Wise words on cancer, therapy and dealing with grief
GREG WISE has just returned from a few days’ holiday in Scotland with his wife, the actress Emma Thompson, ready for a round of publicity - in which the Yorkshire-educated actor faces the unenviable task of recalling the last months of his sister Clare’s life.
The siblings were “ridiculously close”; living in the same street in London, holidaying together, and enjoying many wonderful family gettogethers. Film executive Clare was the ‘rogue aunt’ to Greg and Emma’s daughter, Gaia, and adopted son, Tindy.
When Clare was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013, Wise was away filming for some of the time and a close friend returned from Australia to look after her, along with her extended family.
Clare started a witty blog to keep everyone informed as to what was happening with her health and treatment. Judging from her initial entries, Clare was clearly a hugely positive, funny and entertaining person to be around, highly organised and determined to live life to the full.
The treatment worked - but then the cancer returned to her bones in 2015. She re-started the blog, her brother taking over in July 2016, when Clare became too ill to write.
Greg, 51, a former pupil of St Peter’s School in York, continued to chart the highs and, increasingly, the lows of his sister’s last months, including the final 10 weeks when he became her sole carer. He was with her when she died in September 2016.
The blog’s now been made into a book, but far from being all doom and gloom, there are as many light-hearted moments in it as there are bleak recollections.
“You have to approach everything with humanity, and humanity is about humour,” says Wise. “It’s too easy to catastrophise, which serves no purpose at all.”
He was unable to leave his sister alone in the flat for most of the time during the last months, although did get some cover to go for some ‘emotional housekeeping’, aka his weekly visit to his therapist. He says he’s been having therapy for years.
“I go to therapy once a week. We should all go to therapy once a week, or even twice a week. It’s very important to go and be able to be in a space to discuss stuff that is not necessarily appropriate to discuss with mates or family, especially at a time like that, when I was necessarily confronting my own mortality and my sister’s.
“It saved my life. I could not have sat with my sister over this period of time and survived, without having done an awful lot of work on my mental health over the years before. I’m profoundly grateful every day of my life that I’ve done the work I did on my head. It would have been very easy to have been completely broken by this. And I wasn’t.”
He began filming the second season of playing Mountbatten, two days after Clare’s funeral. “Trying to obfuscate or push down emotion by getting your head down and working may be all right short-term, but will never work long-term. You have to be able to sit with it.
“Early on, you don’t know when the grief ’s going to hit you. When it does, it comes like a vomit. You can be walking down the street or at the supermarket at the frozen peas counter and suddenly it hits you, and you go with it.”
He remains convinced that she decided when she was going to die. “I was relieved when it happened. She was finding a reason to open her eyes every morning and I think I was part of that reason. As hard as it was for me to see what was physically happening with my sister, I know that period of time was extraordinarily powerful for the two of us in a very positive way, even though it was fuelled by such a terrible disease.”
by Clare & Greg Wise is published by Quercus, priced £16.99.