Virginia Ironside - Youll Get Over It: The Rage of Bereavement

PENGUIN BOOKS

YOULL GET OVER IT

Virginia Ironside has been a journalist all her life. She was a rock columnist for the Daily Mail in the 1960s, a television reviewer and a columnist for teenage magazines. She has also written several novels and childrens books. She has been a problem page editor at Woman and the Sunday Mirror for many years. She also has a regular column in the Independent. Divorced, with one son, she lives in London.

The Rage of Bereavement

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Hamish Hamilton 1996

Published in Penguin Books 1997

Copyright Virginia Ironside, 1996

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192833-3

For

Janey and Christopher, my two strange parents

Phyl, from her Toosie

Danny, who told me about wild flowers, and Kum-Kum who wasnt such an old stick as I thought at the time

Rene and Nellie Ironside, my headmistress and great-aunt with a Scottish sense of duty, and her more light-hearted sister

Robin Ironside, painter and genius

Kevin Macdonald, who jumped from a roof

Diana Holman Hunt, whom I loved very much

Sebastian Walker, who died too young

Bobby Birch, my first boss

Diana Lyle, who wanted to die, and whom I still miss dreadfully

Jimmy Taylor, the first leaf off the tree

Delia, Miriam and Gemma, my three little cousins who died in a fire

Peter Black, who died when I was writing this book, two years after his wife (She first deceased, he for a little tried/ To live without her, liked it not, and died)

without whom I would never have had to go through all this

Before my father died I thought I knew a bit about bereavement. And I did. A bit. I knew about the shock and the crying; I knew about feeling special, and I had also got a whiff of my own mortality. I knew, intellectually at least, about the anger people are meant to feel when theyre bereaved, and in my job as an agony aunt I would blithely send out leaflets to bereaved people leaflets which told of the stages of grief and were full of kindly, sympathetic advice.

Then my father died. And nothing made sense any more. I was in a new world, with a new language and new emotions. Perhaps he was resting in peace, but I was in utter turmoil. I was stunned, and crazy. Not with grief, which, it turned out, was only a small part of the whole ghastly process, but with other shameful feelings of rage, greed, loathing, hatred for life and with new, surprising interests in religion and the afterlife

In the same way that a relationship between two people consists of much more than just romantic love (it may not include romantic love at all) and probably includes all kinds of complications projection, sexual attraction, emotional crutches, trust, neurotic and selfish needs so there is a great deal more to bereavement than just grief, which is what, of course, makes it so difficult.

As one who tends to find that books offer me the most comfort, understanding and good sense, I read and I read and I read, trying desperately to understand what I was feeling. I devoured every newspaper interview with bereaved people, and read as many books on bereavement as I could. And with a few exceptions in which the authors shared their personal experience, nearly every book was written as if by an interested anthropologist about another world. Detached. Patronizing. And often, it seemed to me, dishonest.

Most of them enraged me. From each one oozed, it seemed, a gluey sentimentality, every bit as schmaltzy as any Pre-Raphaelite picture of a woman lying prostrate on a grave. In one, the sentimentality might come as a comfort kit advising the reader to speak to her mom as if she were in a chair, and say goodbye, or write her dead dad a letter telling him how she loved him; in another it came in sickly paeans of praise to the enriching effects of pain, as inappropriate as extolling the nutritional effects of cyanide; in another it came in the queer, flowery and sometimes almost declamatory language that bereavement brings out in people Courage, sometimes, I do not have, wrote Daphne du Maurier, when writing of her feelings about her husbands death, with all the cumbersome pomposity of a newly elected mayor. There were too many words around like mourning, healing, weeping, lamenting, wounds that opened anew not to mention a lot of guff about seasons; or the sentimentality came in poems like Canon Hollands famous piece of nonsense (entitled Death is Nothing at All) which claims that the dead person is only in the next room and that: All is well.

After my fathers death I wanted to write a book that told the truth, a truth which says: All is not well. Bereavement is a beastly business. Or, as one man I talked to put it: Death stinks.

It was only more recently that I discovered I was not the only one to feel like this. And it seemed that, perhaps as members of a Western lapsed Christian society, bereaved people are in increasing turmoil about their feelings, and, perhaps, willing to be more honest about the darker side of bereavement than they used to be.

I found that academic studies seemed to ignore feelings and emotional responses, and that I had to go to more literary sources for any understanding of the underlying relationships, wrote Valerie Smith recently in a moving piece included in Death of a Mother: Daughters Stories.

few bereavement studies take into account inappropriate negative responses, except the common phrase a happy release when the deceased had suffered much pain and ill-health. In anecdotal sources, bereaved middle-aged children share my feelings of liberation into true adulthood; but such feelings of liberation are not touched on in academic works I would like to see research that asks questions about rage and anger, about the forbidden feelings, the unacceptable responses to death and bereavement. In learning to cope with the death of a parent, we begin to face the reality of our own mortality. It would have helped me to understand the situation better if I had been able to find fuller, more truthful accounts of the experience of mid-life bereavement. I would have felt less guilty, less ashamed.

When one is bereaved, of course it is quite natural to fume at all bereavement books and research, even, or perhaps especially, those that offer any kind of advice or comfort two of my helpful bereavement books actually bear my enraged bite-marks chewed into the covers before being flung across the room. Perhaps this book will come in for the same treatment from you. Nothing on bereavement can be right for everyone, and many unhappy people will prefer a misty-eyed collection of helpful poems (of which there are some very touching ones, and, I have to add, why not?). And while I have not, I hope, failed to put the boot in to some of the unhelpfully rigid current thinking on bereavement, it would be too cruel to give the reader the idea that books that offer comfort and help are useless. Not at all. It often depends on ones mood, anyway, whether the advice and attitudes come across as a load of rubbish, or as sensitive insights. When youre bereaved youre so all over the place that you might find a book heart-warming on a Tuesday and mindless nonsense on a Wednesday.