Also by Catherine Mayer:

Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly

Charles: The Heart of a King

Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: How Gender Equality Can

Save The World!

GOOD GRIEF
Embracing life at a time of death

CATHERINE MAYER AND ANNE MAYER BIRD

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird 2020

Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780008436124

Version 2020-10-30

Note to Readers

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

 Change of font size and line height

 Change of background and font colours

 Change of font

 Change justification

 Text to speech

 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008436100

To Andy and John, with our undying love

Contents

Cover

Also by Catherine Mayer:

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Introduction

1Loss

2Denial

3Death

The first letter to John

4Aftermath

The second letter to John

5Three funerals and a memorial

Eulogies

The third letter to John

6Sadmin

The fourth letter to John

7Covid

The fifth letter to John

8Comfort

The sixth letter to John

9Love

A letter from Anne to herself

10In conclusion

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Introduction

We are extraordinarily lucky, my mother and I. We have each other and we have this room.

When she and John moved to London, married just three years and still figuring out the shape of their relationship, their new home had not yet established its boundaries either. The room came later. At first the house grew warily, adding a small glass extension at the back with a slippery incline that their ginger cat treated as a slide. The local foxes chose a bigger playing field, barking and tumbling on the flat roof of the builders’ merchant abutting the property, a comparatively recent arrival to this estate of Victorian townhouses. The neighbourhood had seen wealthier days and would do so again. Nothing stays the same, no matter how solid it appears.

In a portent of gentrification, developers made plans to demolish the commercial unit next door and build, in its stead, a new house made to look old. My mother and stepfather debated what to do. They had more than enough space already. Yet they feared that a new neighbour, sharing a party wall, might prove noisy and, anyway, John wanted somewhere to put a piano and the art that he had started to make and collect. After five decades working in jobs he didn’t much enjoy (‘a lifetime,’ he said, though it proved to be just three-fifths of his total span), he retired and began to reinvent himself as a painter. They bought the unit and knocked through the party wall, creating for themselves a garage, utility area, extra bathroom, and this, a cavernous second living room.

If truth be told – and the conversations my mother and I conduct in this room often worm out truths unknown to either or both of us until the moment of utterance – I never until recently warmed to this room. Its industrial proportions make it a perfect place to display paintings or throw big parties. It is less successful as a venue for intimate discussions. Two big armchairs maintain a chilly distance against the far wall, acknowledging each other only with a slight angling that directs the gaze of any occupants towards the centre of the room and, beyond that emptiness, to a Chesterfield at the opposite wall.

This is where my tiny mother usually sits, Thumbelina on the full-sized sofa, during our weekly meetings. After John died and my husband Andy stunned us by following suit forty-one days later, she and I saw each other often but at varying intervals. It was the lockdown against coronavirus, coming seven weeks after Andy’s death, that enforced on our timetable a form and regularity. New government rules to combat the unfolding pandemic isolated us in our fresh isolation, my mother who had never in her eighty-six years lived on her own and me, alone again after twenty-nine years of coalescence. Only when Andy had gone did I realise how much he and I resembled a sight we often stopped to admire on our weekend walks, a tree and railing merged into a single entity, the tree enfolding, the railing sustaining.

Exposed now and unsupported, I looked for fresh ways to hold myself up. The imperative to help out my mother came not as a burden, but like the small services I performed for others in those early lockdown days – supplying food and medicine, posting parcels – as a gift. In doing these things, I found the iron necessary to stay upright. More than that, my Sunday visits to my mother, legitimate under the rules as care work, provided the only meaningful face-to-face interactions I would have during that period, even if the lower halves of our faces were masked.

Even now it continues. Every second Sunday I change her duvet. Most weeks I fix (or try to fix) something, an iPad one visit, a recalcitrant filing cabinet the next. Every week I bring meals I’ve prepared to her requests (cauliflower cheese was an early favourite; latterly we’ve been exploring curries). There are often other items to source too: shoes, hanging files, birthday cards. She presents me with a to-do list when I arrive – she calls it an ‘agenda’ – and we work through it. Then, at the end of my visit, we allow ourselves to relax, she on the sofa, me in one of the safely distant chairs. And we talk.

Our starting point is usually a piece of news from the past week, whether small and personal or global and transformative. These things are anyway linked in unexpected ways. In the first months, our battles to persuade service providers to transfer household accounts into our names dragged on as the virus and furlough schemes depleted staff numbers. Automated systems failed the easiest of tests. ‘How can I help you today, Andrew?’ ‘I’m Andrew’s widow. Andrew is dead.’ ‘Oh dear, Andrew, that doesn’t sound good.’

For the worst part of the past year, Facebook has shown me advertisements for funeral services, as if the mischance that saw me notifying John’s friends of his death in December, organising his exequies at Golders Green Crematorium in January, Andy’s cremation at the same venue on Valentine’s Day and his memorial at the beginning of March, bespeaks a delicious new pastime. The same algorithms that take me for a funeral hobbyist decide which posts are seen by whom, which propaganda to channel to voters. They may have helped install the populist leaders in the US, Brazil and here in the UK who responded to Covid-19 not with life-saving policies but bluster and blarney.

In the big room with its gallery of paintings, the weekly meetings with my mother unfold against another, grim backdrop, both strange and horribly familiar. As the global toll of the virus rises, we cannot help but understand each death not as a statistic but a sequence of events, a body shutting down, the person there and then not there, never again there, the families distraught and numb, embarking on the same path that we already tread.

Bereavement is an odd phenomenon, full of twists and surprises, nasty ambushes and unexpected dark humour. It is the little things that knock you off course. I work dry-eyed through snowdrifts of ‘sadmin’, but weep when the wifi conks out. One day I call the funeral director to pay by credit card for Andy’s cremation. The man in the accounts department runs through the usual drill: name, credit card number, expiry date. For a second I genuinely don’t know whether he means for the card or my beloved. Laughter, inappropriate and all the harder to control for that fact, wells up. The man takes my thickened voice as a sign of grief. For days afterwards, I find myself sniggering.

We are aware, my mother and I, that we discomfit well-wishers. Most people are scared to death of death and unsure how to talk about it, yet curiously our composure unnerves them more than tears. We appear functional and less fragile than they expect. Might our similar reactions and coping mechanisms point to universalities about grief and loss or to the specifics of our family’s history and culture? We don’t know, but assume a mixture of both. As a child, my mother lost her father and brother in quick succession. When my sisters and I were children, the stepfather she loved took his own life.

These experiences surely shaped her and her parenting, informing my own conspicuous self-sufficiency, which Andy sometimes found difficult. (Oh, my love, if only you knew how much I need you.) A run of deaths among those closest to me from my thirties onwards, excluding John and Andy, four alone in the past four years, prepared me for widowhood in two significant ways: I already knew grief to be as mobile as a cat on a cantilevered glass roof and I already knew that the lovely dead never leave us. If we learn not to flinch from the pain, the lovely dead enfold us, tree to railing.

It is because of this knowledge, accrued and unasked for, that I agreed to write this book. You cannot be proofed against grief. You can be prepared for it, for the inevitability of loss and the screeching arrival of its outriders: disruption, despair and dread tape, the red tape of death. Our culture, in recoiling from death, medicalising it, shoving it behind screens and banning it from polite conversation, does us no favours. For too many, those horsemen come as a nasty surprise, wringing from their targets an anguished ‘good grief!’. My mother and I aspire in sharing our experiences to imbue that cartoon phrase with a different, and constructive, meaning.

Even so, we do not address you in this book from a position of lofty authority. The subject isn’t new to me. I’ve lost too many people and I also wrote, some years back, a book called Amortality that examined the phenomenon of widespread denial not only of death but ageing. Yet such expertise as my mother and I will share with you derives less from research than from the frontline of our own emotions and experiences. We are recent widows, open and vulnerable. Our equanimity is a front, a construct, that we must believe, with time, will add layers and substance. We are allergic to the question ‘And how are you?’, especially if delivered in a sorrow-laden voice, the inquisitor’s head tilted to the side. How should we reply when the answer changes by the hour or do so honestly without resurfacing feelings we have struggled to subdue? The doctrine of letting it all hang out, crying as catharsis, may work for some people. To my mother and me, it brings no relief. For now we aim for functionality rather than intensity. As we will explain later in these pages, you have to relearn how to be before you relearn how to live.

If not for lockdown, we could seek solace from the company of family and friends, hang out, speak if we wished, stay silent if we preferred, talk of important things or TV shows. We can never replace the cradling we miss the most, but we could hug and be hugged. In the eleventh week of lockdown, as I queue for bread, a man walks into me with force and intent. At first all I can think is how angry he is. I realise later that this is the first and only human touch I’ve experienced not just since lockdown, but from the start of social distancing.

Mother’s Day has fallen, with cruel precision, on the eve of lockdown. Boris Johnson reveals during a press conference that he hopes to celebrate with his 77-year-old mum; Downing Street later ‘clarifies’ his remarks to say he means to Skype her. My sisters and I decide on one last visit together to our mother, in her living room, embracing not her but its edges. It is already decided that I will be the only one of us during lockdown to cross her threshold. My middle sister Lise will lock down with her son. My eldest sister, Cassie, and stepsister Catherine A are key workers. Cassie, as duty manager of a municipal stable, is responsible with a small team for keeping eighty-eight horses fed, watered and, in the enforced absence of clients, exercised. Catherine A teaches.

(A quick side note here: memoirs, by their nature, are messy, the contents shaped not for ease of storytelling but by random circumstances. When they married, my mother and John created a family of five daughters, two called Catherine. To avoid confusion, my mother and I refer to my stepsister Catherine in this book by her first name and the initial A for Anderson, her surname through marriage.)

My siblings’ commitments mean they have less flexibility than I and more exposure to potential virus-carriers. It is safest for me, alone as I am, to be my mother’s designated carer, not that she would recognise herself or our relationship in that phrase. She is right. I depend on her just as much as she on me.

During this last family gathering before lockdown, she looks smaller than usual. As the conversation moves on to how we will fill our time, Cassie suggests that she should write. At this stage everyone imagines, wrongly, that lockdown promises reams of hours, as empty and full of potential as blank pages. My mother started writing a memoir when she was 11, What Makes My Childhood Fun, gave it up with the death of her father a year later. Recently she resumed the project as an adult, picking up from her early years and continuing into the first part of her marriage to our father. She would send us chapters, fascinating, engaging, sometimes a little unsettling. For her eighty-fifth birthday, Lise had the chapters bound into a book.

In March, a friend from her neighbourhood asks her to start contributing to a website aimed at women over fifty. The words burst out. The new blogger has so much to say, not least about the ways in which older generations are simultaneously patronised and unprotected, instructed to shield and left to die as Covid rips through care homes. The website prefers positive angles, so she exhorts readers to reject reductive ideas about age, drawing on her own experiences and routines as examples. The beneficiary of good genes, exercise and an adult life without significant economic struggles, she remains fiercely active, working, until the virus shuttered theatres, as a freelance publicist. One day I offer to perform a small chore for her. ‘Oh good,’ she says. ‘I’ll use the time to do my staircase walking.’ It turns out she walks up and down her staircase thirty times a day.

Her blogs are good, but they conceal as much as they reveal, an extension of the brave face she turns to the world, its scarlet lipstick applied every morning. There is another woman behind the bravado who longs and aches. On 27 March, ninety-six days after John dies, that woman sits down and writes to him, the first of a series of letters about the events that have roiled our family and the world since he died. In writing to and for my stepfather, my mother lets her defences fall. She writes as if he could answer. She writes without filter.

Until Andy died, I could write that way too. For most of my life, writing had been not just the way I made a living but the way that I lived. Often I would not be sure what I thought or felt until the process of writing gave me clarity. As a journalist and non-fiction author, I immersed myself in research. Writing, like a sculptor’s tools, revealed the shape within the marble. I also wrote for myself, poems and stories and, in the months leading up to Andy’s death, fifty thousand horribly prescient words of a novel, set in a world scarred by a pandemic, about a woman who loses to death the love of her life.

When, at the start of lockdown, my friend Jo messaged me: ‘Tell me you ARE writing a book about these weirdest of grief-blurred days…’, I told her, no. I couldn’t write, but for the eulogy – in the truest sense of the word – that poured forth, without pause or revision, one bleak pre-dawn. Two days earlier, I had watched my love die, twelve minutes between the unhooking of the machines and the extinction of all hope. I would read the eulogy, unchanged, at his memorial. After writing it, I shut the laptop and closed down, though I didn’t realise this at the time. The world had closed down too. In the sensory deprivation of lockdown, untouched and sequestered, no sounds in the flat or outside on the streets but for Thursday nights when we clapped for the NHS that had tried and failed to save him, I lost the connection between words, thoughts and feelings.

It is either coincidence or a measure of how closely bound my mother and I have become that the day I recovered that facility was 27 March. As she composed the first of her letters to John, I set up a new blog, 2020 Vision, on my website and wrote, intimately, about Andy’s death. My conscious reason for doing so was to stave off all those unwanted And how are yous? By answering the question in more detail than anyone asking could possibly wish, making public my innermost thoughts, I sought to preserve my privacy.

I also hoped to scotch rumours about Andy. Perhaps two hours after he died, as I sat with his band members in the atrium of the critical care unit that had been our assembly point for that final week, journalists began calling me for quotes and to ask questions about the manner of his death. The next morning, one of his fans somehow procured my phone number and rang, weeping, looking to me for comfort. As I begged him please not to call again, he interrupted. There was something he must know: what really killed Andy? The internet did its thing too, embroidering the fact that Andy’s band, Gang of Four, had toured in China in November 2019 into a dark tale of Covid and cover-up.

It was true that after Andy’s admission to St Thomas’s on 18 January, doctors had asked about his travels, briefly considering whether he might have contracted the novel coronavirus that even now locked down Wuhan, but the timelines, as we then knew them, appeared to rule this out. ‘He did not, as online conspiracists allege, die from Covid-19,’ I wrote in that first blog, ‘but he had an underlying condition, sarcoidosis, that would have put him at high risk. The immunosuppressants he took to manage it laid him open to the pneumonia that proved implacable. He did not die from Covid-19 but his death, in many details, resembled that of a Covid-19 fatality, respiratory failure, the battle to keep him alive long enough to give him a chance of life.’ Later I would question that assertion, and begin to investigate, to contemplate dreadful possibilities. This is a story I also tell in this book, not least because it has to be told. If Andy had in fact been killed by Covid, then the timelines and basis for the public health response were wrong. There was a sharply personal realisation too, that John – officially the victim of ‘hospital-acquired pneumonia’ – might also have succumbed to it, one of many thousands of Covid dead unrecognised in official statistics.

This thought, I was aware, would destabilise my mother and not just for the obvious reason that it would force her to revisit John’s death. Something odd happens when the person you love most in the world dies: all at once they are nowhere and everywhere, absent and omnipresent. Andy, essence of Andy, Andyness permeates every aspect of my life, every action and interaction. He is in the cutlery drawer, in its unfeasibly large collection of implements for opening oysters. He is, as you would expect, in the music studio in our basement. He is in every bar of soap in the flat, not one of them bought, all nicked from hotel bathrooms, a habit he picked up from touring. He is in the wardrobe, on a shelf holding hundreds of pairs of identical slimline underpants. A market stall near our house sold these cheaply and Andy, for unfathomable reasons, reacted like a shopper during a pandemic, stockpiling those pants.

This Andy is gloriously flawed. He has not yet been polished by the abrasions of time, sanitised and reworked to inhuman perfection by the human desire to remember the best of the lovely dead. This is the Andy I aim to keep around for as long as I can, and those first days after he dies make clear just how difficult this will be. Questions about Covid, at this stage, aren’t persistent, but interest is. He is a public figure, all the more so in death. Across the world, he prompts banner headlines, makes the early evening news, then the next bulletin and the next and the next, well into the following day. He trends, for twenty-four hours, on Twitter. Then come the obituaries, some good, some sloppy, all of them telling me, telling all of us, ‘this is who Andy was’.

I knew instinctively to resist my own impulse to selective memory, but hadn’t realised how many alternative Andys would challenge mine. Nor could I ignore the impact on my mother and the rest of the family. Barely had my sisters and I gathered around my mother, sought ways to support her in her new widowhood, than we were pulled away, to Andy’s bedside and thence into the depths of our grief. My mother lost and kept losing. She loved Andy, too, so much so that I used to tease her about it. In my eulogy for Andy – reproduced in full later in this book – I mentioned an invitation she once sent to both of us, addressed to ‘Andy Gill plus one’.

Alive, Andy’s charisma could relegate me to my mother’s afterthought. In death, he shadowed and overshadowed her agony, risked blunting and blurring memories of John. My stepfather was a big character, genial, complex, interested in everything, still making up for time lost to a career in sales, first tyres then insurance, that suppressed his curiosity and creativity. His love for my mother was prodigious and hers for him unquestionable, as was clear the moment I first saw them together, forty-something years ago. He was 83 when he died, but still only in the foothills of his ambitions, for himself and, more than that, for others. People remembered him not just as a family member, friend or colleague but as someone who changed their lives for the better. When the noise and anguish around Andy cut across all this love and loss, I worried for my mother, for all this could mean.

She would tell you herself – she will tell you herself in these pages – that these fears were justified, but that together we found ways to navigate our mutual and intersecting grief and to hold on to the Andyness, the Johnness and our shredded hearts. In this room, this living room, we are learning to embrace the things we can’t touch, each other and the lovely dead.

We hope in sharing our insights and learnings to help those of you who have lost or will lose people you love or who wish to know how best to support others in such circumstances. We don’t pretend to have all the answers or even all the questions, but we believe we can impart at least a few essential examples of both. Death has been having a busy time of it, dashing from one household to the next like a malign Santa Claus. We will talk about the additional challenges to grieving and coping during a pandemic, but most of what we discuss is not specific to this period or these circumstances. It is just that Covid has made these things visible. If humanity can drag any positives from this global tragedy, it will be in addressing the deep dysfunctions the virus uncovered. This book is not a manifesto for equality, though it touches, often, on the tragic consequences of inequality. Covid was never, despite the protestations of politicians, a leveller. On the contrary: it revealed the degree to which some lives are valued more highly than others and some deaths, as a result, disregarded. It also showed the manifold ways in which we are unprepared for the end of life and its aftermath.

Every one of us will die; every one of us will have to deal with death. The central purpose of this book is to make the inevitable better and more bearable.

To that end, although this is not in any sense a handbook, my mother and I seek to distil from our interwoven narratives key lessons not only about grief but about some of the practicalities of bereavement. My mother’s narrative comes in the form of the letters she wrote to John and one she addressed to herself. This book came about after I showed her letters to my publisher, with no intention of writing anything myself. I had found in the letters resonances, learned to understand not just my mother’s grief but my own, and in securing for them a wider audience, I hoped that they might help others in the same way.

In the end, I agreed to write too, about two much-missed men, their widows and a search for truth. In telling our story, I aim to offer an antidote to the numbing effect of charts and undifferentiated death tolls, statistics and numbers. Every death matters because every life matters. This is a memoir of love and loss in the time of corona, of relearning to live in my mother’s living room.

Please join us there.

Chapter 1: Loss

My mother held a party in her living room exactly a week before John died. She was beginning to grapple with a challenge that in pre-pandemic days still confronted the bereaved: how to recalibrate changed personal circumstances to an unchanged world. Life, but for the life that meant the most, would go on. The party gave her brief respite from this growing awareness and, in a small way, modelled a new idea of how she might live without John, alone but not isolated, buoyed by friends and family. She could not know that the virus would soon transform the world too, banishing from her living room all society but mine.

These days we play catch-up, we who are grieving. How should we reimagine our lives when everything around us is in flux? One answer, though not mine, is to follow the dictum of recovery programmes, to take one step at a time. You may find this approach helpful and it is certainly my mother’s default. Throughout John’s illness, she resisted giving much detailed thought to a future without him and instead got on with doing the things that were still possible. As a result, his last years were full of light and vibrancy. When he could no longer walk or breathe without external oxygen, she pushed him in a wheelchair. Though she be but little, she is fierce. They maintained a busy social life. She kept up a considerable workload freelancing as an arts publicist and assisting a theatre company to stage a touring production; he painted. In December, however, ringed by fairy lights and festivities, worries crept through the cracks in her composure. How will I do the supermarket run, she wondered aloud. (John drove, she did not.) Who will cook when I entertain? (For years, John had done all the cooking.)

She still held out hope that John might be home for Christmas, not just the coming holiday but the one after that. They had married on 29 December 1980, and, as John’s health deteriorated, she set her sights on celebrating their fortieth anniversary together. He encouraged this optimism, but never fully shared it; he knew he couldn’t be at the drinks party, but chivvied her to go ahead with it. John recognised in my mother’s focus on small things and increments of time a bottomless fear of something much bigger: losing him. He could cope with his own suffering and wanted to forestall hers.

It was a nice party, with five of their closest friends, and Andy and me, he on fine form, returned recently from a tour that had taken him to Australia, New Zealand, Japan and China. He wore an orange shirt and told vivid stories. Everyone mixed easily. The life my mother and John had built together was intensely sociable, blending different generations and strands from their long and variegated histories. After so many years, more than a few of their pleasures and passions had merged, though she ceded the telly to him when the rugby was on. Both knew what they liked and what, most definitely, they did not. They enjoyed parties and lunches and dinners, trips to the theatre and to galleries. They loathed inactivity and Conservativism.

John was given to declaring some of his deepest aversions on Facebook. On 2 December, he had posted an article from the Independent; its headline: ‘Boris Johnson says salary of £141,000 is “not enough to live on”. He will have to learn to live within his means like the rest of us,’ he commented. ‘Poor boy. It might also help if he kept his zip done up when out with women and stopped creating more arseholes.’

The following morning, an ambulance collected him for a pre-arranged appointment at UCLH, a hospital where he was not only a patient but a former governor. For several years he also served in this voluntary capacity at Moorfields Eye Hospital. John believed in the NHS and in active citizenship. If you wanted a better world, you should help to build it.

He may have been relieved when UCLH decided to keep him in. His conditions – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a form of blood cancer – were incurable. Steroids to control the COPD had weakened his bones, too. In constant pain from spinal fractures and flares of cellulitis, dependent now not just on ambulatory oxygen but a large compressor that sat in the living room alongside the other paraphernalia of his illness, he might easily be mistaken for someone without joy or reason to go on. After he died, well-meaning friends would say that ‘he had a good innings’ or that ‘it was his time’ or even that his death came as ‘a merciful release’.

The truth was more intricate. It always is. John loved life, loved my mother, still had things he wanted to do. The last place he wanted to be was in this hospital bed. If, as seemed entirely possible, he had more juice left in him, he wanted to come home, to live in the living room with its step-free access to a bathroom. This would require home care. He knew his medical needs had become too complex for my mother to manage on her own. He also looked on the process of dying much as he regarded Boris Johnson, enraged by the fact and stupidity of it and wanting nothing so much as to see the back of it.

Only in that sense was John, at the end, ready to die. His last words, shouted suddenly at a knot of family talking animatedly and pulling him back to consciousness, were ‘shut up’.

Sometimes it is better to keep quiet. There can be a lot of noise around loss, the rattle of hospital trolleys and crematoria conveyor belts, the empty phrases casting death as a blessing. Yet this is not, by any means, an injunction to avoid substantial conversations around death. One aim of this book is to equip you with a better understanding of how to have such conversations and the importance of doing so.

Twenty people close to me I’ve lost in the past twenty-seven years, eleven of whom, including John, I saw at or near the moment of extinction. Those who could still speak had last messages to impart. On the eve of his death, John instructed me to look after my mother; that same day he mentioned to her that she might find another partner. People often presume to speak for the dead. ‘He would have wanted you to be happy,’ they say. John wanted my mother to be happy. I know this because he told me.

The dying often discuss their own predicaments too, seeking not so much comfort as connection. This is helpful to understand, because those grating platitudes about death come from a place of good intention: we want to make the dying and the grieving feel better. It is the wrong ambition. What we should aim for, instead, is to support the dying and the grieving while death or time do their work.

That starts with being honest. I think of a family meal, already tinged with sadness. My stepsister Catherine A has fallen into the excellent custom, since the death of her older sister Sarah, of organising annual gatherings to mark what would have been Sarah’s birthday. The last of these John attended took place an exact calendar month before he died and three days before Andy’s return from China.

A surprise awaited John at Catherine A’s house, a good one. He knew most of his grandchildren would be there, but hadn’t expected to see Sarah’s eldest, newly back from working in Germany. He chatted with her and with all of us. For much of the evening, he seemed himself, which is to say, convivial, interested, game for any conversation, undaunted by age gaps or the hubbub of people talking across each other. Our combined family is generously endowed with opinions and seldom reticent to share them. Andy sometimes found this wearing, but not John; on the contrary, John was always in the thick of it, the Duke of Debate, the Prince of Polemic, arguing his case, laughing, head thrown back with the joy of it all.

This evening, though, he began to flag, in pain and pained to be talked over in his chair. ‘Oh for goodness sake,’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Don’t you know that I’m dying?’

In that moment, he needed neither distraction nor soothing words, but recognition of his situation – and of his anger. Just one person I have ever seen greet death without a shred of resentment. Andy’s Auntie June, at 92, yellowed with jaundice but comfortable, had lived with meaning and purpose; at this juncture she could no longer do so. Like John, if she must die, she wanted to get on with the business of dying. Her body’s refusal to let go as fast as she would have liked was the trade-off for a robust constitution that had sustained her through world wars, social and cultural revolutions and repeated proofs of the human capacity to ignore the lessons of history.

Most everyone else whose ending I’ve witnessed railed against extinction, even when that outcome was inevitable and decline merciless. At 97, my paternal grandmother Jane resented the rude interruption to her plans, fighting death to the last. By the time cerebellar ataxia finished off my close friend Richard, just before his forty-eighth birthday, it had stripped him of control over movement, then of movement itself, of speech and of functional eyesight. Still, he dug in his heels. My stepsister Sarah might have been expected, as a committed Christian, to accept mortality easily, but her grace in meeting her fate could not mask the distress of being taken, aged 52, from daughters and a new husband, from a blossoming career in politics and an unfinished thesis.

Sarah died in October 2016. A month later, one of my best friends Sara Burns – I distinguish her from my stepsister by referring to her in these pages as Sara B – finally succumbed to cancer too. She had survived melanoma in her thirties, then twenty years ago received the first of a series of breast cancer diagnoses, by chance in the same week a drug overdose killed another close friend. A short time later, Nicky, my best friend since university, while nursing her youngest child discovered a lump in her breast. It was not, as her GP assured her, a swollen milk gland, but cancer. She would survive, but suddenly I found myself alone among our friendship group to be whole of body if not in spirit.

Sixteen more years Sara B kept going, comforting me throughout that period as if I, not she, were in mortal danger. After a later diagnosis, finally at the edge of any therapies she could tolerate, she asked me to help her campaign for assisted dying. She did this not with a view to shortening her life but to enhancing the life she had left by freeing herself from the fear of a bad death. Maurice, my sister Cassie’s close companion, and Barbara, my former editor and mentor, shared this perspective, and like Sara B died in protracted and painful ways. If help had been at hand to terminate their lives, they might have accepted it, but perhaps later in the process than they originally envisaged. Maurice in his final weeks still talked of projects he hoped to see through. Barbara starved herself to try to escape the last, agonising stanza, but right up to the point of taking such drastic action regretted that her life should be over. The cancer ate at Sara B’s bones and seeded strange tumours, one, jutting below her clavicle, that pressed on her heart and lungs. No matter the pain, something – a will to live, a sense of potential – kept her fighting for ragged breath.

Where there’s life, there’s denial, a final bond between the dying and those who love them. Death breaks the compact, leaving the bereaved to face the truth alone. The stillness of a body is unarguable, non-negotiable. In that moment you understand the stories of the parents fighting in the courts to keep alive children for whom no life, in a meaningful sense, will ever be possible. In that moment you realise that there is a form of loneliness more profound than sitting by a bedside, listening to the mechanical breath of your sweetheart. You knew, intellectually, that there was no hope of a recovery, but you hoped for some kind of a reprieve. You would rather hold a warm, insensate hand than no hand at all.

For my mother, who at 12 saw her father fall dead, and less than a year later lost her only sibling, younger brother Kenny, to a lightning strike – a force so savage and sudden that it serves as its own metaphor – the prospect of watching John die was unbearable. She had limited tolerance for hospital visits even when she hoped to bring him home. After UCLH hung the sign of a swan at his door, signalling to staff his impending death and their changed medical priorities – comfort, peace and no unnecessary intervention – she left for the evening. My sisters and I kept watch over him in turn. Catherine A was with him when he died, quietly she said, an alteration almost imperceptible but equally unmistakable.

It was around 9 p.m. that this happened, a little later when Catherine A called. I was to let my mother know. I paused to tell Andy; he and John had bonded deeply over decades and the experience of holding their own within this family. Andy cried, then held me as I, also crying, rang my mother. She guessed the news as soon as she heard my voice, asked a few, leaden questions and rejected my offer to come over. She later explained that she had been watching an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. When she put down the receiver, she returned, numb, to the television to watch the rest of it. I’m not sure what she did for the rest of that night, whether she wept, whether she slept, whether she felt the sharpness of loss or the dull weight of blanketing shock. Certainly her small fears returned and multiplied in the coming days and weeks, no longer bypassing her defences but amalgamating to create a buzzing distraction from her underlying anguish.

My mother and I write elsewhere in this book about the administrative burden that attends every death and the unintended sting of the phrase that repeatedly drops from the lips of those intending comfort: ‘It’s good to be busy’. Oh no it isn’t, not when that busyness consists of a daily battle with institutional incompetence and bureaucracy, compounded by apprehension about whether you can pay for the funeral, household utilities and basics, whether you can afford to stay put or might need to move. All these things we experienced, and we are the lucky ones, privileged, cushioned. We had assets to sell if we needed to, friends and family who offered to help out.

The only slender positive of dread tape and sadmin is that they occupy headspace that might otherwise brim with thoughts of giving up. So it was that my mother’s campaign to retrieve John’s Nectar points and add them to her own card preoccupied her during the aftermath of John’s death and during Andy’s final days. She informed Sainsbury’s customer services of her aims; instead of assisting her, they suspended John’s card. It took interventions by Cassie and by my mother herself to restore the points.

An outsider might have mistaken her focus for a lack of deeper feeling. How could she care about such a trivial matter when she had lost, so recently, her greatest love and must soon bid farewell to the son-in-law she cherished? The answer, of course, is that trivialities helped to divert her from considerations she could not, at that stage, endure. I grasped only when she began to write her post-mortem letters to John how much she had held in check. The contrast between those letters and the eulogy she wrote for John and asked me to read at his funeral is telling. Lovely though the eulogy was, it told their origin story, about how they met in a wine bar, a tale honed with years of repetition, about them but not, in any depth, about him. She was moved – we all were – by the more detailed tribute their friend Ian delivered at the funeral. It pleased her that he had so well understood and appreciated John. It would be many weeks before she could let herself fully access that understanding and appreciation, because to do so would also confront her with the scale of her loss.

My coping mechanism was different, a swift-onset, selective amnesia. Every minute of Andy’s dying is etched in my memory, but the only reason I can tell you how I got home from the hospital that day is that I recently asked the people most likely to have accompanied me. Apparently Nicky brought me back to the flat, watched over me until I had eaten something and declared myself ready to sleep. Try as I might, I cannot remember anything of this. The following days are a mosaic of coloured pieces and clear glass, memories and absences.

These reactions – my mother’s deflection, my erasure – shared key characteristics: they were involuntary and elemental, a retreat from the full realisation of our circumstances, that in delaying and reducing our engagement with grief made us appear more functional than we were, perhaps even a little detached.

There was a look I caught more than once in those early days – surprise, unease – when I behaved in ways that defied expectations of widowhood. It’s not that I danced or sang or made tasteless jokes (though I’m sure I did make tasteless jokes). It was more that I was still recognisably myself. I had noticed this reaction to my widowed mother before I found myself on its receiving end.

So often the bereaved are judged as if there were a right way to do grief. The form that judgement takes is shaped by wider social attitudes. The irony is not lost on me that as the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, it has taken my own widowhood to make me think about how this phenomenon plays out for women. Mourning rituals vary widely across time and cultures but there is a constant: women who survive their spouses are subject to tougher criticisms, customs and rules than other classes of bereaved. ‘If I am to speak of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short admonition,’ said Pericles in his funeral oration for Athenian soldiers who had died in the opening skirmishes of the Peloponnesian War. ‘To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or for evil among men.’ Failure to wear widow’s weeds – black clothing signalling their sad status – earned censure for Victorian widows. Queen Victoria drew criticism for the inverse behaviour, wearing widow’s weeds for forty years after the death of Prince Albert, longer than the prissy era that bears her name deemed seemly.

Navigating popular ideas of widowhood can feel like being Goldilocks without the option of the third bowl of porridge. Whatever we choose risks being too hot or too cold. We risk being judged too hot or too cold. Our cultural heritage teems with steamy, rapacious, dangerous widows and their icy antitheses. Black Widow is both a Marvel assassin and the unrelated titular serial killer of a 1987 movie (‘she mates and she kills’). Jane Eyre’s Mrs Reed stares mistily at a miniature of her dead husband but ignores his dying injunction to look after their niece, Jane, as if she were one of their own children. Instead she abuses her, then exiles her to the brutal Lowood School.

Underpinning these uneasy portrayals is a sense that widows, unlike other women, have power. The opposite remains true in swathes of the world where widows are routinely not only deprived of inheritances but treated as inheritance, to be passed on and enslaved. It was coverture, established in English common law in the twelfth century, that by omission granted to spinsters and widows rights not available to their wedded sisters. Under this convention, a married couple became, in economic terms, a single unit. That union saw possessions and other rights passed from bride to groom, making her by extension his chattel. Spinsters, by contrast, retained economic control and widows regained it, even if as women their rights were curtailed in many other respects.

My mother and I, in our deceptive calm, inadvertently tapped into deep-rooted folk memories and prejudices, though Pericles would surely have approved for all the wrong reasons. None of the people urging us to cry more or organise less did so from a position of anything but love. Others, equally benign in their intent, pushed premature life plans at us. Within days of our husbands dying, friends and family had told us we should move from our respective homes or at least avoid staying in them until we had regained strength. Different people react differently to loss, but both of us drew comfort precisely from the reminders we were warned against. We still do. The presence of our dearest departeds is something neither of us wishes to escape.

In truth we were neither strong nor weak, powerful nor fragile. We became all of those things and still are. My mother surprised herself in finding resilience she didn’t know she possessed and coping with tasks and responsibilities she had for years left to John. Nor did she, in those first weeks, show signs of echoing Queen Victoria and withdrawing from the fray, though grief, lockdown and its closure of public toilets diminished her desire to venture far from home. John died on 22 December. On Christmas Day, she arrived at Andy’s and my flat for the family meal I was cooking in John’s stead. She wore a grey, cable-knit dress, patterned tights and ankle boots, with a sparkling of jewellery and her signature lipstick. She looked, acted and interacted almost as if nothing untoward had happened. Later she would ask me if Andy was all right. She noticed that he picked at his food.

She always notices things, and she has a ridiculously good memory, useful for the purposes of this book. I too used reliably to remember certain things – lists, dates, phone numbers – and accretions of detail that didn’t, at the time, seem to matter. Andy mentioned this facility in an interview with the Sunday Times, published two weeks after he died. The journalist Helen Cullen, who spoke to both of us separately for the newspaper’s ‘Relative Values’ series, later sent me the recording of Andy. So strange and moving it was, hearing him from beyond the grave. He recounted an incident back in the early Nineties at the Blueprint Café near Tower Bridge. ‘We went out one evening to a restaurant and the waiter happened to recognise me from Gang of Four, so he was quite chatty and then he said, “What’s your order, madam? Do you want me to bring the menu back?” Catherine said, “No, I can remember it.” “What, all of it?” “Yes, all of it,” and he replied, “I’ll give you a bottle of champagne if you can remember the whole menu.” So she just recited the whole lot, including what came with everything, like twenty dishes. I knew she could do it, but he was very surprised and produced a bottle of champagne.’

Listening to this recording, I yearned to interrupt Andy, to add a missing element of exposition: the waiter offered to bring the menu back because the dish I’d ordered had run out. And, by the way, his name was Simon. That’s how long-term couples often communicate, speaking across each other, issuing small additions and clarifications to their joint narrative. My mother and John were like that too. If you didn’t know how much they loved each other, you might have thought they were bickering. ‘Oh Anne,’ John would say, rolling his eyes. ‘Which of us is telling this story?’

A sadness in writing this book has been the absence of that affectionate, jousting dialogue, though my mother and I fall into similar habits when we meet in her living room. Are you sure that’s right, we ask each other? Didn’t that event precede this one? In search of answers, I pore over old text messages and WhatsApps, emails and my online diary. There are other resources too, including Andy’s mobile and computer, but I’m inexplicably reluctant to switch them on and startled by the volume of correspondence when I do. Friends and strangers still send him messages to tell him how much he meant to them. Until his number was disconnected, there were voicemails. ‘Andy, I miss you. I wish I had seen you more often. You’ve shaped my life more than you’ll ever know.’

Needs must. I force myself to fire up his computer, look through the calendar on his phone. If only he and John could give you their version of events – and correct my mother’s and mine. In the Sunday Times recording, Andy identifies me as an unreliable narrator. ‘Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it,’ he says. ‘I actually think she gets things wrong when she’s looking back at certain events and I’m going “no that’s not quite how it happened.”’

My mother and I from the outset resolved in telling our stories to stick to the truth as closely as we could, even where it is painful or uncomfortable. My amnesia complicates the process and distresses me for other reasons too. Days have disappeared, but these were anyway disposable, post-Andy days. It is the sense of our life together slipping out of reach that torments me, his scent (I keep an unwashed t-shirt in a Ziploc bag, but it smells more of hospital than Andy), his stories. I drive myself mad, or madder, trying to remember his stories. There’s one he used to tell about his youth involving a mix-up between Tony, a hash-dealing acquaintance, and the dealer’s father, an upstanding, pillar-of-the-community also called Tony. The anecdote always made me laugh. Now I retrieve only fragments: Tony Senior answering the phone to a client of Tony Junior, who requests ‘a pony’ (£25’s-worth) of Junior’s wares; a punchline ending with the Lady Bracknellesque exclamation ‘a gymkhana?!’ Was this tale inherently funny or did the humour, as so often the case, rely on Andy’s delivery?

I remember the name of a waiter from three decades ago. How is it that other small details elude me? These turn out to matter at least as much as the big stuff. Yes, yes, so Andy was an extraordinary guitarist, a ground-breaking musician, something of a genius. Right now, my dearest wish is to find him in the studio, disturb him even if he’s writing another trailblazing work, make him tell me, one last time, the story of Tony’s dad.

That last Christmas dinner, he told no stories. He was quiet, abstracted. My attention was on my mother. My sisters and I had already begun to discuss with her what practical support we could offer. Catherine A would work with Cassie on the estate and with me on organising the funeral; Lise would handle the wake. On 27 December, I paid a visit to A. France & Son, the funeral director in Lamb’s Conduit Street that three years earlier had handled the ceremony for Sara B, under instruction from me and her children. On 6 February, I would return to A. France for a third time to ask them to organise a cremation for Andy. I should have requested a bulk discount.

Death is monstrous. Sometimes it is funny in a monstrous kind of way. The fates that conspired to snatch John and Andy, then impose a nationwide lockdown amid a global pandemic, were having a right old laugh.

Chapter 2: Denial

‘I always knew I would lose you, but I never told you of my fears; of the night, six months into our relationship, when you curled up to me, your skin so smooth. When I reached for the light, I spotted a lesion on the nape of your neck, black as the future, obviously a melanoma. I loved you too much to deprive you of a last untroubled sleep, so said nothing, hit the switch and lay awake beside you for hours, dreading the dawn and what lay beyond that dawn. Such a strange thing: I wasn’t neurotic. You can testify to that. I took risks with my own life. I still do. Yours seemed more fragile, even then. Of course, when I looked again, at first light, I could see that the mark was not a mole, but a piece of wax paper, the corner of a Mars wrapper. You always did like to eat chocolate in bed.’

I wrote these words in August 2019, part of a novel that now will never be published and probably never deserved to be. In my reimagining of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the Time Traveller – a Silicon Valley tycoon – tricks the Narrator into accompanying him to a future shaped by a global pandemic. The Time Traveller deploys his technology in a self-aggrandising mission to tackle problems created by technology. The Narrator sees another possibility: she might bend time to save her partner of many years, who is dying.

When I embarked on the novel, months ahead of the first reports of an outbreak in Wuhan, the pandemic and its impact were fiction, my descriptions of the melanoma-that-wasn’t and the partner who ate chocolate in bed, autobiography. The Narrator spoke in my voice and of my deepest terrors.

I suppose that in articulating these terrors, I hoped to stop them from materialising. Yet something else also compelled me to write – the absence of any other outlet. Andy was my closest companion. Our working lives could be demanding, but we always made time to talk. We wrote in adjacent rooms, cooked together, ate together, spent evenings lounging together, with friends or just the two of us. We agreed to leave serious discussions for daylight hours and our weekend walks. As we strolled, nothing was off bounds – nothing except the most serious topic of all. He would always shut down conversations that reminded him we couldn’t live, as we were, forever.

‘Rock musicians have shorter lives than other people.’ This is the bald observation of an academic paper published in the scientific journal Advances in Gerontology and based on comparing the average age of death of nearly fifty thousand members of the creative professions.

Until the last two years of Andy’s life, he seemed pretty healthy for a rock musician whose tours were more notable for their gourmet riders than for abstinence. Other bands argued with promoters about smoke machines and lasers; Andy pushed for good food and fine white wines, properly chilled. I remember his exasperation when Glastonbury, on a hot summer’s day, ran out of ice.

At home, by mutual agreement and his personal choice, he lived more moderately, eating well and exercising daily. In his twenties, he underwent an emergency operation to excise a cancerous tumour and, because this was lawsuit-happy America, a string of lymph nodes. The experience left him with a scar from groin to sternum and clips holding him together that could be felt below the skin years later. It may also have underpinned his aversion to end-of-life discussions and his surprising lack of arrogance. Performers can be brittle and needy; he was neither, though he often did tell me, in jest, how lucky I was to be with him and that he was a genius. I would laugh, but both statements were true. We were always lucky, something I felt moved to acknowledge in a statement on the day he died: ‘This pain is the price of extraordinary joy, almost three decades with the best man in the world.’

We met in 1991 at a ‘page forty-six party’. Invitations, in those analogue days, had been extended to people living in the part of Islington mapped out on that page of the London A–Z. Neither of us did.

Our paths crossed by stroke of luck and our good fortune manifested itself in other ways too. No matter that we had marched against her: we belonged to the minority of the population that had thrived during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The venue, a warehouse flat with a suspended pool replacing one wall to create a human aquarium, spoke to the affluence of our intersecting social circles, musicians and writers, artists and actors.

Wealth cannot shield you from death. I think, now, of friends at that party. Our hosts were Richard Paxton and Heidi Locher, architects of the flat and of other buildings including Soho Theatre. Richard died suddenly at 49; so too one of their guests, the author Douglas Adams. The barrister, Jane Belson, later Douglas’s wife, was also there that night. She would outlive him by a mere decade.

Yet money certainly gives you better odds of living longer. A life expectancy gap of nearly a decade for men and two-thirds’ that period for women separates the UK’s wealthiest from the poorest. The income gap plays out in bereavement too, in the scrabble to meet the exorbitant costs of death, financial and emotional.

Such thoughts had never troubled my life as I wandered through Rick and Heidi’s flat and laughed at an unfeasibly handsome man who stood next to the buffet, a serving bowl under his arm, scooping out trifle with his hand. Andy hadn’t been able to find a plate or cutlery. We started talking and eventually ended up on the terrace, where he serenaded me with The Drifters’ song, ‘Up on the Roof’. ‘And if this old world starts getting you down,’ he sang, ‘there’s room enough for two.’

We met again the following weekend and never looked back – or much into the future. We were busy and happy. Then, nine years later, a cold wind blew through our Eden. Andy’s university friend Yannis didn’t mean to fall from the flat roof of his apartment block; drunk and arguing with a lover, he lost his footing. The singer Michael Hutchence hadn’t planned to die either, succumbing to a suicidal impulse after a sleepless night and a turbulent few years. Andy and he had been working on an album together; we were godparents to his daughter with Paula Yates. His death left Paula, who was both a cause of the turbulence and Michael’s sanctuary from it, with a double burden of loss and guilt, and ensnared in a skein of administrative wrangles. After one of many rescue missions to her house, summoned by some terrible crisis or her intractable sorrow, I returned home to find Andy in the kitchen, doing the washing up. ‘Do you think we should get married?’ he asked. I supposed so. We had seen in Paula’s struggles that love counted for little in the eyes of the law or the rapacious music industry. She attended our wedding in September 1999. A year later, our friend Jo found her cold and final in her bed, the victim of an accidental overdose.

Michael’s death had plunged Andy into despair and me into coping mode. I tended to him, to Paula, to her daughters. Paula’s death took my breath away – at least half an hour I gasped for air when we woke to the headlines. Then it propelled me into a spiral of activity that I couldn’t, at the time, name. All I knew was that I had never been more productive. I seemed to require neither food nor sleep and often took long walks at night. Scared of further and greater loss, I recoiled from the person I most feared losing, the only person who could comfort me, deluding myself that I needed neither him nor comfort.

Hello grief. So cruel you can be, tearing apart families, setting lovers against each other, urging people in the teeth of involuntary life changes to make more and faster change. Andy and I were lucky, again. After a difficult time, we found our way back, held each other tighter. Others are less fortunate. Grief poisoned my mother’s relationship with her own mother, Ruth. How could she, a child already reeling from the death of her father, cope with the loss of her little brother, much less understand Ruth’s anguish? My mother felt – still feels – that given a choice between her children, my grandmother would have preserved Kenny’s life, directing the lightning bolt at her eldest instead.

These days grief is my familiar, a shadow I know as well as myself; that is to say, not quite as well as I think. Some days its shape-shifting ways still surprise me, a bruise that inflicts bruises. My spatial awareness is shot. Yesterday I walked into a table. This morning, I took a break from writing this chapter and in the kitchen, beneath a new portrait of Andy created in tribute to him by the street artist Shepard Fairey, danced, sobbing, to ‘Up on the Roof’. Another day grief might sit on my chest, immobilising me in an echo of Andy, on his last day at home, laid out and struggling for breath. It isn’t an easy companion, is no substitute for the companionship it replaces. Yet it is more than the price of love. It is love. We, the bereaved, must learn not just to live with it, but to make it welcome.

At 56, Andy was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that can affect any part of the body but in his case targeted the lungs. Initially he mistook his minor breathlessness for a return of the asthma that had troubled him since childhood. He consulted a specialist, George Santis, Professor of Thoracic Medicine and Interventional Bronchoscopy at King’s College Hospital and a consultant physician for Guy’s and St Thomas’s, who prescribed a course of steroids that quickly sorted him out. Recurrences were mild. Then came a bout that hit him harder and responded more slowly to treatment. The steroids, in higher doses, eventually did their stuff, but at a cost. He couldn’t sleep, using the fevered nights to write a new album, developing diabetes as a side-effect of the drug and losing lung capacity to scarring. Professor Santis regularly checked on his progress.

That February, I joined Andy at the start of a Gang of Four tour that would cross the US from the west coast to the midwinter east, culminating in New York. Our arrival coincided with a polar vortex that turned most of the US into a snow globe and unleashed on California sleeting rain. Water dripped from the skylight of the tour bus, pooling on the floor. Already Andy seemed too weak for the slog ahead, endless days on the road, the load-ins and soundchecks, the interviews, the kinetic performances, the backstage revelries abbreviated only once the load-out was completed and the bus set off again. The gigs, though, were brilliant and he was in his element. At The Roxy in Los Angeles, flanked by Shepard Fairey and the musician Tom Morello. I watched Andy smash a guitar and make magnificent noise.

After I flew home, his health declined. In Denver, the altitude, in combination with his reduced lung function, sent him to hospital. He managed to play that night. As the band traversed America, he got sicker, blaming the cold air. By the time they reached Woodstock, he had lost feeling in his legs and had to be carried on to the stage. The next day, his bandmates rebelled, refusing to perform unless he obtained medical assurance that he was fit to do so. He called me from a New York hospital, pleading with me to persuade them to change their minds. Instead I backed them and, after his return to England, urged him to seek medical attention. Our GP took one look at him and sent him straight to hospital. He was there for a few days, then discharged himself. He had work to do.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that I wasn’t alone in my intimations of his mortality. Andy’s nominal reason for concealing his illness was that promoters would stop booking him if they thought him a bad bet. When I study photos of him from that time, I see fear in his eyes. He did his best to maintain focus on the present – Live In the Moment, as he punningly titled a recent live album – and to trust in a future mapped out in tour dates and deadlines. ‘The doctors will just tell me to take more steroids,’ he argued, or ‘All it needs is a bit of warm weather and I’ll be fine.’

When spring arrived, he appeared to be right. We attended a wedding in Hastings in May, a second wedding in the town in July, enjoyed walks along the clifftops. That summer, staying with friends in Spain, I took a photograph of Andy against a fresco in the former monastery of Santes Creus, a skull above his head. In September, in Athens, we celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary and twenty-ninth year together. The next day we wandered contentedly around the archaeological museum, surrounded by reminders of human transience. Gang of Four played in the city that night. It was the last great performance of theirs I would see, the last anniversary Andy and I would spend together. In my bones I knew what was coming. So why did I not try harder to talk to him about it?

Fear of death is rational. Our responses to that fear more rarely are. We try to outrun mortality, to shield ourselves from the clear, sharp pain of loss. Let me share with you, from a place of pain and in the story of Andy’s death, a lesser ambition: to remove not the pain, but the avoidable stress and distress that too often cloud it.

In the years we were together, Andy and I built and made and created things that required effort and dedication: music, books, campaigns and organisations, and a flat above a recording studio in a space without planning permissions for either. We obtained those permissions and navigated any number of more complex challenges that confronted us during our working lives, including legal skirmishes and lawsuits. We knew our way around forms and institutions. We were well prepared for anything life threw at us – except death. Andy died before making a Will or sharing his last wishes or passwords or the secret of how to fix the television when it goes on the blink.

In a later chapter I touch on the difference planning for the end of life can make for the dying and those they leave. First I must deal with something far more uncomfortable. Did Andy and I, in trying to ignore his fate, advance it? What if instead of collusive silence, I’d offered him a way to admit to and address our mutual fears? Imagine if we’d known how to talk about death as easily as we debated politics or the books we were reading or, a question that preoccupied us, what to have for dinner.

It wasn’t until November, nine months after his hospitalisation and apparent recovery, that I realised quite how tightly braced I was against a relapse. My sisters and I had plotted with our stepmother to arrange a surprise visit to my father on his ninety-first birthday. As we sat in his house in Manchester, a WhatsApp came through from Gang of Four’s tour manager, a photo of the band accepting the applause of the crowd with the simple caption, all in capital letters: ‘WE DID IT!’ I surprised everyone, including myself, by bursting into tears.

The day before, I had messaged the tour manager, concerned that Andy sounded breathless on the phone. ‘Beijing is very cold!’ the tour manager replied. ‘We are all a bit short of breath.’ Now the tour was over, in grand style, a catalogue of full houses and five-star reviews, and my love was coming home.

We’d developed a trick over the years, Andy and I. Instead of reuniting in our flat at the end of his tours, we would book ourselves into a hotel, allowing twenty-four hours to catch up on neutral territory before he crashed back into a space that in his absence was always tidy and quiet. It is tidy and quiet now.

On this occasion, I broke with tradition. I just wanted him back. He looked tired but his lungs didn’t sound too bad, an observation confirmed by his thoracic specialist, Professor Santis, the following week. The day he imparted this encouraging news, my mother took the call from my stepfather to tell her that he wouldn’t be coming home from UCLH for the time being. We commiserated with her and agreed to join her two nights later for a muted celebration of her birthday at a restaurant booked for the occasion by John.

The following days and weeks will be pocked with hollow celebrations, Christmas parties, birthdays, feeble hope vainly flapping its tinsel wing. We visit John in hospital. When my mother is in earshot, he talks of a fictional future. After he dies, the festivities continue. Andy and I bring in the new year with family and friends in Italy. At midnight, someone hands out sparklers. I watch his burn down and cannot stand the symbolism. By this stage it is no longer possible to pretend that he is even remotely OK. If I’d realised how sick he was, I’d never have agreed to travel to this undulating countryside, where paths we used to walk taunt him with their cambers and gradients. On our return to Gatwick, he can no longer manage its flat expanses either. I find a wheelchair and somehow manoeuvre him, our twin cases and computer bags to the train station. I’m lucky, I think, to be strong, just like my mother, who until so recently had wheeled John about the place. I will be Andy’s carer, as she was John’s. Already I am shedding work commitments, rearranging my life to the service of his.

Three years, my mother looked after John. I tell myself I will have longer to tend to Andy. He was born amid a hubbub of new year fireworks. In Italy, at the moment his sparkler splutters its last, he has turned just 64, hardly any age at all.

He and I support each other in our denial. Our fantasies are not the same, though Andy is beginning to acknowledge the possibility that he may have to make some changes. He keeps booking tour dates and working on music, but he also starts looking at property in warmer climates, still trying to convince himself and me that cold air is the culprit. I imagine living in such a place, tranquil and content, enabling Andy to write music. I know that he shouldn’t tour again and wonder what it will take to make him accept this too.

At night, pipe dreams give way to living nightmares. Andy’s specialist has given him a small, portable oxygen supply for the last tour. He didn’t need it on the road; now he depends on it. We sleep to the hiss and pop of its pump.

He takes higher doses of steroids and an immunosuppressant, Methotrexate, to try to dampen what we assume to be a particularly acute episode of sarcoidosis. Despite the steroids, he remains lethargic, dozing through the days and barely moving from our bedroom. When I persuade him to see our GP, she tells him he should be in hospital. He refuses. I discover after Andy’s death that he ignored the same recommendation from Professor Santis. Andy insists that hospitalisation will make him worse. He wants to be at home.

Much later – too late – I will ask questions that I should have pursued, without let-up and to their logical conclusion, no matter how much Andy and I would have hated the answers. The reply I receive from Professor Santis, in its caution and kindness, tells me what I needed to know: that there is a chance, however slight, that the outcome could have been happier if we had acted sooner. ‘It is difficult to know if Andy’s touring contributed to his deterioration,’ he writes. ‘I suspect not… I doubt again if an earlier admission would have made much difference. Unfortunately, it is impossible to answer with any certainty.’

On 18 January, I find Andy slumped in a chair, conscious but colourless. Finally I tell him I am calling an ambulance and even then we bargain. First he must have a bath. Then he asks for a glass of Puligny-Montrachet. I refuse and will always upbraid myself for that pointless rigidity. The paramedic suspects sepsis and summons a blue-light ambulance to take us to St Thomas’s hospital.

Even then we delay its departure. Andy wants his computer with him, external hard drives, address book. He’s planning already to work from his hospital bed. This, too, he will do, right until the moment he is forced to stop. He will cease building a fictive future only when he can no longer breathe.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.