The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss, by Reverend Richard Coles
Frances Wilson
The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss By Reverend Richard Coles Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99
Richard Coles, the Vicar of Finedon, Northamptonshire, is sewn into the fabric of our lives, like family.
Every time we turn on the radio or TV, there he is: the presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Live, the model for Alan Smallbone in the sitcom Rev, a contestant on Masterchef, Strictly and Have I Got News for You.
Last century, he was half of the pop duo the Communards, whose cover version of Don’t Leave Me This Way was number one for four weeks in 1986.
Remember Bridget Jones’s gay friend Tom, who had a one-hit wonder in the 1980s and loves it when people still recognise him? He’s based on Richard Coles, apparently.
The Madness of Grief, Cole’s third volume of memoirs, is an account of the death just over a year ago of his civil partner, David Oldham. David, aged 43, died from internal bleeding.
We do not find out the cause of the bleeding until page 77, at which point the narrative changes gear. David was an alcoholic and he had chronic, decompensated alcoholic liver disease.
Along with Richard’s grief comes the inevitable guilt: ‘I should have been kinder, loved him more strongly, made him happier, I could have done but I did not, because I was too self-absorbed, and there is nothing I can do about it now.’
As David drifts into and out of consciousness, Richard sings him A Case of You and then realises that his stomach is overspilling his belt: he must, he tells himself, go on the 5:2 diet. It is when he nips back home to feed the five dogs that David dies, on 17th December 2019. Boris Johnson has been voted Prime Minister, the presents are under the Christmas tree and a lethal virus is about to be unleashed in Wuhan.
To call his grief ‘madness’ makes it sound more exciting than it is. Grief, Coles discovers, is grindingly, numbingly, colourless. Life without the person you love is colourless; your own company is colourless. The days are too long; the house is suddenly filled with junk; being awake is an effort and so you go to bed, dosed with sleeping pills, at 6.30pm. You feel as if you’re stoned, ‘standing in a motorway service station dressed as a velociraptor surrounded by broken crockery and everyone’s gone quiet’.
After death comes what Coles calls ‘sadmin’: filing the death certificate, selecting a coffin, planning the eulogy and ordering a headstone. When he chooses David’s grave-clothes, the funeral director insists that he remember the underpants, lest the departed soul ‘goes commando into that good night’.
Because everyone feels that they know Richard Coles, he is stopped in the street, in the pharmacy, at the burger van and in the supermarket. Other widowers give him advice: one instructs him to ignore what the lifestyle magazines say about coping with mourning because it is ‘shit and bollocks’.
Letters arrive by the truckload. Most people are kind, but some are vile. ‘I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am to hear the news that David has died,’ writes one man. Another tells him that David is roasting on a spit in hell.
He visits friends – Richard has dozens and dozens of friends. Some are army officers; some are left over from his pop-star days. He met one at West Hampstead tube station in his twenties.
He spends Christmas with Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, at Althorp House, where one of the Earl’s children tells him that he is like one
of the family – but then we all feel that Richard Coles is like one of the family.
As a vicar, Coles is used to death, but that doesn’t make his own loss any easier to bear. Nor does his Christianity. David, he says, is rotting in the earth and not flying up to heaven.
There is more love of dog than love of God in these pages: it is the five dachshunds that keep Richard in one piece, especially at night when they all pile into the bed together.
This is not a particularly good book, in the literary sense. It is repetitive, directionless and lost inside itself.
But that is what grief is like, which makes this an honest book, and a brave one. Grief, we realise, is the ultimate form of bravery. He should have called his lament The Courage of Grief.