“People expect me to say, ‘worry more’, but there’s a big part of me that’s just, live, love, laugh”
Global emergency planner and an authority on disaster recovery, Lucy Easthope’s work has given her a unique perspective on loss and survival – helping people find hope, even on their darkest days
When the worst happens, Lucy Easthope’s phone starts ringing. She has been at the heart of some of the most catastrophic episodes of the past few decades – including the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 7/7 London bombings and the Grenfell Tower fire. “As a breed, emergency planners probably operate at functioning levels of anxiety all the time,” she says. “We’re at our best when there’s a crisis.” More recently, she’s contributed to the recovery in Turkey and Syria after last year’s earthquakes.
Though being at the frontline of disaster has given Lucy an unusually comprehensive awareness of what could go wrong, it’s also deepened her appreciation for the ordinary. ‘Every day without Armageddon is a good day,’ Lucy wrote in her bestselling 2022 memoir, When The Dust Settles. ‘Life really is to be lived as if it is precious, time-limited and so very fragile.’
A CALL TO ACT
Born and raised in Liverpool, Lucy’s first understanding of how a disaster might be mismanaged came in childhood – she was 11 years old when the Hillsborough tragedy sent shockwaves through her community. “I would hurt if I saw something terrible on the news,” she recalls. “I’d be like – I’ve got to do something about that.” By the time she was a teenager, Lucy was obsessed with disaster and social justice
– in her view, the two are intimately connected.
She hoped that a degree in law might enable her to change the system from within.
Lucy felt like an outsider in the legal world, but an MSC in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management led to a job with Kenyon International Emergency Services, one of a handful of private companies in her field. She has since founded her own company, carving out her own niche “with a pick-axe,” she jokes. Specialising in handling the aftermath of disasters, Lucy’s work is part-organisational, part-pastoral. Initially she might assist with the distribution of relief and, later, the return of a body or remains to families who have lost loved ones. When that’s impossible, “personal effects become so much more important,” says Lucy. “It’s that idea that the person has been and existed through the object. I’ve seen bereaved mothers hold a shoe, jewellery or a watch so close, or perhaps even remake them into something.”
When describing events that are to most of us unimaginable, finding the right words matters. She uses the sociologist Kai Erikson’s term ‘furniture
of self’ to capture the significance of losing the precious objects we surround ourselves with. From the Welsh language she borrows hiraeth: a longing for a place to which there is no return. “There’s a lot of confusion, post-disaster, as to whether you can treat these things,” she says. “Some mental health initiatives try to get you back to a life that was as good as before, rather than going ‘this is a massive scar, this is a heart sickness that doesn’t go away.’”
LITTLE LOSSES
Everyone grieves differently, says Lucy. For some it can be as physical as it is emotional. “Sliding down on the floor, needing somebody to remind you to put something to eat in your mouth.” During our worst times we all need “somebody there to take our arm,” says Lucy, who advocates for better humanitarian assistance for those bereaved by disaster. No stranger to loss herself, Lucy’s father recently died, and she suffered repeated miscarriages before the birth of her two daughters, now 12 and eight.
“Parenting changed me,” says Lucy, “You could live your whole life looking for horrible pitfalls but I genuinely don’t worry about it on a big scale.” She admits to feeling some pressure to ‘walk the walk’.
“If you’ve written a book on disaster planning, you can’t be bad at it!” she says with a laugh. “I like to be slick in my crisis management at home.” There is, however, no such thing as an approach that works for everyone. “Humans, quite rightly, want very different things. I’ve learnt to respect that, and that there’s a magic to not-knowing. People expect me to say, ‘do more preparedness, worry more’, but there’s a big part of me that’s just ‘live, love, laugh.’”
Lucy credits her dyspraxia, which she was diagnosed with while an undergraduate at Bristol University, as fundamental in shaping her self-deprecating sense of humour. “There was a humiliation with being very
clumsy; it wasn’t necessarily associated with being very forensic… [But] laughter is the best medicine – laughing at yourself, at the absurdity of life,” she says. “I joke about my wardrobe disasters. Among my female colleagues I have wardrobe monitors who will tell me if my skirt is tucked into my pants.” Dyspraxia is still a “huge” part of her life, but rather than viewing the condition as an obstacle, Lucy says it has encouraged her to innovate and to articulate what she needs in any given situation, even if it’s just a taxi (she doesn’t drive).
There’s power in being prepared, says Lucy, and one of the priorities of her activism is to teach us how to look after each other. “It’s not terrifying to talk through scenarios like ‘what do we do if the power goes out?’ but we’ve created a myth of total safety.” She’s also interested in what value we place on instinct. “The hairs going on the back of your neck isn’t some weird ‘Spidey’ thing – it’s knowledge, skills, experience,” she says. “It’s ‘I’ve been here before’ or ‘this doesn’t feel quite right.’”
CHERISH YOUR PEOPLE
Witnessing the pain of others has encouraged Lucy to leave nothing unsaid in her own relationships. “I’m a very verbose friend – I will tell you I love you,” she says. “Going to work on a row or slamming the car door and saying to your kids ‘I’m really disappointed in you’ is inevitable in the way we live our lives, but I’ve seen complex grieving when people can’t forget that was their last interaction. I live constantly like it would be the last time.” She adds, chuckling: “I can still be an arse, though.”
She freely admits that she was “not an easy person to live with at the start of the pandemic,” and argues that we are in collective denial about how the covid crisis continues to impact our lives. “We are all disaster survivors now. People fight the idea, because their clothes aren’t smoking and they’ve not lost their house. But still, give yourself a pat on the back for what you went through.”
When The Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope (Hodder & Stoughton) is out now in paperback.