Living With Grief

Personal grief experiences

Esther Rantzen recently presented a personal and sensitive documentary on Channel 5 exploring living with grief. Her husband the broadcaster Desmond Wilcox died 20 years ago.

We are introduced to 5 people all with different experiences of death and all at different stages of mourning. They talk to Esther one to one and share their respective stories of grief.  Esther, by the accounts of her children, has been in denial. She has worked feverishly since the death of her husband. She acknowledges herself that grief has been a struggle for her. Boxes of Desmond’s work, his files, his videos and his many awards have remained untouched tucked away in a barn adjacent to her home. Her reluctance to go through them is simply explained:

“I don’t want to say goodbye to this, it would be like losing him all over again”

I learnt from this documentary that grief is not something that can be solved. It is a process that each person goes though in their own way and in their own time, it cannot be rushed or hurried. In dealing with grief there is no one size fits all. It’s also something that needs to be talked about with kindness, openness and curiosity.

The more we talk about death and grief, the more we will remove the anxiety that surrounds it. At the end of the programme, we are shown Esther walking through a room transformed, no longer full of Desmond’s boxes and files but now a playroom for her grandchildren. I can of course only speculate on what lead her to this change, but perhaps talking openly to all those people about her own grief and hearing about theirs helped towards her recovering a little bit more?

Resources
Julia Samuel’s book Grief Works
www.juliasamuel.co.uk
www.cruse.org.uk
www.nationalbreavementpartnership.org
www.itsgoodtotalk.org.uk
www.childbereavement.org.uk