A walk through grief

In a rather miraculous way, I have charted a path through life that has been remarkably untouched by grief. I am in my early forties, so have experienced the loss of all my grandparents, and one work colleague was killed in a car accident ten years ago. Apart from that, I have lived quite a charmed life.

My parents are both well and physically fit in their mid-seventies, and whilst I have thought about the crippling grief that the loss of a parent will involve, I have been quite the emotional cripple and not spent time looking at it face on.

This summer, one quiet Sunday afternoon, my wife walked down the garden in tears to tell me that my best friend had died suddenly in his sleep. He was forty-two, cycled many miles each week, played five-a-side football and had a better diet than me. Here was grief, fresh and brutal, with no warning at all.

My wife and I went through the process of saying goodbye to my best friend together – he was, after all, a best friend of hers as well. We booked a strange hotel, agonised over which funeral clothes still fitted, made the terribly difficult phone call to his father, and travelled to the north for the service. In the absence of a sibling I gave a speech at the funeral. All too quickly, we were back on the train to London and he had physically vanished from our lives.

I found it odd, and my wife noticed, that I appeared not to grieve. She was worried. At what point, she asked, was the explosion of grief going to happen, and how much clearing up was going to be needed when it did?

It began thinking about grief, its many forms, and how we all cope differently with the events leading up to and closing the death of a loved one.

I came to the conclusion that I am what I might term an alcohol griever. In traditional English male fashion, I bury my grief deeply (just about every internet article tells me that this is NOT the thing to do) and it bubbles to the surface in unguarded moments, lubricated by Pale Ale or Rioja. There is a brief, maudlin and uncomfortable ten minutes and then the emotion moves on, as my corrupted senses move to the next room in my head, and I find myself empty and in need of nostalgia.

Will I ever grieve properly? I doubt it. What worries me is that I might appear somehow heartless for this way of carrying on. I really am not. I miss my best friend terribly and think about him every day. I often check my instant messenger and read the last thing he typed to me. But as far as public shows of emotion go, I doubt that there will be any, and there definitely won’t be a gut-spilling on social media.

I thought about how others grieve. I think that the way we say goodbye to people works rather badly.

There is an awkwardness in Christian ceremonies because in most cases many of the mourners do not believe in the Christian promise of resurrection. Even in a very believing community, the hit-rate of cast-iron believers isn’t going to be more than eighty percent. What that means is for all the hope and joy of returning to God, there will be a fifth of people keeping quiet, doubting it all, and despairing quite a lot at the helplessness of the situation. That’s where you are going to get real emotion, genuine grief, and sadness.

There is also the uncomfortable feeling that many who claim to be believers have only come back into a church because it is The Right Thing To Do, and haven’t been to church on a Sunday for many years.

And there are the others who don’t know the words to the hymns, are intimidated by the ceremony, and wish that there was a chance to play a Robbie Williams track.

The flip side, which is the case for the majority in the UK, is a secular service in a crematorium. It is shorn of many of the traditions of the Christian way of doing things, which people have been used to for a thousand years, and what is left is a strange amalgam of different practices. We have music, but it is often something that the family of the deceased thought he or she would like. We have speeches, bravely made by family and friends, none of whom are experienced in public speaking. Rather like a children’s school play, the audience is not going to grumble and goodwill carries them through. And then there in The Poem. If all else, when my time comes, please spare the mourners The Poem. It is lovingly crafted, usually by someone who is writing poetry for the first time since he or she was in a Junior School. It has painful rhyming couplets (because it always has to rhyme) and contains syrupy observations meant for the only person that cannot hear them. Also, there is no good rhyme for the word ‘football’.

So with a hotch-potch of different little tributes, we are sent on our way, and in the UK that means a button pressed, the closing of the curtain, and a tinny reproduction of ‘My Way’. How can that help anyone come to terms with the loss of someone dear to them?

I feel that the process of grieving in the UK is somewhat out of kilter. It doesn’t help people who want to come to terms with loss.

I think what actually happens is we don’t have the opportunity to grieve properly for those we love, so we head to the media for a suitable replacement activity. Newspapers are still sold on the back of the emotion surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. When any footballer dies, there are black armbands at every fixture and a minute’s silence before every game. Is any of this emotion genuine, or are people just using the event of a famous death to transfer private grief?

How touched are we really, for example, by the death of a 1970s celebrity, and how many of us are scared to say that we really don’t care that much, because we fear a social media backlash from the Emotional Police?

The passing of David Bowie was a good example. I am sure that for his family, his loss is awful, just as it would be for any of us. By all accounts he was a marvellous husband, father and friend. But what I fear happened was that the journalists who produce much of the content we read (many of whom were teenagers in the 70s) saw it as a great opportunity for a public mourning. I have no problem with that as it is, but I don’t think everybody should be obliged to join in. What if you didn’t like Bowie’s music? Were you obliged, as everyone else was, to post that poignant lyric, just to seem normal? It’s not normal. It’s ghoulish.

The internet has spawned a lot of this, which is a digital extension of the ‘Happy 40^th Birthday, Mike!’ signs you used to see posted on roundabouts in the 1980s. (Remember them?) It is a sign that people need to be seen to be feeling something, and everyone else has to know about it. An emotion is not real and validated unless everyone else can see it.

Are we really that emotionally immature?

I return to my own emotional constipation. I did do a couple of things to express my grief, and to attempt to help others see how much my dear friend meant. I bought a football shirt, and told only my wife, two old college friends and my friend’s sons the significance of the choice of colour. It was a private and closed expression of loss.

I also wrote to his father and his wife. The cards didn’t make much sense, but I hope they helped them a little.

And finally, in a few quiet moments, I shared stories with my wife about our three way shared past. We laughed and were sad.

None of it was shared on Facebook. My friend would have appreciated that.

One Summer: America 1927

The year the world tilted

OneSummer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

Over the last ten years or so I have been playing catch-up with Bill Bryson and his books, and I have finally arrived at his 2013 offering.

It is by far the best researched and most interesting of his books for many years - a massive sweep through a short period of time, with carefully crafted chapters piecing together the details of a summer of ninety years ago. My knowledge of America of the 1920s was only sketchy, and after reading I was amazed at the continent-shaking changes that all seemed to come together in one summer. It is not a literary device to tell a story - Bryson does not have to, because so many amazing events came to pass that it’s almost as if a decade of events were compressed into a few short months.

Why was 1927 so special? From a European vantage-point, it might not seem special at all. One of the few startling things that happened on British shores was that Cardiff City of Wales won the FA Cup. But across the Atlantic, from spring to early autumn of the same year, every week seemed to offer another astonishing, headline-busting moment.

CharlesLindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic. His achievement was heralded in the United States in a similar way to Hillary and Tenzing on Everest - except on a monumental scale. He spent the summer being mobbed by unimaginably vast crowds in every city in America. This one event is the one on which Bryson hangs much of the rest of his book. It was a first for America. As he points out, it was a sort of ‘first’ first for America. Until then, most advancements and achievements had happened in Europe with Americans looking on admiringly. Now Americans took the lead.

It was the summer of the largest flood of the Mississippi, and the amazing organisational skills of Herbert Hoover, who following his clean-up operation after the First World War appeared to metaphorically roll up his sleeves again and wade in to the flood waters, whilst a passive President sat and watched from a distance.

It was also the summer of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and stupendous baseball records tumbling. Bryson writes with real skill and affection for these two American heroes. The margins of their dominance is perhaps unmatched in any European based sport.

What else? Well, the late summer was the biggest boxing match of the century, JackDempsey and Gene Tunney.

‘The Jazz Singer’, the first real ‘talkie’, appeared and caused a sensation.

Charles Ponzi defrauded millions.

Two Italian ‘anarchists’ went to the electric chair, with the nation knowing that they probably did not do what they were convicted of.

It was a time when innovation and money were flooding into the United States, and for the first time the focus of the world tended to not be on what was going on in Paris or London, but what was happening in New York and Chicago. Chicago was the fourth largest city on Earth, and was ruled by officials so corrupt that in reality Alphonse Capone was pulling the strings. Life was brash, bold, and filled with excitement and tragedy in equal measure.

What Bryson does extremely well is to focus on the small and long-forgotten details of life. In the same way that today a world without internet is hard to remember, he explains how newspapers were fundamental to the experience of living at the time.

It was also a troubling time when the first stirrings of ideas that would have devastating consequences in the 1930s and 1940s were first expressed publicly. In 1927, the idea that eugenics could make for a better world was accepted by quite a few people, and listened to by academia. It proved to be the issue about which America finally fell out of love with Charles Lindbergh, who was an enthusiastic supporter. With almost a century of hindsight, it is easy to see how dangerous and misguided it all was. In 1927, there was no such idea.

A charming part of Bill Bryson’s writing is that he does the job for you that you usually turn to Wikipedia to do. At the end of the summer he includes a lengthy epilogue, explaining the fate of many of the world-famous figures on that long-ago summer. Many did not prosper, many did not live past their fifties, and there is sadness in reading in particular about the demise of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who were so loved by the American people.

This is one of Bill Bryson’s most accomplished books - still full of the anecdotes that make his writing so enjoyable and easy to read, but backed up by lengthy and accurate research, and written with a genuine love for a vanished America. I am only sorry that it took me four years to read it. I doubt in the far future that the summer of 2017 will be viewed with such interest and affection.

Victoria A Life AN Wilson

One hundred and sixteen years after her death, you might think that all that can be said about Alexandrina Victoria (1819-1901) has already been said. Certainly, there are a number of well-written biographies of her, each characterised by the period in which they were written. Elizabeth Longford’s study is a good example.

Enter A.N. Wilson, quite a colossus in the world of royal biography and serious historical writing. He has already written about Hitler, Jesus and John Betjeman.

Victoria: A Life, which was first published in 2014 and which I have just got around to reading, is an enjoyable book. All the usual anecdotes are present. He writes about how Victoria came to the throne, the misbehaviour of her Hanoverian predecessors, and the strange life of her father Edward, Duke of Kent. There is an examination of her libidinous marriage to Albert, and her withdrawal (excuse the pun) from public life after his death. John Brown looms large (again, no pun intended) and her friendships with Melbourne and Dissie are well covered.

What makes Wilson’s book different is that he is clear about just how deranged Victoria was. Her behaviour in the 1860s and 1870s was so difficult that Wilson views it as mental illness. For more than a decade, long after her bereavement, Victoria acted like a petulant child. Wilson quite rightly draws comparison with the stubborn, tantrum-prone middle aged woman and her younger self who used to fly into childish rages at Kensington Palace. You are left with the impression that Wilson would not have liked her had he met her, as he shows her little sympathy and is critical of her eccentric behaviour. His writing highlights the frustrations of the ruling class of the time.

A second strand which is refreshing is his attitude to the royal family. He views the Victorian family firm as quite apart from those who really held power, a mere figurehead. For the first half of Victoria’s reign the landed gentry were in charge, and after reform there is a fascinating shift towards the newly enriched industrialists and the newly enfranchised middle class. Even though Wilson’s book is principally about the life of the monarch, her story is told against this backdrop of change. Her anger at change is Hanoverian, and closer to George IV than her grandson George V.

Despite the tremendous change in the country over the sixty-four years, Wilson continues to remind the reader of the nuances of a fact that is often repeated. Victoria was German. However, he is clear that there were two Germanys at the time, and Victoria was an old-school Hanoverian, attempting to keep alive the dream of her husband of a liberal free-thinking Germany. She was never a Prussian Imperialist, and greatly mourned the fact that her oldest daughter Vicky was dragged into the circle of sabre-rattling militarists. He reveals the distaste that Victoria held for Willie, the firstborn of her firstborn.

Of course, there is the family. Just like the Plantagenets all sharing about six names (Richard, Henry, Katherine, etc) so the Victorian family tree can be baffling. Victoria and Albert were partly to blame for this by insisting that all children carry one of their names (hence a vast range of Alberts, Victors and Victorias). Wilson rather muddies the issue by placing a family tree at the start that is tree shaped and difficult to follow. All that was needed was a page each for the nine offspring, their children and many grandchildren.

What is clear is that Victoria really didn’t like a lot of them. Her relationship with her son and heir never recovered after her husband’s death, for which he was partially blamed. She favoured Hanoverian relatives and Wilson almost goes as far as suggesting that she would have been happier in a little Schloss than remaining in Britain. She was, as we all know, the grandmother of Europe, but it was a grumpy and remote grandmother. No wonder so many of the third generation thought visiting her a chore.

This study of the life of Victoria is an easy read because it does what it says – it describes her life and does not spend hundreds of pages explaining the reasons, for example, of the Crimean War. There is just enough historical common sense to carry you along. It is a worthwhile addition to everything that has already been said about Victoria.