Why does everyone say widows like me should rush to find new love?
She lost her husband at the start of the pandemic. Now, in a surprisingly uplifting book about grief, CATHERINE MAYER rails against those who — within days — told her she’d find another man
In THE moment Andy died, I was certain of two things: that my beloved was gone, though the critical care team waited a bleak minute before confirming what my heart brokenly and instantly recognised — and that he would never leave. Death alters relationships. It doesn’t end them.
It will be two years next month since my husband succumbed to a pneumonia that blindsided doctors with its severity and odd behaviours, defying their every
A man who guesses a woman’s age may be smart, but he’s not very bright
LUCILLE BALL
intervention. Later, they would launch an inconclusive investigation, suspecting that Andy, only 64 when he died, had been one of the earliest UK Covid fatalities. he first showed symptoms of the illness that would kill him less than a week after his band, Gang Of Four, rounded off an international tour at packed venues in China.
Widowhood came hard on the heels of another loss. My stepfather John died shortly after Andy’s return to London, his cause of death also listed as pneumonia. My mother and I were lucky in one respect; this happened before Covid barred families from hospitals. I was even able to hold a memorial for Andy with 400 guests, many travelling from other cities and countries.
Then came the first and hardest lockdown and, with it, a silence that blanketed our empty home and the desolate streets outside. Though we were childless by choice, our flat had always been full of sound and life, a working music studio at its core and an extended elective family dropping by at all hours.
Throughout this whole numb and numbing period, I saw only one person, my mother, and then but once a week, at a careful distance and masked. She needed assistance with household chores, ‘sadmin’ and meals. John had always done the cooking.
I won’t pretend this sequence of events — and much else besides and since — hasn’t been traumatic, for her and for me. I use that word in its clinical sense too. Memories the brain cannot digest resurface as flashbacks. Whenever I hear the unmistakable bleeps and beeps of intensive care unit machines, a soundtrack popular with broadcasters reporting on the pandemic, I’m transported back to Andy’s bedside. Again and again, I stroke his beautiful face, tell him I love him, know I will never be able to say it often enough.
This pain is now part of me, as he is, a phantom limb. Nevertheless, and by most metrics, my mother and I are doing well. She is sociable and independent. I’m busy (often too much so), passionately engaged with the future, up for the next challenges, new adventures, fresh vistas, a good night out. Sometimes — whisper it — I feel happy.
You might misconstrue this to mean that we’ve ‘moved on’. On the contrary: my mother frequently writes letters to John, updating him on news of friends, family and the startling turns the world keeps taking. She writes as if he could answer. Perhaps he does.
For I was correct in my conviction that our lovely dead don’t leave us. Andy threads through my waking hours and dreams, contrives sweet reminders of our three decades together, tinkers in the music studio in our basement, tsks when, yet again, I scratch the car.
Often, I hear him drily pass comment, whether on global affairs or, a subject that has always obsessed him, what’s for dinner. Nor is he the only ghost at my table. John likes to join in the fun, as he did in life; so, too, a growing number of my closest friends plus my stepsister Sarah, who died of ovarian cancer five years ago; and, since her sudden death, in her sleep, just weeks ago, my niece by marriage, rachel. To admit publicly to these visitations is to invite side-eye or more serious concerns about my mental health, but, to me, there is nothing strange or unusual about it.
David Bowie died in 2016. his widow Iman recently told an interviewer that he remains in her family’s ‘hearts and minds on a daily basis’. She added: ‘he’s hiding in plain sight. his fans are still around, his music is still relevant. And on the day of his passing, I went on a hike and a bluebird flew in front of me. A bluebird, above all things!’
She also addressed the idea of remarriage. ‘Never,’ she said. Also: ‘Someone a few years ago referred to David as my late husband and I said, “No, he’s not my late husband. he’s my husband.” This was my true love.’
Now, it so happens that the lives of Iman’s husband and my own true love intersected. Andy admired Bowie and discovered, when introduced to him by Gail Ann Dorsey, former Gang Of Four bass playerturned-Bowie’s bassist, that the admiration was mutual. I remember Andy’s surprised and embarrassed delight when Bowie bowed before
They suspected he was one of the UK’s first victims of Covid
him. Yet Iman’s words resonate powerfully with me for another, far more important reason. The truth she describes isn’t specific to her experience and mine, but universal, and it is this: whosoever you are, your lovely dead will remain in your life if you make them welcome. To do so is painful — and wonderful.
It hurts because instead of ducking reality, you confront it. You acknowledge that two of the elements that gloriously define living love, its dynamism and physicality, will never return.
Yet your love endures without these things. If you don’t believe me, think about the ways during these Covid times all of us found ways to express our feelings without touching, at a distance of metres or, thwarted by journeys disrupted and plans postponed, in increments of miles and weeks. The distances created by death may be unfathomable but they are bridgeable.
This is what every newly bereaved person needs to know, yet too often those trying to support us dole out the opposite advice, urging us to shed reminders of the deceased as fast as possible, to hurry as best we can to a future where the lovely dead recede to insignificance.
Widows like Iman and me, young enough (I’m 60, she, I believe, just a
few years older) that we might have a couple of decades or more left in our tanks, quickly discover that our would-be comforters brandish another incentive to speed-mourn.
I’d been widowed less than a week when someone first floated the idea that once I’d got shot of grief, I might find new love.
Nowadays, similar suggestions come fast and thick, though Sandi Toksvig, friend and co-founder with me of both the Women’s Equality Party and Primadonna Festival, does so only in jest.
Days after Andy died, she proposed that I improve the dating pool by including lesbians, then quipped ‘too soon, darling?’. These three words have become our catchphrase, deployed in conjunction with all manner of concepts for reimagining my Andyless existence, and still capable of reducing Sandi and me to tears that are, in pleasingly high percentage, of laughter.
Facebook has swung into action too, bombarding me with invitations to enrol for its online matchmaking services, including one, mystifyingly, featuring patterns made of dog biscuits. (I’ve never owned a dog, though Andy and I for years havered over choosing one . Andy’s hilarious obsession — he believed dogs’ tails should decently cover their bottoms — complicated our decision-making; so too the fact that our flat has no garden.)
Frankly, if I need a warm body curled next to mine, I’ll choose a puppy. The preoccupation with coupling me up continued to baffle me until one day, my mother and I sat down to watch the 1990 movie Truly, Madly, Deeply.
We had just started exploring stories we hoped might help us better understand the gap between expectations of bereavement and our own experiences, something we were documenting in our book, Good Grief, a memoir of loss and love.
Already, we’d noticed that fictional widows are either steely or tear-drenched, hard-hearted or prone to splattering their sorrow all over the walls and furniture.
Nina, Truly, Madly, Deeply’s central character, played by Juliet Stevenson, embodies the latter archetype, her sobbing paused only when her partner Jamie (Alan Rickman) reappears as a ghost.
His spectral presence made perfect sense to us, but the film’s underlying message, intended as an optimistic one, left us cold.
Jamie must be banished so Nina can find happiness with a new lover. The dead, in this tale, are not only unwelcome, but in competition with the living.
As the credits rolled, I realised how pervasive this view is — and how misguided. The extraordinary good fortune of loving, and being loved, by Andy taught me that love is expansive, not exclusive; its generosity makes us more generous. Love generates love, even once a heart stops beating.
Well-intentioned friends who converge on the bereaved, trying to shoo away our ghosts, take their cues from a culture that in recoiling from discussions of death and its aftermath fails everyone.
We learn to deny mortality instead of accepting it as part of life, to exile the topic and our lovely dead.
Andy wouldn’t be easy to sideline, even if I wished to do so. His music means he remains a public figure. His death made headlines across the world, then came obituaries, and a flurry of interest around the possibility that Covid had arrived in this country earlier than officials admit. His work continues to win new fans. Soon after he died, I released some of his music to raise money for St Thomas’, the NHS hospital that tried so hard to save him.
I later completed a record that was his final, and unfinished, passion project, The Problem Of Leisure: A Celebration Of Andy Gill & Gang Of Four.
Andy’s profile means I often have little choice but to bring him everywhere as my Plus One.
Yet if I mention him, even, as is usually the case, in the context of an anecdote, there’s often a collective flinch, as if it’s unseemly to speak his name after all this time. As the months tick by, that tendency is deepening, rather than dissipating.
Some of this discomfort lies at the door of the psychiatrist
‘ Frankly, if I need a warm body curled next to mine, I’ll choose a puppy'
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. When she attempted in her famous book On Death And Dying to systematise the manifestations of grief, she didn’t intend for the process to be construed as an obstacle course.
That, however, is exactly what happened. The five stages of grief she identified — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance — are now widely misunderstood as inevitable and sequential. This notion comes entwined with another, equally wrong-headed: that if you race through each stage, you’ll reach a finishing line, where, miraculously, your sorrow disappears.
Even if the pandemic hadn’t piled loss upon loss — so much anguish there is right now, not just for loved ones lost, but for opportunities and livelihoods — this
There’s often a collective f linch as if it’s unseemly to speak his name
If you race through grief ’s five stages, sorrow doesn’t disappear
would be profoundly misleading. Sadness lingers for excellent reasons: because people and things mattered, because we loved, because we love. To wish away grief is to wish away that love. A better ambition by far is to make grief liveable.
My mother and I are reaching that point. Our advice to those in similar circumstances is to set your own pace, recognise that you can and will feel all sorts of emotions, often at the same time — and to ignore advice.
However you respond is valid. For some, liveability might involve a new companion. My mother has formed a platonic friendship with a man she refers to as her ‘gentleman caller’. Recently I asked if she thought she might marry again.
‘My next significant birthday is 90,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know if I could bear the getting-to-knowsomeone phase. It’s not like instant mashed potato. It takes time. If I met someone and wanted to have a John-like relationship, I’d be 100 because it would take ten years.’
As of now, I’m with Iman on this question — Andy is my husband — but I reserve the right to change my mind.
Here’s something else Andy taught me about love: it seeks you out when you’re not looking. One minute, I was young, free and single. The next, I’d encountered a ridiculously handsome man at a party, who charmed me by making me laugh and serenading me. He always will.