THE LONG GOODBYE
Christine Manby on grief and loss in a time of coronavirus
Lockdown has stolen many important moments even from those of us Covid-19 has not touched directly. We’ve been robbed of the ability to celebrate in person the births and birthdays, graduations and end of school celebrations, engagement parties, weddings and anniversaries that make life special. But such moments of shared joy can, we hope, be rescheduled for next year or for the year after that. Perhaps not so the equally important rituals we usually devote to saying “goodbye”.
At the height of lockdown, attendance at funerals was limited to immediate family only. As I write, 10 is still the maximum number of mourners allowed. A ban on staying somewhere other than your own home overnight makes travelling a large distance to mourn someone all but impossible. Thus many people are still missing out on the chance to say the traditional farewell to those who have been important to them. How do
we begin to process grief when attending a funeral is out of the question? How should we be grieving anyway?
Sasha Bates is a former television producer turned integrative psychotherapist whose husband, the actor and playwright Bill Cashmore, died unexpectedly at the age of 56. In her new book, Languages of Loss, Bates weaves her own experience of that sudden, heartbreaking tragedy into an exploration of psychotherapeutic theory on grief. She says she wrote her book, which she began in the year after Cashmore’s death, “… to help me make sense of the senseless loss of my husband but also to help others in my position… The taboos, misunderstandings, and silence around grief in our society add immeasurable damage to an already heartrending process and I would like this book to open up a conversation and start to dissipate some of the shame and ignorance around what grief really feels like.”
I’ve felt some of that shame. Shortly after my father died, someone told me I wasn’t “grieving properly” because I wasn’t “letting it all out”. He went on to suggest to me that I might be getting grieving wrong because I am adopted. His unsolicited wisdom made me feel inadequate as well as bereft. Unlike my helpful friend, Bates offers no strict prescription for grief but examines a number of theories in turn. Some are familiar, like Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s Five Stages (which are famous not because Kubler-Ross herself thought grief always has five stages, but because her publisher wanted a snappy hook). Less well known are J W Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, which are roughly broken down into: accepting the loss, acknowledging the pain, adjusting to a new environment and reinvesting in the reality of a new life.
When Bates talks about “feelers” and “dealers”, I recognise myself – grieving “wrongly”, according to my friend – as a dealer, keeping busy rather than emoting. But Bates sets straight the idea that any approach is wrong, so long as it works for you. She writes, “We each of us experience our grief in multiple dimensions and in multiple languages, not all of them verbal.”
When I had the chance to talk to Bates on the phone, I asked how she’s been coping with the ongoing process of her own grief in lockdown. She told me she’s been doing lots of exercise, making phone calls, joining family quizzes and giving weekly webinars on mental health. As soon as it was allowed, she started taking socially distant walks with friends.
Then Bates’ echoed the sentiments of a friend of mine, who lost her husband in January of this year, when she told me that when it came to lockdown, “Which has plunged everyone into loneliness and isolation and facing a future taken away, having lived with grief for a while I feel I’ve had a head-start.”
I asked Bates whether she thought that those who’d lost loved ones during lockdown were having to put their grief on hold. “Grief isn’t a choice,’ she said. “It will happen no matter what.” She explained that what I was really talking about is the ability to memorialise and you can still do that, even when you can’t have the service you might otherwise have had.
“You could write a letter to the deceased. If you have a garden, you could plant something in their honour. You could make a playlist of music which reminds you of your time together. You could set up a website, where other friends could post their memories. Not having a funeral is terribly sad but you can still share your memories and feelings virtually.”
She suggests a Zoom get-together with a degree of structure. Each person attending could bring a photo of the deceased and choose a track of music that represents them in their hearts. The participants could even cook the deceased’s favourite meal and sit down to eat it at the same time.
In retrospect, our last conversation did feel like the sort of last conversation one would write for a film
Bates doesn’t mark the anniversary of her husband’s death but she does makes sure to celebrate his birthday. Those celebrations would easily lend themselves to Zoom too. One year she created a “Billy quiz”, where his friends answered questions about his life and received personal mementoes – such as his school tie or a favourite T-shirt – as prizes. Another year, she created “Billy bingo”, with participants checking off his catchphrases instead of numbers.
“The rigmarole doesn’t matter,” she says. “What matters is connecting with their essence. Then plan for something bigger that you will be able to do when this time is over.”
Bates herself set up a theatrical bursary in her husband’s name – The Bill Cashmore Award – in conjunction with the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, aimed at helping young people gain experience in theatre and giving them the opportunity to produce their own work.
It so happens that Languages of Loss fell into my hands at the exact right time. During the early weeks of lockdown, I swapped regular emails with my friend Ed, who was living in Arica in Chile. I suspected he would be finding lockdown hard, being extremely gregarious – I don’t think we ever had a dinner for two that didn’t end with at least three brand new friends at the table. The time zone differences between Chile and the UK were just enough to mean that we never seemed to be simultaneously free to chat on the phone but on a Thursday in mid-May, we finally managed to have a proper conversation.
Ed was a scientist, a medic with a background in cancer research, and I was very glad to have him give me his view on the pandemic, which he said was not what he would call a pandemic at all. I couldn’t follow a lot of the science he threw my way but I could feel his relative calm regarding the situation and that was helpful.
Our conversation moved on to the frustrations of lockdown. Ed lived in an apartment overlooking a beach that he wasn’t allowed to walk on. The weather in Arica was perfect. “As it always is,” Ed said. He wanted to get out on his bike. Ed was a fanatical cyclist. Back when we met 20 years ago, he cycled 40 miles to meet me for lunch. I was deeply impressed though soon came to understand that 40 miles was his idea of a warmup. Thus not being able to race up and down the local mountains on two wheels was driving Ed quite nuts.
On the Sunday evening after our chat, he sent me a happy email to let me know that the curfew in Arica was being partially lifted the following day. He’d be able to go out between five in the morning and ten at night. He wrote, “I am free. Going off to cycle in the mountains but will write / call later / tomorrow… I miss you. Much love xx E”
On Tuesday morning, I woke to an email from someone I didn’t know, telling me that Ed had been killed in a road accident on that first lockdown breakout ride. My brilliant friend was gone.
Once I’d called the stranger to confirm the news was real, I wasn’t sure what to do. Home alone, I went through the people I might call and came to the conclusion that, other than my partner, there was no one I wanted to speak to. No one I wanted to worry when everyone I knew had worries of their own thanks to the sodding virus. Instead I picked up Languages of Loss, which had been sitting on my bookshelf untouched for months. It felt like having the best sort of friend right beside me. Bates is a Quaker and there was a spiritual element to her book which surprised and delighted me and comforted me too.
There was no reason to suspect that Ed’s first bicycle ride after lockdown would be his last. He was, as the local newspaper in Arica put it when they reported the accident, “an experienced athlete” and “in very good shape for his age.” He would have loved that. Yet, in retrospect, our last conversation did feel like the sort of last conversation one would write for a film. It was the only time Ed really spoke to me about his childhood and the family dynamic which had made him who he was.
When I tell Bates, she responds that she doesn’t believe such conversations are entirely coincidental. She and Cashmore talked more candidly than ever in the run up to his completely unexpected death.
In her book, she also describes how after Cashmore died, she felt her husband’s presence in a series of little events that played to his sense of humour. She still gets those messages, though she says they are less intense and serious as time goes by. “A certain bird will land in the garden and look at me in a way that makes me think of him.”
Imagining such continuity is a comfort for me. About a week after Ed died, I went for a walk on Tooting Common. It was early and the common was quiet. There was no-one within 20 metres, let alone two. But suddenly, as I walked along a wide footpath, I saw a small boy hurtling towards me on a bicycle with his mother in hot pursuit. No matter which way I moved to avoid him, he seemed to alter his trajectory so that we were on a collision course. He was looking back over his shoulder, explaining the solar system to his mother as he zig-zagged across the path. I jumped out of the way as he hurtled by, yelling to his mother as he did so, “It’s the biggest in the universe!”
The little boy on the bicycle, expounding his scientific theories with such enthusiasm, felt like a messenger sent by Ed. My dear friend Ed was a one-off, but there will be other crazy cyclists and dedicated scientists in the years to come. Someone will pick up his research and run with it and turn his theories into cures. All the same, I wish more than anything that the curfew in Arica had lasted for one more day.