all over a poor woman walking her dog on Hampstead Heath (bet she wished she’d never asked how I was); and in the changing rooms at Uniqlo while trying to find a pair of jeans to fit a butt depressingly f l attened by f i ve months on the Death Diet.
I thought the days of the Widow’s Wail had gone, but I was wrong. Along with feeling completely overwhelmed by the terrible past, my frightening present and a bleak, JSless future, that uncontrollable guttural roar of grief and frustration has returned.
On Friday lunchtime, I was in tears while frying some out-of-date cheese, when suddenly I couldn’t stand at the stove for a nanosecond longer.
I felt i ncredibly restless and anxious and began pacing the kitchen crying out: ‘ no! no! no!’, cl e n ching my fists. Then: ‘WAAAAHHHH!’
The noise was so loud, it sent the dog ricocheting through the cat flap in a barking frenzy.
The Widow’s Wail i s perfectly acceptable (if horrible) at home, but a bit more difficult to deal with in public.
I remember some months ago sitting on a l oo i n the toilets of John Lewis, weeping, when it suddenly emerged.
In an attempt to get myself under some sort of control, I tensed up — only to realise that I was beating my thighs with my fists while making squeaking noises.
To those washing their hands on the other side of the door, it must have s o unded as t hough a chimpanzee was using the cubicle...
SEPTEMBER 2011
SIX MONTHS ON…
SOME of the things I have discovered about grief and widowhood:
That I can be blotchy and redeyed, gaunt with zits so large they need their own postcode, yet people will still proclaim: ‘You’re looking really well!’
That God doesn’t make bargains with people who plead: ‘Please let me die in the night and let someone who wants to live survive.’
That it’s easy to forget that I’ve put soup on the stove or started to run a bath, but impossible to dim the memory of my husband walking away into the sea.
That a dog is truly man’s best friend.
That finding my purse in the fridge and a can of dog food in my bag is perplexing but as old walnut face Tom Jones sings, it’s not unusual
That people who know where and how JS died will still say: ‘Perhaps going on holiday would do you good?’
That playing Kamikaze Pedestrian doesn’t kill you, it just irritates cyclists who have to swerve to avoid you.
That when I go out, I want to come home.
That when I’m home, I want to go out.
That I still can’t look at recent photographs of JS without feeling my heart is being ripped out without an anaesthetic.
That drinking alone i sn’t sad, it’s vital
That I don’t have as many true friends as I thought I had.
That if I meet someone in the street who looks like they have constipation, it’ s almost certainly caused by their embarrassment at bumping into me.
That I know JS would want me to be happy again. I just don’t know how to go about it.
CHRISTMAS 2011
TEN MONTHS ON…
SO, I’m childless or child-free or however you want to put it. It’s one of life’s great ironies that you spend your late teenage years and beyond trying not to get pregnant, at times panicking that you are, only to find out later that all that angst and worry was a complete waste of time...
I have spent hours trawling through bereavement websites, reading other people’s stories, and many of the comments are along the lines of: ‘I’m only keeping going for the children’, or ‘Without the children I’d end it all’. but what about those of us without children? Without even nieces or nephews? Who do we go on for?
On Christmas Day, I will wake up alone in an empty house (except for the dog). Some widows and widowers will wake up on Christmas Day to a house filled with children but no partner. In our own ways, we will all feel searingly disconnected from the life we once knew.
Widowed but childless, widowed with children at home, widowed with children grown up: we’ve all drawn the short straw.
JANUARY 2012
11 MONTHS ON...
BOTH our suitcases are still packed from the barbados holiday, still standing with their luggage labels intact.
I’m not going to unpack JS’s suitcase — what would I do with his clothes? — but I’m starting to feel that I need to unpack mine, the green one. I don’t have a big enough house to hide the cases away, and we have no loft, so I see them daily.
They are constant reminders of not just a holiday interrupted by death, but a life forever altered by it, too.
FEBRUARY 27, 2012
ONE YEAR ON...
IT HAS taken a year, but at last I feel ready to write about this, the most traumatic of memories.
The night after t he day my
husband died. The day itself is a blur. For such a private, dignified man, he had a very public and undignified death, though I feel sure that he would not have known anything about it; that my screaming, the yells of the crowd, all fell on ears wired into an oxygen- starved brain.
But when everyone left — the doctors, the British consulate staff, the police — the momentum of death stopped. And I was alone.
Friends in the UK knew friends in Barbados and arranged for them to ring me. They suggested that they came to pick me up and take me to their house.
It was a Sunday night and they were staying in to watch the Oscars. I would be very welcome to join them. I declined. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know anything except my husband was dead. The sun went down. The restaurant below my hotel room began to prepare for dinner. I paced the room that was the same as we’d left it that morning: JS’s clothes over the back of the chair, his toiletries in the bathroom, the bed unmade.
I could hear guests going into dinner, chatting as they walked along the corridor outside. The band struck up. I couldn’t bear it.
I rang the friends of friends and asked if I could change my mind. They said they were on their way. I went down to reception, an area that overlooked the restaurant. As I waited, all eyes turned to me. For a moment, the band slowed down. It was surreal, almost comedic.
I remember giving a slight wave and saying (to no one in particular) with an ironic laugh (not the right word, but I could do an impression and you’d see what I mean): ‘Yes, I’m the woman on the beach whose husband drowned today.’
I’ll never forget it. I want to forget it, but I can’t.
The friends of friends were lovely. Warm Northerners working in Barbados. They drove me to their house, which was on the edge of a golf course and absolutely fabulous. As I walked in, I thought: I must tell JS about this place!
They made me tea and cheese and biscuits, but I couldn’t sit still. I needed to pace. Pace and pace and pace. I paced in their bathroom to try and get some pacing out of my system. I’d only been there (I think) half an hour when I asked them to run me back to the hotel.
I drank whisky with the hotel manager and two of his friends who were in Barbados on a golfing holiday. They were kind men, but they couldn’t sit up drinking spirits for ever. We all went back to our rooms. Everything was deathly quiet except for the noise of the whistling tree frogs.
In the small hours, I started to pace around the hotel dressed in a white dressing gown, desperate for human company.
And then people began to get up back in the UK. I rang them or they rang me. I can’t remember what I said or in what order I spoke to them, I just know that those people prevented me from doing something stupid thousands of miles away in paradise until my wonderful brother could arrive from the UK, which he did about five o’clock later that same day.
The sun came up. I lay on the bed.
The phone rang. I was asked to go to reception as a car was being sent for me to take me to the hospital. I put on a dress, shoes, make-up and all my jewellery and went downstairs.
Couples were going to the beach. I was going to the mortuary.
NOW...
IF YOU’RE grieving right now and can’t see a way forward, hang on in there, it will be OK in the end. Trust me, because I’ve been there, done that and bought the coffin.
Four and a half years into my journey, my life is almost unrecognisable. That first year, I became fr i ends t hrough a Facebook bereavement group with a man whom I named in my blog Gorgeous Grey- Haired Widower ( GGHW). Later, much to my surprise, we became a couple.
At first we were both vulnerable, emotional wrecks, and our relationship could easily have collapsed as we worked through our grief.
But we supported each other and grew stronger and eventually sold our respective houses to buy one together in Hertfordshire, where we now live with GGHW’s two sons. I’m still shell- shocked that my life after JS’s death is so different from my life before. It’s not always easy living in a home that came together through sudden death. But life is good in ways that over four years ago I could never have imagined.
JS’s suitcase, meanwhile, is still packed, and now lives in the spare bedroom. I am still waiting for the right time to open it.
The author’s proceeds are donated to the charity Widowed and Young. When Bad Things happen in Good Bikinis is published by Blink on October 8, priced £8.99. To pre-order a copy for £6.74 (25pc discount until October 3), visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk.