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Bereavement

Nigella on grief

JanH · 2004-10-17 18:43:30

<<Lawson has had more than her fair share of bereavement, watched too many people die dreadful and untimely deaths. Her mother when she was barely four years older than Lawson is now, her sister, two years her junior, then her husband, whose exquisite record of the long, slow dying of his light made us all feel as intricately involved as Lawson in his loss. Fools that we are. What to us came as an enlightenment, to her was the gradual diminution of a shared life while she watched his expression of himself removed with his throat and his tongue until it was reduced to the written word, his most intimate self shared with a computer. You'd think, she says with a practised stab at irony, she'd have been used to it by now. Or at least ready for it, when the end came. But she wasn't. She remembers something the theatre critic Jack Tinker wrote when his daughter died at the age of 23. He said that you only get over a death if you think of it as a life completed rather than a life interrupted. But the words are hardly out of her mouth before she repudiates them. "What is this thing about getting over it? You don't get over it!" She remembers back 20 years, when her mother died, how well-meaning people would ask how she was coping and, by way of empathetic consolation, tell her how well they remembered the sad death of their puppy. "The mourning process," she says grimly, "is not a matter of universal understanding." We cross the road when the widow walks by because we do not know what to say. We are embarrassed by her grief. We say, "Oh, she has taken it well" with admiration, meaning you can hardly tell she's just suffered a bit of a setback. We use these ridiculous expressions - "Draw a line under it." "Go on with your life." "Put it all behind you." Lawson's first child was born 10 days after the death of her sister. The well-intentioned seized the opportunity to assure her of the good fortune of this "compensation". "But you can't think, well, my sister's dead but, hey, this will make it better," she says. "And when people said, at New Year, here's hoping you have a better year, you think, why, is she coming back? "There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness," she says. "You are very distanced from other people because what is going on in your head is literally unshareable and you can't focus properly on what is going on outside you. And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up." There is a process to grief, but it is not linear. "You don't feel this on a Monday, that on a Tuesday, as though you are making steady progress from A to B while all about you are being supportive. It's as if people think you are either happy or unhappy, one or the other. As though happiness is like some kind of domestic cleaning product you spray around to get rid of those nasty, dark, dusty corners. I don't think happiness is a remedy for unhappiness, like there, that was unhappy, now this is happy! What kind of a life is it if you don't have both? You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be. That John was so ill for so long is a cause of grief for as long as I remember it, and I have no wish to forget. I have room in my head. It's all right. I don't want to put my mind in order as I might with work or a store cupboard, because that wouldn't be a fair representation of the way things are. It is difficult to explain this to people. Language is more articulate than emotion, but it doesn't do the job. Emotion is messy, contradictory ... and true." There was a moment, not long ago, when the authenticity of this concept bore in on her with such stark clarity that the memory of it makes her laugh out loud. Her five-year-old son was watching her unpack some groceries in the kitchen. He said to her, "You know, I'm so sad that daddy has died" and in the same breath - "Oooh, Twiglets!!!" "Do that as an adult and you'd be regarded as sick. But it isn't. It is just entirely honest.">> I like Nigella. Rest of the piece is here .

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JanH · 17/10/2004 19:43

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donnie · 17/10/2004 19:45

I also read this in the Guardian yesterday and really liked it. I had always thought of her as a bit of a rich airhead but this article really changed my view of her.