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A year ago I resolved to have a ‘good divorce’ – so how’s that going?
No-fault legislation has helped to steer us away from the blame game. But disentangling 17 years’ worth of shared experience hasn’t been easy
I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. But last year, I did make a pledge to myself that this would be the year of the “good divorce”. I remember feeling sad thinking of the moment it would happen. How the kids would react. How we’d be with each other. I imagined how it would feel. Relief and grief – my sister heard me say these words so often throughout our breakup that she renamed it “regrief ”.
There was, however, one thing I felt reassured about. The new “no-fault” divorce law would mean there would be less wrangling. There would be no finger pointing or bad-mouthing in an attempt to disentangle 17 years together – complete with two kids and a Russian hamster called Ziggy.
The bare bones of the law simply mean there’s no legal need to blame the other party. The aim is to unite broken couples rather than divide them in some court-based mud-slinging exercise.
I wonder, if the law hadn’t come into effect, how our divorce would have been different. The need to hold your ex to account doesn’t feel a particularly healthy way to enter into a co-parenting relationship.
The turning of the year often nudges us to look back, reflect and consider what lies ahead. For a recently divorced mother like me, it’s been a journey peppered with both sorrow and optimism.
Navigating the end of a marriage isn’t merely about signing papers: it’s an emotional labyrinth, a process of dismantling a life intertwined with shared joys, some of the happiest memories, drabbest routines, dreams achieved together and dreams shattered.
And in the middle of this, there’s an inevitable pang of introspection – one that extends beyond the legalities into the depths of emotional healing. What could I have done differently? How could we have done more? How will things be without the man who has been my unwavering emotional support for 17 years?
The resolution I made – to have a “good divorce” – wasn’t about erasing the pain or pretending everything was fine. It was about striving for a separation that didn’t spill animosity into our family’s future, for the sake of our daughters.
I found solace in the concept of “no-fault”. It’s a beacon of hope, an opportunity to transition from being spouses to becoming co-parents in a way that keeps respect and mutual understanding.
Looking ahead, the new year beckons with its promise of fresh starts and new beginnings. For me, it’s about embracing the bittersweet beauty of life’s transitions, about focusing on the positive amid the challenges. I have made a great many mistakes in 2023, but hoping for a good divorce was not one of them.
Resolutions, in this context, aren’t about drastic changes or lofty goals. They’re about small steps – creating a stable environment for my girls; nurturing a co-parenting relationship
As the fireworks pop, I shall carry forward with me a mixture of cherished memories and quiet aspirations
with Matt based on empathy and open communication; and finding my own sense of peace amid the aftermath of a life-altering event.
It’s about being kind to yourself, allowing room for healing, acknowledging the emotions that ebb and flow, and finding strength in vulnerability.
And in the middle of all this change, I find myself seeking comfort in the familiar and solace in the unknown. The divorce was not the end but rather a new chapter – a chance to redefine roles, rebuild dreams and rediscover resilience amidst the echoes of “regrief ”.
The impact of divorce reverberates through every aspect of life, especially during the turn of the year – when reflection and resolution intertwine. It’s a reminder that in the uncertainties and complexities of life, there exists a space for the renewal of hope.
And in the manic muddle of my future life’s unknowns, one thing remains certain – the love and commitment to nurture my daughters through every twist and turn of this journey. They are the guiding stars illuminating our co-parenting path, and we put them first in everything.
So as the clock ticks down, I try and embrace this blend of emotions: the melancholy and hopefulness, reminiscing about the happiest moments of the past while leaning into the promise of tomorrow. There’s an intrinsic strength that arises from adversity – a resilience that emerges from navigating uncharted waters.
The journey after divorce isn’t just a singular day but an ongoing process — it will be with me for every day through 2024, and who knows what that will bring. There will be tears, doubt, resilience, and the unwavering determination to build a future founded on love for my daughters.
So, as the fireworks pop, I will carry with me a mixture of cherished memories from the past 17 years, and quiet aspirations for my future and my girls. I want to let go of my guilt and anger and embrace understanding and forgiveness.
The journey onward into our “good divorce” continues – one step, one day, at a time.
For broadcaster Janet Ellis, whose husband John Leach died of cancer three years ago, the tiny details of grief hit hardest. “For me, lying in half the bed is still weird,” she says. “Even now, I change the sheets and think, ‘It’s only this bit.’” Or, “Writing Christmas cards with just your name in.”
His absence feels incomprehensible. “When that communication stops, you think, ‘Where does this go?’ It’s like throwing something at glass – you think you should be able to get through it, but it keeps coming back.”
Janet, sitting in the cosy kitchen of the London home they shared for decades, wells up frequently as she speaks about John, but laughs just as often. “When you are in a couple,” she says, “particularly in a happy relationship, you realise that a lot of your energy is bound up with theirs.” It means “you can spend a whole evening together just watching telly, and if somebody says, ‘Did you get up and make some tea?’ You won’t remember.”
When they die, you’re suddenly isolated, she says. “I felt as though I was on an individual platform, at all times, doing every single thing as if for the first time, and on my own. And it is exhausting. You can’t prepare.”
It’s why a charity like Marie Curie is invaluable. “There’s somebody there to speak to at all times. And the baseline of understanding means that however much or little you want to explain, they know why you’re calling, immediately.” Janet adds, “There’s something I found incredibly relaxing about once you’ve made the call and the connection, you give so much of that energy to someone else – just for a moment – and it’s extraordinary how rich that is.”
It was November 2017 when the couple learned John had terminal cancer. A week earlier, they’d been on top of the world, on holiday in Japan. Their visit involved self-guided walking between Kyoto, which is surrounded by mountains, and Tokyo. One day they visited a high-altitude beauty spot – “I’m not a climber, so John hauled me up to this astonishing waterfall,” she says, “and it was beautiful.”
That high point followed a gruelling year. In September 2016, TV producer John had called Janet from Rio, where his company was covering the Paralympics, to say he still had that sore throat, and would get it checked out on his return. When antibiotics didn’t help, his GP referred him to an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist, flagging it as “possibly carcinogenic”. It was tonsil cancer.
Janet says, “The oncologist said to him, ‘It’s going to be six weeks of doing radiotherapy and then you have an excellent chance of full recovery.’ And I do remember thinking, ‘I heard the word ‘chance’. Like a bat squeak. You know?”
The operation and treatment were “particularly nasty” says Janet, but John was stoic. “He was always a very rooted man, very practical, he did not feel sorry for himself.” She also notes that thanks to the radiotherapy, “tragically, he didn’t like the taste of alcohol for quite a long time”. By March – “his birthday was in March” – he was beginning to come out of it. “In April he had a scan, which was clear.”
Another scan was scheduled for November. Ironically, she says, they were dressed up to attend the opening of a new cancer support centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital – just “popping in” for John’s post-scan appointment en route, surely a formality. “You could just tell immediately,” Janet recalls. “The ENT guy started going, ‘Umm, I think we’ve found…’”
She says, “I had this urge to leap up and say, ‘Don’t say that because it sounds like, you know, cancer again, and we’re just on our way here’ – but that is what he meant.” Her eyes glisten. “So, yet again, approaching Christmas, John had to have a biopsy because the cancer had spread to his lung. And the only reason I can say all this without crying, is because it doesn’t help… But that’s what I feel, all the time, when I’m talking about it.”
Yet, describing him and their life together, she glows. John and Janet got together in 1987, when she was presenting Blue Peter. A director friend (“not the best judge of men”) introduced them, so she was cautious. “We met quite casually over lunch. I had Sophie with me – she was from my first marriage, she was seven.” On a second meeting, Janet realised how funny he was. Afterwards, she rang and asked him out. “He always said he would have got around to it.”
Decades later, hearing that terrible news, “We wished we didn’t have to tell anyone, ever,” that – as she told the “On the Marie Curie Couch” podcast – they could keep their “burning, horrible little secret”. The thought of telling the kids? “Awful.” (Janet is mother to Martha and Jackson, from her marriage to John, and her eldest, Sophie – Ellis-Bextor, the singer-songwriter – has five children.) When Martha rang, Janet couldn’t answer, and passed her phone to John.
Now she says, “You know that once you’ve shared that news, it’s the stone in the pond, and the ripples hit so many people.” When secondary lung cancer, stage 4, was confirmed, she howled. ‘I do remember, it sounds melodramatic, but I heard this noise, and it was me” – “a primal reaction” to something “so huge”.
Over the next year, John was “plunged back into scans, treatment, chemotherapy”. His brilliant oncologist – “she did understand that his priority was living well, not surviving at any cost” – also prescribed self-hypnosis.
Janet laughs at an unlikely pursuit for “this man from Huddersfield” but he did it daily after work – it afforded him 25 minutes of peace – while she made dinner. “I think the noise of cancer is huge,” she says.
They didn’t discuss his prognosis. “As far as I know, he never asked,” she says. Nor did she. After his diagnosis, she felt “angry and frustrated and tired” – while thinking that she shouldn’t since it was his fatal illness –
“but it does make you feel all that. It’s incredibly isolating because, try as you might, if it’s not your experience you can’t get there.”
They weren’t in denial but didn’t brood. “If I ever said, ‘I can’t bear the thought of this without you,’ he’d go, ‘Well, I’m here now.’” They impulsebought a tiny house in Sicily, and visited eight times. Janet remains grateful for the brilliant weather of lockdown, “We were in the garden all the time, and it was quite peaceful, and I do look back on that with a generosity, really, because all we wanted to do was to be together,” she says.
Marie Curie offers information and support for families at any stage. Though, before John’s death at 63, in July 2020, Janet says, “The initial shock of grief was so huge, even though in theory I knew what was coming, that I couldn’t have talked to anybody.” She adds that, for much of that time, “my kids were around, so we helped each other”.
You feel her courage in speaking so openly about her and the family’s grief. The sight of her, an elegant 68, sitting alone in their joyfully cluttered family home, is terribly poignant, as is her stark lack of self-pity.
The charity is a lifeline, she says, because whatever you need – to talk generally, or about specifics, the practicalities of caring for someone with a possible end-of-life diagnosis, or about bereavement, or fundamentals like healthcare, money, or your electricity bill – there is someone who understands. But it’s not only empathy their counsellors provide. “They will reflect back to you a way that you can cope.”
She says, “I know for some people the initial contact is hard, because we are conditioned to think that asking for help implies weakness – and I think asking for help is the strongest thing you ever do. It’s powerful. It’s taking a match and lighting the flame.”
For Janet, “Somebody at the end of the line saying ‘yes’ is more helpful than bucketloads of people saying, ‘Mm, I know. When my dog died…’ (She’s loath to criticise; she understands they mean well.) She’s also aware that some assume the pain of grief is blunted three years on.
“There’s a huge swathe of human thinking that says, ‘Oh, well, surely you have whole days when you don’t even think about it?’ ‘No.’” Or, “‘Surely it can’t be upsetting now, you’re a practical person…’” There’s relief in talking to “someone who just takes from you all of this, without any form of criticism, yawning, making you feel wrong, [or] changing the subject.”
Janet also rejects the notion of the misunderstood “so-called stages of grief ” – “There’s absolutely no time limit to this… Frankly, I’m never going to accept this.” She adds, “I have to come to an accommodation with it, which is very different… an accommodation says, ‘I still feel it, I still love him, he’s my husband, he’s just not here.’”
She grapples with the “bizarre, bizarre” fact of his “chronic” absence. It was one topic she discussed with a Marie Curie counsellor. “There’s no one who can change it or make it go back.” Even if John was travelling for work, and she didn’t know if he was eating supper or sleeping, she says, “Somewhere, in your peripheral vision, they’re present. They’re still there. They exist. And, of course, death is not that.”
Janet was with her husband when he died – “I did not know before how important that was” – and, as she says fiercely on a heart-wrenching video for the National Day of Reflection, initiated by Marie Curie to remember those who died during the pandemic, “I certainly wasn’t going to say goodbye.” Instead, she told him, “Thank you.”
Since then, the binary emotions of happiness and grief have been hard. “In my life, there are loads of fab things and people,” says Janet. “My youngest daughter got engaged two days ago. Which is really lovely, really lovely. But none of us, none of my kids, are not thinking ‘John would love this.’” She says, “We all have that sense of, ‘There’s someone we’re just itching to tell.’”
‘They will reflect back to you a way that you can cope’