More Rosebud - we talk to Julia Samuel MBE about grief, bereavement and loss

0:21Welcome to More Rosebud. More Rosebud is what happens on a Tuesday and sometimes on a Tuesday it's me and Harriet and I'm reading my diaries. And last time we had Michelle, my wife, as a kind of pop-up guest. She happened to be here and she happened to contribute. And did people like her contribution? Well, I can tell you that I loved it, obviously. Well, that's a nice thing to say because it's really you and me. And I thought maybe actually, did you feel Michelle was here usurping your place. You didn't mind. I thought everything she said was fascinating. I mean, she added a whole other perspective on your life, on your parents.

1:08I think all the comments she made were... And it was very interesting to hear what she was up to in 1968. Her work, working at the BBC, that was great, wasn't it? And the listeners loved it. We've had lots of great feedback. So tell Michelle. Well, we want to please the listeners. That's really what we want to do. And also we want to respond to the concerns of listeners, which actually brings us to today's episode, which is a bit different. One of the subjects we have talked about or been aware of increasingly since we began, the idea, if you're new to Rosebud, the idea began a couple of years ago.

1:43I simply thought, I want to do a podcast. I want the first question to be, what is your very first memory? And then simply unpack the lives of people from that starting point. Harriet became part of it. Harriet thought of the name Rosebud, I think. And then we've been making the podcasts, and they've been growing increasingly popular, which is lovely. But one of the themes that seems to have been recurring is people conscious of childhood loss, conscious that when they were children, they either, they lost one, or in some cases, both their parents. They lost a parent either through divorce or separation, through distance, through somebody working away and not being very much to them, or sometimes they lost them through death.

2:31So childhood bereavement has become a theme. And it's something that Harriet has spoken about quite openly, because you lost your mother to suicide when you were how old? Thirteen. Thirteen. And obviously, we say often a childhood lasts a lifetime well i know knowing you quite well now that that aspect of your childhood of course has lasted a lifetime so today this was your idea the guest tell me who we're having why we're talking to them what it's going to be about why is this going to be an episode that's a bit different well it's it was it wasn't really my idea it was actually a and she julia samuel who's the guest today who's a psychotherapist was suggested by lots of listeners so when we first I think we started between us kind of ruminating about let's do an we should do an episode on childhood bereavement and people kept emailing us with their stories in fact we're going to read an email shortly about a childhood loss and this name Julia's name kept coming up and so I emailed her and we're very lucky because people love you and they love Rosebud she said absolutely happy to come along and so we're lucky because she's very very eminent and distinguished in this field.

3:52Well, my thinking about it has been, and I hope you'll be happy with this, that I would talk to her in the normal way, first of all. And then if you're comfortable, you will, I know, want to contribute. You may have questions of your own you want to ask her, and you may like to share some of your story. But that is up to you as we progress. Tell me, who has written? I mean, so many people have written about this. Do you want to share this letter right away? Yes, I've got an email here, which just happens to be relevant to today's episode. Who is it from? It's from someone called Simon Stevenson, who lives in the US, but he's from the UK originally.

4:29Dear Harriet and Giles, your comments about bereavement during childhood resonated with me, but not in terms of a relative or even someone I was particularly close too. When I was 12 years old and in my second year at Beverley Grammar School, I witnessed my friend Wayne Hobbs being struck by a car while we were out on a cross-country run. Wayne and I often ended up running with each other during these runs as we fell into a similar pace and one day I was standing next to Wayne when we stopped across a road. We waited for a car to pass, it did, and then waited for a second car to pass that I thought Wayne had seen, but he hadn't.

5:20As he stepped out, I lifted my arm to try and stop him, but missed him completely and the car struck him. Wayne died a day or so later in hospital. The details of the event are as crystal clear in my mind as if it were yesterday. Even though Wayne and I were not particularly close friends, we were always on friendly terms with each other. He was in a different form to me, but when it came to running, we usually fell into a similar pace. Even though this tragic accident was over 40 years ago, I don't think there has been a month go by when I haven't thought of Wayne. About five years ago, I was in therapy and Wayne's story came up.

6:02I never thought such all-encompassing grief was possible for someone I knew so little about and from so long ago. We were just running friends, not close friends, but I liked him and we got on. He was a good kid. Your point about talking through grief really hit home. I recall my father telling me that Wayne had died. My dad was extremely gentle with me and tried as best he could to help me, but things were very different back then and you just didn't talk about those feelings. There was no therapy or counselling. I pushed those difficult to handle feelings deep down inside me not wanting to talk about anything to do with them and yet Wayne has consistently popped back into my memory regularly for over 40 years.

6:50Talking through the grief doesn't prevent the sting of the hurt you feel but over time it can be a salve that reduces that sting. reminding people to talk and to listen is crucial in coming to terms with life-altering events and i truly appreciate your openness and willingness to talk about your own experiences kindest regards simon well that is intriguing isn't it because it just chimes in so much with what julia is going to talk about today lots to unpack here so julia is a world authority she is she's written a famous book isn't she she's written a book and has an app and a website called grief works grief works clever yeah um but i think she became interested in particularly in grief and bereavement when she worked atst mary's paddington and helped lots of parents who'd lost children so actually not people that were bereaved in childhood but people who lost children which is probably the worst kind of loss and she i think learned a lot about what people need when they lose something that important to them.

7:57And she's, yeah, so she's well known in this area and very, very wise. So that's our special guest today on More Rosebud, right now. Actually, before we start, this is Harriet with a quick message to say that in this episode, there is some discussion of suicide, not a great deal, but in relation to the death of my mum. And I just wanted to let listeners know before you start that this subject does come up later in the podcast. I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation. And here's Giles to say... Cue the music.

8:44Well, as Harriet and I were agreeing a moment ago, we're very excited about today's guest. It's somebody special and somebody who's here for a particular reason. And the reason in a nutshell, dear guest, Julia, I'm going to introduce you properly in a moment. The reason in a nutshell is this. Over the two years that we've been doing Rosebud, we've come across a lot of our guests who, as part and parcel of their story, have known loss. either the loss of a child in their family. For example, we were with somebody the other day who felt that he was one of five children, but his eldest brother had died in infancy.

9:31And he felt now, 50 years later, that this was what really had caused his parents to separate when he was only three, even though there were five children in all. for surviving, and he was still thinking about this. But we also have had lots of people, and we were thinking who they were, who during lost a parent, and we're still talking about it or thinking about it, either through death or divorce during their childhood. James Dyson was one, Eddie Izzard was one, Christine Scott Thomas was another, Piers Morgan, Brian Cox, the actor Jeffrey Holland another actor Richard Osman Ivor Mountbatten an awful lot of people and so we then heard about you and I heard about your podcast and I heard about your books and then I read this wonderful quotation of yours I don't know if it comes from your grief works book but the line is grief is work extremely hard work but if we do the work it can work for us it enables us to heal and rebuild our lives.

10:42So I think, Julia Samuel, that we are hoping for a positive conversation about the nature of grief, grief in all our lives, particularly grief connected with premature death, either premature because the person was very young, or in the life of the person who is feeling the grief, it came too soon for them. That's what I think we're going to talk about. Are you happy, Julia Samuel, to talk about all of that? I'm very happy, Giles, to talk about all of that. I think it's interesting that you frame it that we want a positive conversation about grief, because probably one of the reasons it is so rarely talked about and is still stigmatized is that people find the pain that is attached to grief very difficult to talk about, and they want a kind of positive spin.

11:38And my take is that in order to heal from grief, we actually have to feel the pain of it, and then that allows us to grow through it. It isn't something that we can make positive. Very good. If you see what I mean. You're an authority. You worked as Mary's Paddington for a quarter of a century. You founded Child Bereanment UK. Okay, you have your very successful book, Grief Works. But before we begin to unpick all of this, I want to ask you a few of our traditional Rosebud Podcast questions to discover, in a way, where your story, why your story has led you to give a lifetime to this really quite challenging topic.

12:22So the first question I always ask my guests is I say to them, Julia Aileen Samuel, though nay Guinness, that's right? born on the 12th September 1959 so clickety clicks just 66 well done Julia what is your very first memory? So the one that is most present and I think it's my memory it might be a photograph is being in a pram with my twin brother Hugo in the garden So there's this image of me sitting up, looking across at my twin brother. And who is your family? Who are your parents? Is this your actual brother? Yes, he is, because he's your twin. He's my twin. Do you come from a family of twins?

13:13So I have twin sisters as well. So my mum was called Pauline Guinness and my father, James Guinness. My mum's grandmother were twins, so she comes from a family that have twins. and you know in the late 50s when we were all born twins were very unusual so two sets of twins my sister Sabrina Miranda and then my middle sister Anita and then me and my twin brother Hugo there were five of us in four years so my and we lived near Holland Park so my mum would dress us up and sort of take us out into the park and people would literally always just stop because there these five little beings all dressed the same as you did in those days um now all of this is suggesting to me the very name guinness and holland park very fashionable part of london it wasn't then to be fair but it does suggest nonetheless uh a kind of upper middle class moneyed background are you guinness family in the sense of guinness the beer or guinness the banking are you one of those So my dad was chairman of the bank, but his father came over from Ireland.

14:23He'd been a brewer in Guinness. So what sort of people were your parents? So, I mean, linking to how I come to be who I am, both of them were very kind of traumatically bereaved, very young. So my father, by the time he was 27, his father had died of a heart attack and his brother died in the dentist chair. And my mother was an orphan, so her mother... Forgive me, you can't just rush through. He died in a dentist chair. Forgive me. The dental counselor will be on to us saying, this is an unusual occurrence. I mean, one of the reasons I'm a therapist is that very little was talked about any of these things.

15:04So I knew that my grandfather died on the Queen Mary of a heart attack. That's literally all I knew. And your father is only 27. Yes. And I'm actually not 100 % sure how old my father was. But he's young. He was young. Yeah, okay. And the uncle? Ivan, his brother Ivan,

15:24was a drinker and he went to the dentist and he had an anaesthetic and the combination of the drink and the anaesthetic killed him. But that's literally all I know. I know very little else. And then my mother,

15:40by the time she was 25, And both her siblings and both her parents were dead. So she was an orphan. So there were seven, you know, so everybody, so there was so much loss in our family. And, you know, I knew very little stories. I remember the black and white photographs of Aileen, which is my middle name, my mother's sister, of her brother, Tony, who was killed in the war. I don't really remember pictures of seeing my grandfather on her side. I remember pictures of her mother and my Guinness grandfather, but no stories. They were never talked about, except occasionally when she heard a piece of music, she would then cry and say that Tony, her brother, who'd been killed, played that music.

16:28So we had these fragments of stories, but everything was done to suppress it. When and how did your parents meet? And was this commonality of losing parents when they were quite young part and parcel of what they had in common? I mean, I don't think consciously it was. You know, my parents were of the generation whose parents had fought in the First World War. My dad fought in the Second World War. So they were a generation who survived and multiplied. they didn't talk about feelings or process things or have kind of deep thoughts about why we're attracted to each other but I mean if you look from a distance of course you can see they must have seen something in each other that attracted them to each other so you when did you first become aware that they weren't talking about your grandparents and the part of the family that had died because as you describe it it simply didn't come up didn't come up but in retrospect you're very aware of it so when did you first become aware of it?

17:36Well I'm a bit of a slow learner so I mean you thought I became a therapist when I was 29 but actually it took me probably 10 years to fully realize why I was in bereavement so I did my voluntary work at a place called Westminster Bereavement Service and visited people in the houses whose children had died in fires and terrible things but I didn't know consciously why I was drawn to bereavement and it wasn't really it took me a long time to work it out. Then why were you drawn to bereavement before you understood the real reason what what superficially? I just did it instinctively so I just you know the story I would have said in my early 30s was I wanted to be a therapist I was interested because I was a twin to have deep connections with people I was a good listener and I went to the first place that had a voluntary organisation that they would take me so it was very kind of on the surface Before I ask about your own first I feel like I'm in therapy now by the way Before I ask you about your own first experience of sadness to leaven it can you give me your first recollection and as I say this word I want your instant answer from your childhood a moment of joy?

18:55A birthday party with my brother, yeah. I remember someone coming and singing and us sort of dancing around together. I just remember it as a very kind of happy moment. It's a good moment. Yeah. And then now I will say your first immediate recollection of sadness in your life. I think it was when our dog died I think it was we had a Labrador called Gay and I was about eight or nine and he died I think we were all really sad about that it's easier to be sad about pets than it is about people if you're not a family that talks about feelings you have a kind of license to you because it's permitted.

19:46I think it's because you don't defend against it because it is big, but it's not. I mean, for some people, actually their pet is their most significant relationship, but if it isn't actually your most significant relationship, you don't build up so much armor against feeling it. So all of us could be sad about the dog in a way that probably we wouldn't, we would have suppressed feelings of deep sadness about a person. if that makes sense it makes total sense um total sense and i this is a you're having a good conversation with a good person to have it with because i come from a generation older than you but my parents would have been of a similar generation to yours and certainly feelings were not discussed my father i don't think to me ever referred to either of his parents I don't know when they died.

20:40I've seen photographs of them subsequently. I would have to look up their names. He had a brother who died during the Second World War who was never referred to. I don't think this has anything to do with not liking these people. It was just how they dealt with it. And when his sister died, she had cancer, but it was known in our family, if referred to at all, as the Big C. and that would have been said by my father to my mother out of my earshot the coping mechanism was humorous indeed I'll share this story with you simply to lighten the tone my father knew that my aunt his sister was ill and he was very keen at church and there was a trip planned to Lourdes.

21:31He signed up for it, thinking it was Lourdes the cricket ground, and that he rather fancied a weekend of cricket, and then was too embarrassed to back out of it. They were actually going to Lourdes for the weekend with the church. So since his sister was ill, he went to Lourdes and collected in a little file. The water. Water. Yeah. And took it to his sister. But because she didn't know that she had cancer, people weren't told in those days, He didn't know how to administer it to her, so he had the bright idea of putting it into her Nescafe. So he made her a cup of coffee and gave her this... Blessed water.

22:07I'm afraid she died a few days later. He went to see the vicar and said, this really won't do. We went on this expensive trip to Lourdes. We got the lovely holy water. I administered it to my sister, and she's dead. And the vicar said, how did you administer it? And my father said, well, I put it in the Nescafe. He said, well, you boiled the efficacy out. of course it didn't work the point of the story is that that is the only reference my father ever made to his and this was his favourite sister to her death was telling this amusing story in retrospect about it so I mean I don't know if this is useful or my mother her closest cousin was Martin and who she adored because she didn't have any family.

22:57And she didn't ring up, but I had spoken to her and she just said, darling, darling, I planted Martin today. And that meant that she hadn't told us he died. She hadn't told us she was going to the funeral. She just referred to it as, darling, I planted Martin. I mean, that's how she dealt with death. Yes, it's partly a generational thing. It's very generational. Going back to you, it's a recollection of sadness. What's the feeling you remember? I remember that we were all sad together. So it was in a way a close sadness, which was quite nice. And I remember being tearful and that it wasn't a bad thing being tearful, which it normally was.

23:49Is bereavement similar to, is it another trauma? what I've noticed during the podcast is that often people with their first memory it's either a rather idyllic memory of being in a pram often it's a beautiful day in their mind's eye sometimes they're looking up and they can see leaves or they can see something that is beautiful and reassuring it's either that or there is an element of trauma somebody falling downstairs an accident of some kind or a moment of loss in my case it is a moment of loss I'm standing on a pavement aged two or three and I see a car going away which contains my parents.

24:29I now know they were moving flats and they were going ahead in the car and I was left behind with someone. So that's common. Is bereavement a kind of trauma?

24:50well trauma normally come can happen with bereavement particularly a death out of time sudden unexpected death in some ways you're never prepared for someone dying even if their death is expected. But trauma has a particular aspect, which is that it has no sense of time. And it's stored in the part of the brain that isn't integrated into your whole kind of mindset and network. So a traumatic memory like flashbacks, you could remember your seven year old self, your five-year-old self, your 40-year-old self, and it has all the senses, sounds, smell, emotion as if it happened in that moment. Whereas grief from a death that isn't a traumatic death, you have a connection to the person that's died because the love is still there and the bond is there, but you're not, it doesn't throw you back in time.

25:55You can know that you're 66 and you're remembering when you're six whereas a traumatic memory you're suddenly six i'm with you so trauma coming from the greek meaning a wound it's exactly it's a cut and the scar is there and it takes you to that actual pain of that whereas bereavement is something else and it blocks the process of grieving so if you're if you have a sudden death and you have and you are traumatized by it the capacity to naturally and organically grieve which we are wired to do is blocked because the trauma cuts in before you're able to do that what is your own first experience of bereavement going back in your life i think it was my um grandmother dying and how old would you have been i was 20 i was married i was pregnant and you're married young i was married young.

26:53I've been married 45 years. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And what was that experience? Describe that experience as you remember it. I mean, I knew that she had cancer. I think we said the word cancer. I don't remember anyone being particularly upset.

27:12She was significant. We saw her every week, but we weren't close. So it was sort of, it was sad, but it wasn't a devastating loss. Okay let's come to really the nub of the matter as far as we're concerned initially is bereavement in childhood and how it can affect you in later life. So I mean I think one of the misconceptions which is slowly changing in my learning is that people in the past tended to say children are so amazing they jump back and what you don't tell them isn't going to hurt them so that you need to protect them from the death by suicide for instance or the bad elements of the death and if you treat them like nothing really bad has happened that's how they will experience it and they'll get on with their lives and so children were often the invisible mourners and particularly siblings if a child died were certainly the invisible mourners and what I know from child bereavement UK and we were a big kind of we did a lot of work in educating about the importance of children's grief and getting it to be legitimized and that children to be responded to was that children need the same truth as the adults around them, that children very naturally do grieve.

28:46They need both, in the same way as adults, they need to feel the pain, jump in the puddle that we talk about, and be happy, ordinary children, and jump out of the puddle, get on with life. And if you don't do that, are there bad effects? Because I can understand how earlier generations would have felt something bad has happened. You go, when the funeral's taking place, send the children out for the day to the cinema. And mostly don't send them to the funeral. No, exactly. Send them somewhere else. Keep them elsewhere and just let them have, let life go on. Now, what is the harm that has been, I mean, I can say it's well-intentioned, but you're suggesting that it does harm.

29:27Why does it do harm? It's completely well-intentioned. So that's important to say. the harm is the task of mourning and the purpose of grief is to face the reality of the loss. And are you never too young to face that? No. So the reality, how we operate as human beings is that we are wired to adapt to change, but our mind is a learning machine and it needs the information to update its database so that if our parent dies suddenly of a heart attack and we are told that daddy's asleep we don't go to the funeral no one talks about daddy anymore his all of his possessions are taken away his photographs are put in a drawer sudden one minute there's dad and the next minute there's no dad but there is no narrative or emotional link between the two so there's this gap of emptiness and for children they can't make sense of that so often they fill in the gaps with the stories they tell themselves and what they make up is much more frightening than the truth however difficult the truth is and sometimes they blame themselves maybe often children blame themselves a particular age between seven and nine children particularly blame themselves and with the guilt with grief which ever again everybody experiences often children turn that guilt as a story as i wasn't a good girl you know i didn't win the match i was horrible to my sister and this is being done, you know, dad died because I wasn't good.

31:17And can it be equated with, give an example of a father disappearing? I'm thinking specifically, we interviewed the grandson of Oscar Wilde, who told us a lot about his father and his uncle, the children, the sons of Oscar Wilde, who, when their father was imprisoned, nobody told them what had happened, put into Redding jail for two years. they didn't know where their father was they thought maybe he was dead they thought maybe he was in prison they just didn't know and indeed eventually were told at school by the headmaster your father is dead one of them actually thought he died sometime before so they were they were confused and one of them certainly when he found out felt he had to sort of well it it affected both their lives completely.

32:07So I'm asking really if, do we equate the death of a parent with the disappearance of a parent? Can they be comparable? Yes. I mean, so a father leaving and going off with another woman, so not coming back and not having contact with their child is a living loss and you experience it in the same way as grief and the sense of abandonment may be greater because they're actually choosing not to see you they're choosing to go away and not come back so the complexity of that abandonment probably will form how you attach to other men in your life how you how you have relationships in your life with grief we do naturally adjust and we naturally grow through grief but if we're not supported to do this thing of both feel the pain and oscillate to be okay and have joy and laugh and move between the two we get locked in this emotional narrow bandwidth where you don't really feel pain but you don't really feel joy.

33:25And also your capacity to trust is foreshortened because something came and kind of sent this wound through your system and your life and the roots of your life and what you trust. But you don't, you haven't had the support to allow yourself to mourn it, to weep it, to rage against it, to be furious, to punch, and then release that out of your system, which then make space to have feelings of that I can dare to trust again. What you do to block the pain is the thing over time that does you harm. So is this the key effect of not dealing with bereavement, grief at a time of death? The long-term effect, if you blank that, you don't deal with it.

34:13The long-term effect, the main one in your life is going to be lack of trust. what can you give me some specific examples of typical behavior traits of people in whose lives this has happened and when it happened they didn't they weren't helped to cope with it so i mean everybody is unique but generally speaking so a lot of the people that you've interviewed had sudden and unexpected death so it may be their way of coping with the death is to work extremely hard to protect themselves from danger or to get love from anywhere they can get it, to get attention, to get love. But that doesn't come from a place of security and resilience.

35:07It comes from a place of deficit. James Dyson suggested to us, and I'm not sure that you got it quite right, that every British Prime Minister, up to and including John Major, had suffered the loss of a parent in their lives. And American presidents, very similar. And he felt that was one of the things that had driven him. Motivated them, yes. Is there something in that? There is definitely something in that. But it can also be the reverse. So you don't see the other side of people who don't have the motivation and the direction to prove yourself to be worthy of love or to fight against the fear of death or disappearing, but actually disappear.

35:51And so they're just not well known because they haven't been successful. But what the research shows is that bereaved children's outcomes, if they're not supported at the time of the loss, are much worse than the national average. They're more likely to get physically ill, they're more likely to be depressed, they're more likely to have mental illness because they have this injury that then impacts how they see themselves and how they engage with the wild. Given this is the case, is there a good way of talking about the loss of a parent with a child or a young person? Well, the good way is being honest, is to acknowledge to the child that their father or mother or whoever the significant person is has died to allow them to i mean how children learn how to grieve is how it's modeled by the adults around them so if you have a surviving parent that both shows they are sad they have continuing bonds so the love never dies they talk about the person that's died they have connections to the memory they do a memory book or they wear their jersey or they make things.

37:10But is there a danger there, as there certainly would have been seen by an earlier generation, of almost indulging in grief? I'm asking. I know, but you're also winding me up by saying it. Well, I'm only saying it because I know people who still would feel it. And I know people of an earlier generation who definitely felt it, not in a bad way. I'm being devil's advocate here but I'm wanting to know I'm saying that this is how some people would feel and explain to me why what I'm saying is so dated and so wrong I'm not saying we don't kind of get on with life I think what the kind of older generation my parents generation your parents generation generation because there wasn't the psychological knowledge or the mechanisms for support the only thing they knew was to keep calm and carry on and I think we want to be able to keep calm and carry on and we want to be able to go out and go to work go to school and live our lives when we're grieving the thing that I'm talking about is that in the privacy and the intimacy and the trust and the love of your home family relationships, that there you express your grief and that you are allowed to both feel the pain of the loss and at times be absolutely fine.

38:44So you can do both things in a way. It's called a dual process. Good, because I recall vividly being rather pleased with myself that on the day my father died, which was a major event in my life very discombobulating and distressing even though he was 71 and I was middle aged 71's pretty young these days it is, it is and he died at 71 because a fortune teller in Margate when he was a teenager had told him he would and he talked about it often but he also had cancer and had smoked a lot so, but he did die at 71 the two, the two, the two it all came together she looked apparently she read his palm and said oh nice long life you'll fulfill your three score years and 10 and get a year extra so he thought oh i'm gonna 71 that's good which is fine you might think in the 1920s 50 years or 60 years later it was the national yeah it was it was but the point of the story is that i felt rather pleased with myself i thought i was doing the right thing on the day he died i was doing a speaking engagement somewhere in the midlands and i I do remember vividly that for some reason there was standing room only on the train.

39:56And I thought, oh, this is, I mean, this really shows I'm doing it. I've got to stand all the way to do this speech. And I did the speech and I made it go well, thinking, you know, this is what my father would have wanted. Which he probably would. Yeah. So that was carrying on and then I carried on. But I think I'm all right because obviously in my head I was doing maybe the other things that you're talking about. So there's a balancing act. It's a balancing act. And, you know, there are no kind of firm rules except that how we heal in grief is finding our own unique ways of feeling the pain. And that doesn't mean going on social media and crying and telling everybody it's not about going to work and saying I don't function because I'm grieving.

40:47although for some people that may be the case but it is finding your own particular way where you give yourself permission to mourn the death of this person that's important to you explain to me the phrase mourn the death in practical terms what does it mean because what you were just saying almost suggests to me that anything goes you can do it in your own way what does what does mourning involve does it involve talking about it does it involve crying what what what is mourning mourning is when the there's a connection between the inchoate sense of loss that is often in your body moves up into your mind where you have a way of understanding it where and at that moment you know that the person has died in a way that you can't not know that they've died and in that moment incrementally you adjust and as you adjust through feeling the pain you also open to have other feelings most of the people when we ask them about their parents whoever in the conversation has turned to be the significant person in their life who has died i sometimes say oh do you think about them they always say every day yeah they always say that is there a period of time for mourning is there a time when this process can come to an end where you are healed and when remembering them is just something that's part and parcel of of your life so I think two things one is the level of the loss is equal to the level of the emotional investment in the person so whatever their kind of role is if they haven't been that important to you they're not going to be a big part of your life going forward there is a time frame which is individual where the pain is much more intense but over time if you grieve and get support that pain is less and then comes the capacity to remember and connect and have nice memories and they then that person can influence you so you can say to your dead mom mom shall i marry this man or shall I buy this flat or shall I take this job because we know what they would say they're in us they're part of us and you could hear your mum or your dad or your grandparent whoever it is saying yes darling or no absolutely no so that they're in you and they become part of you and love you into your future do you have a view about people who try to get in touch through a seance or through a medium with people they've lost I've had a lot of clients who've done that i personally i i think it can be quite disturbing um but people do find comfort in it people find it very helpful and when my sister had a sister who died and she was young she's only 61 and i went to a medium and i realized the person was simply an empathetic person who picked up very quickly and said good warm things a colleague of hers was even more helpful and managed on the same day to introduce me not only to my sister again, but also to Diana, Princess of Wales, and Joan of Arc.

44:22So I got a triple whammy. That's a big day. Yeah, exactly. And it was only 25 quid, so I got value for money. You're bang for your buck. You're saying that for some people that can be helpful, though you would be sceptical yourself. Yes. Yeah. Particularly when you have a child that dies. I think it's difficult. When you have a child that dies, it's so horrific. There is, well, what is the explanation? what can you do how do people cope with that there isn't an explanation it tears up the rule book of life it you know your trust in yourself and your present and your future in that moment dies with your child and so the morning is very complex and difficult and you know it's what i specialize in i've done it for like 35 years so i know that people do find a way of living and loving again even when they have a child that dies.

45:16And can you give us a clue to what you do, what you do to help these people? Because it's obvious when a very elderly, I was thinking the other day, the anniversary of the late Queen's death. She was 96, a good life. Husband lived to 99, remarkable. You mourn them because they were remarkable people, but they had lived full lives. Not a tragedy. So it's not a tragedy. But a child dying is a tragedy. what do you say to these people how do you begin to help them i mean i think it's acknowledging the level of the loss that it's not trying to fix them because that in some ways diminishes their experience there is nothing anyone can say that can make this better so what i offer is myself and to say that i'm so sorry this happened to you and i you know i can really see that you're grieving the future you had every right to expect and how much you miss this child tell me about the child so then they tell me about that child and it could be a stillbirth it could be a child they never that never spoke or breathed or it could be a four-year-old or a 20-year-old or you know all the different ways there isn't a way that a child can die that i haven't worked with i don't think so one example and i don't think we've actually broadcast this yet but the example I mentioned earlier of somebody where there were five children the first one died and then they went on having more and more children till they ended up with five but clearly the loss of the first child was a shadow over everything was a catastrophic was catastrophic and the the wife left the husband indeed left her children um and what we have to forgive of course we do but what triggered that do you think not coping with the first loss and thinking just having more children may be the remedy i mean so this might be too uh too much information but how any individual manages a particular loss will be informed by their psychological makeup like what they're like their own history of loss so what is their experience of loss how much loss have they had before the circumstances of the loss their relationship with the person that died and the support they get at the time of the loss so if you use that as a lens and you say maybe they had quite a not that much robustness in their psychological makeup they maybe had multiple losses you know the death of a baby is a very complex death it's it's the death of the future and trust uh you don't get support because people don't know what to say you don't know how to respond you have you're not given any of the elements that enable you to process it you say the death of the future and trust i can see it is the death of the future a new life snuffed out but trust in that circumstance i can see because it when it goes against you know you should bury your own your your child should bury you in the order of life so when you end up burying your child you mean loss of trust in the world in the basic system of life itself and of life itself now with children who lose a parent when they are young i don't know i would say die by the way because we don't lose them they don't we lose things every day good i'm glad you don't say pass i don't say pass or lose i say die when people say they passed i said well if they're passing they can pop in and it sounds like they've gone to the loo i know it's awful yeah but when a young person or a child loses a parent they die or they leave in circumstances that may be almost equivalent to death it is different it is it in what way is it different because i can see could also be couldn't it not be equally disturbing and almost oh i think the level of distress is equal.

49:26But with the parent that has chosen to leave, there's the agony of looking, wanting, not finding, hoping, failing, and the kind of particular tyranny of that. Why? What did I do? Why didn't they? And then with someone dying, it has its own particular mechanism of still, why did they die but it it's there's a reality to it that in some ways is i don't know it's not the right word it's less complex in many ways i mean these things i i'm trying to make something simple it isn't

50:15how best do we help people in these circumstances either you know family members who simply lost somebody in the way of life but also people in these difficult circumstances one i imagine is to buy grief works of course uh the but what could we do is what what what's the two things one is listen don't try and fix it don't have smart ass things to say so mainly listen and to show up like don't just do the first three months and bring the soup and the lasagna but actually be the friend or the relation that still asks you about the person a year in that remembers that checks in that shows up while you need it we've been talking about in a sense exceptional death because the death of a child or the death of a parent when there is still a child but there is everyday death that is difficult my wife has almost i'd say all her girlfriends are now widows and this is a kind of because you get to an age when it happens and it's a kind of everyday death that almost well people expect to take that for granted uh and i was thinking that about you saying the three-month period.

51:33I'm pretty good in the immediate aftermath of writing the right letter and saying the right things. But, you know, six months later, have you got any guidance to give us there? Well, I mean, you know who your close friends are. You can't be a close friend to everybody you know that's bereaved. So it's putting your, I think it's prioritizing who your close friends are and putting your emotional investment and time with them. You've been married 44 years 45 45 since you were very young don't underestimate that every other year no was that the worst year i'm sorry about that but the day might come when you are faced with being a widow i know i think about it quite a lot i bet you do when you get to my age you'll be thinking about it constantly yes are there ways we can prepare ourselves for that how would you help yourself so i i think there are in that we talk with each other about what we want or don't want when we're ill do you want to be buried or cremated we talk about dying so that it and we talk with our children about it and our in-laws so that that the difficult conversations have been had when you're well and you've had all the discussions so that all the kind of basics of it are known within the family system you tell each other the passwords or you I think one of the things is to think about what your legacy is from an ethics point of view rather than your stuff so right I mean of course you need to do your will about what you're going to do with your chattels but also to think of what you want your children to take on that matters to you is it being kind is it what are the things that you really want to be your living legacy rather than wearing your kit.

53:25What I think I'm really asking you is how do you think you will cope and how have you readied yourself to cope in the event that your husband predeceases you? I'll be devastated. I mean, I don't think you can prepare, you can do all the things and not have regrets, which is a big derailer of grief. But I think however much I've done this, it's like a doctor, you know, when it comes to your own health, you're still a human being who feels a lot of pain. It's interesting you use the phrase derailer of grief because you're explaining to me that grief is a good train that has got to go on the tracks.

54:00And if you derail it by having regrets, I didn't say this, so I did do that. All the what-ifs torture you. It will torture you. So don't have any what-ifs, don't have any regrets. Try not to. Try not to. Very good. Have the important conversations. Say I love you. Say thank you. And say I'm sorry. i do that most days so i'm absolutely ready for it now you're as you know we do this podcast with a producer my friend harriet and on tuesdays she's always part and parcel of the show and since she has a particular story to tell um i'd like to bring her in now and see if she's got any questions for you given her experience which our listeners do know about if they've been listening regularly hello harriet harriet i've known for a number of years we worked together when we did The best producer you've ever had.

54:47She is the best producer I've ever had. We worked together on a BBC show a while ago, and then we created this podcast together. And when we became friends for doing the podcast, quite early on, I discovered that a running awareness in Harriet's head every day is the fact that when she was a teenager, her mother took her own life. And we talk about it. not often but when it comes up we talk about it and it's been relevant to so many episodes and letters that people have written in to us that since you were coming in I'm not just going to cry I might just have to do a bit of crying suddenly It's alright, take your time we've got lots of time Okay Keep going So what we thought Just let yourself cry

55:47interestingly enough we do we

55:57it seemed a good idea at the time we cry regularly at the end of the program the end of the recording together the cars for example when anyone is talking about their mother in circumstances that are even vaguely similar, I definitely don't look at Harriet. And she is, I know, looking away. So I notice that in every one, there is a moment when this comes back to her. And she's either looking down or looking to the side. And sometimes I see tears. And then at the end, if we catch each other's eye, we both cry. So this is very present for her. For both of you, at the sound of this. For both of us.

56:34but in the hierarchy this is not about me this really is not about me we can be about me another time this is about Harriet since you are here and you are recognised as an authority on this if she's got questions to ask you or if you've got guidance to give about why this is going on quite a few years after the death of her mother please feel free to share decades it is yes decades but that's not particularly surprising to me because it wasn't really dealt with at the time. My parents were divorced, so it was very much kind of my father and his wife, who's my step-mom, who I've known for a long time, she'd been my step-mom since I was three, didn't want to speak about my mum because they didn't get on with her.

57:25They didn't see her in their day-to-day lives. They didn't really speak. And I think they very much, they told me they had later they told me they'd had advice from their GP that was the person they asked for advice who very much said just send them back you know let them go back to school and they're teenagers they'll there's lots going on for them and they'll just bounce back absorbed into that which is what happened you know I had started a new school two weeks before my mum died. I mean she'd planned it all, that's what's awful looking back at it. She's kind of worked out this order of events which I now see was taking place over a couple of years actually where we moved in with my father because we had lived with her, she brought us up as a single parent and then we moved to school so that we were at a school near his house, a secondary, just a secondary school and various things had happened.

58:24She took us on a holiday, she spoke to me about her will obviously I didn't realize what why she was doing that I think I said something awfully sort of glib to her I remember when she said I said something like can I have your stereo I remember that um because you were innocent you didn't know yeah so yes I very much did sort of was encouraged to get on with things and I myself wanted to get on with things I remember being desperate to go to school the next day a bit like Giles was saying I was sort of proud and and that became a big part of my personality was I was really proud of how I'd dealt got on with things and I was so tough and but actually one of the things that's interested me about the process is that actually it never goes and and it's funny how it comes it there have been things much much later in my life that have been huge moments of having to really go there having my own children for example that was very difficult in some ways I was here my mum coming through me and in this she was suddenly present in my life in a way that she hadn't been I'd sort of put her aside a little bit and then menopause middle age has sort of brought it back a lot more and And so I guess that's one of the things I wanted to ask you is, you know, Giles, I know, was talking about the length of time.

59:50I mean, I guess I wanted to sort of say and to say, ask your opinion. I think it's a lifetime of, you know, I sort of feel I have a relationship with my mum that is a lifetime long of up and down of the way I feel about her and about her death. Yeah. yeah I think I mean I don't think you get over these things and it was certainly a traumatic death so there may still be residual trauma that's in your system that gives you particular heightened response to particular situations that if I was your therapist I'd think about with you about maybe addressing the traumatic aspects of it and the best treatment for trauma is emdr eye movement desensitization reprocessing but also what is true is that when someone dies who's so significant and that you were at the age that you are when there are big milestone events in your life you particularly feel their absence you know so it could have been when you got married or when you have children or menopause but also just walking down the street and seeing the back of somebody's head and it looks like your mum or hearing a piece of music.

1:01:12And I think what's particularly painful is that it comes still so intensely with the loss and the shock that's still clearly in your system and not with the love and connection to her that you kind of miss. In a nutshell, if you make it very easy to people who don't know the therapy you referred to, some people, in a nutshell, what is it? Or maybe you can't describe it in a nutshell. In a nutshell, it is the physiological processing of a distorted memory that is still in your mind, that through the processing of it, it takes the distress out of the memory. So then you can just store the memory as a normal memory rather than a distorted memory.

1:02:12And you do exercises of a physical kind to do this? No, it's physiological. So it's bilateral. It's you move your eyes. Yes, I did do something like this last year that actually the woman I work with called it brain spotting, what she was doing. It's similar. It's not quite the same. Yeah. Did that help? It was brilliant. Yeah. And in fact, one of the things she said that I thought was so true, and she sort of identified it right at the start, was she said, you need to connect your logical brain that's done a lot of thinking about this in a sort of... With your emotional stuff. With your emotions.

1:02:47And she said, that's why, for example, you have a lot of tears. You know I always feel the tears are very as you've seen and child um are quite close so and I don't like that I mean I know you said cry but it's not a very nice feeling thinking I could just cry any time I bring this subject up even though it's 40 years ago and it means you don't bring it up because you don't want to cry at work or with certain you know partly I I sometimes feel bad if I'm crying I feel bad for the other person and I don't want to look a mess and I don't want to sort of suddenly look so I end up you feel very very vulnerable and and when it happened I very much was given the impression that that wasn't what I should be doing so I've been very good at trying to sort of keep it um but yeah it's the it's the very it's not it's not good yeah because grief is also embodied yes and we feel it in our bodies yeah and i think what your brain spotting therapist pointed out is that when your mind and your body are aligned that when your emotions and your cognitive understanding fit you have much more agency to and resilience to manage how you feel but when you squash the emotions with the thinking like don't feel the emotions you know they don't get smaller they fight back yeah because emotions are transmitters of information they are there to say oh this hurts yeah deal with this and you know what you suppress uh there's an expression, what you suppress fights back.

1:04:38I can't actually remember what it is. But what you resist, what you... Oh, God. It's a little smart-aleck thing. But anyway, what you squash down will come back and get you double. Yeah, it's true. Should she share all this with her teenage daughters? Well, what do they know? Yeah, if I talk to them about it a lot. Is that a good thing? Yes. Yes, and I always have. yeah it's never been a secret that my mum is dead I mean what's sad is I don't call her gran yeah I wish I'd made her more of a granny in the house and she's always my mum um and but no I've never been it's never been a secret how she died or um that she is dead um or when or yeah and and they know now a bit quite a lot of the sort of backstory as well So what we're talking about is the awareness of this will continue with Harriet for the rest of her life.

1:05:38In her head, it'll be there every day. But what we hope you could help with, your book, your podcast, or seeing other therapists could help with, is actually her managing this on a day-to-day basis. Yes. And is it manageable for everybody? I believe everybody has the capacity to find ways of supporting themselves. to manage and navigate these very difficult experiences. I do. But I think what Julia said earlier is true, that I think because we do this podcast where we're talking to remarkable people, we sometimes end up saying, oh, people that lose parents go on to great success. But obviously what Julia said earlier is true is that many people that lose parents when they're young actually suffer in their life, you know, and it's not necessarily always a happy ending.

1:06:30What I find really interesting is that I've been working with quite a lot of people who are dying, who have been very successful during their lifetime. And what is interesting is that their successes and their prizes diminish, but the unresolved losses get bigger. so there's like this log jam of events people regrets that they didn't deal with because they were so busy building their business or being a politician or being an actor or performer whatever it is that now when they have time and all their friends have gone you know they're in their late 80s 90s uh what is most uh relevant to them and what totally preoccupies them is the not resolving difficulties with particular family members or love that they you know the regrets about love that they didn't resolve um and grief that was never dealt with yeah so you really do need to deal with stuff is there an upside to this i'm asking always looking for the liver cars like the positive ways of grief 10 top tips for the positive ways of dealing with grief are there are well let me try and explain this okay i don't mean to take the piss is there a positive in that do people who've had the experience that harriet has had and the others that we've been talking about do they have something in a way that the rest of us don't have that you've observed yes so um what i see and i'm i'm sure it's true of harriet is a term called post-traumatic growth which is that the terrible event that happened to you that is never diminished or the loss of it is never made better but what people find is that through that experience their perception of what matters as a mother or in a family or the importance of love changes and that they experience is growth that and also that they if they could survive what they thought they would never survive they actually feel very robust because they now feel stronger because they can overcome more than they ever expected that they could no and it definitely does give you that feeling yeah how do you cope julia with meeting people like harriet on a regular basis i mean i basically feel i've only just had one second with harriet and i want proper time to get into it If there are people listening who feel, you know, have had a similar experience, what do they do?

1:09:31What should they do? Go to the doctor, go to the GP, find a therapist, read your book, all those things? I think, first of all, to give themselves permission to feel what they feel. That this can't be fixed, but by allowing themselves to name it, to experience it, to access support, whatever that looks like for them, they then will find ways of grieving healthily. Because if you block it, you act out, you go and have sex, you take drugs, you work as an anaesthetic, and all of that keeps it locked in your system. So accessing support for yourself is what you most need. three quick things before we let you go one is how do you stay so cheerful how do you literally cope with going to work and seeing a number of clients patients people who come to seek your help and having them sharing their loss with you crying do you get used to it does it do you how do you because you have feelings don't you i do i nearly cried a little bit earlier It was very emotional.

1:10:47I love what I do. I think I'm really lucky to find something that I really do love doing. I love connecting with other people and getting to know them and getting to build a relationship with their internal world to support them to find a way of living their lives with less pain. So I feel very lucky. I do tons of things that give me joy. I dance in the kitchen. I kickbox. I run. I see friends. I only watch happy films or happy things. People always send me the most miserable stuff to watch, and I never watch any of it because I do that in my day job. I'm very pleased to hear this because we at home, my wife and I, we accentuate the positive.

1:11:37We watch happy films. Yes. We can't cope. Humankind cannot bear very much reality. And the news is so grim. I don't watch the news or listen to the news. I kind of glance it at a distance. We vaguely know what's going on. Yes. But actually, we need a laugh. We need something uplifting. Yes. What finally, but I'm going to give the last word to Harriet, but what finally from me, have you been doing this for so many years, what have you learnt? What have you learnt? What's life taught you? That love is what matters. That we know how to both receive love, which I think often we find more difficult and that we know how to give and show it.

1:12:21Cue! Cue! I don't know what to say now. You've cried more than me which I'm pretty happy about. You think so do you? I was taking the photographs. We both cry at the end of these things. I don't know why it is. But anyway. But what was it about that that brought you to tears? Ah, well if you want to know We went, Michelle and I went at the weekend to, we went recently to the wedding of our friend Maureen Lipman, great actress, Dame Maureen Lipman. And it was a memorable occasion. She was marrying a friend of hers, well, obviously her boyfriend, David Turner, both in their 80th year. So great. So great.

1:13:01But what was so moving was that the rabbi gave a wonderful homily about love. And what he was wanting to do, because both these people were widows. Well, a widow and a widower. And they had their children, their grandchildren there. Lovely. And he wanted everyone to know, particularly I think the children and the grandchildren, that their parents, who were not there, were still part of the story. Yes. He talked about the nature of love and the different sizes and shapes of love. Loving pets, loving objects, loving people who had died, and he did use the word die. having love still when there's darkness in your life.

1:13:47He likened it because I think at the time there'd been an eclipse of the sun. And he said, when there is an eclipse of the sun, you still see the sun around it. So he said, remember in your darkest, darkest moment, when the sun has been eclipsed, there is still around it, the aura. He said, there's always the aura of love. That's why what Julia said made you feel like crying. So that's it. So it was just you mentioning love, all that thing about love. so the answer is love and and i think that when love dies when someone dies it is really only the love of others that enables us to survive and that we need the love of others when we're grieving the loss of someone we love and that sounds like you didn't really have that in the sense that you needed it when you were young because your loss was denied and so then the love for your mum was denied and so you didn't feel loved as you were inside yourself feeling it yeah it was blocked out and it kind of erased and so that then meant that you didn't get the love that you needed at the time when you needed it most yeah that's probably true the last word goes to you what have you learned during today's podcast Harriet you've got to edit it too she gets the last word in every sense the last word here but also the last word because it's her scissors cutting it up cutting out I hope most of my no I'm definitely going to keep all the emotional moments in Giles what have you learned today I often say to people what they learned what have you learned today well it's been a real pleasure to meet you Julia and a privilege and um I feel slightly bad for sort of hijacking the podcast with my own um story but I think can I just cause you I think what is most real is also most relevant to other people yeah exactly I think it's helpful for other people and I think there's lots of people listening who I know because they've emailed who can relate to what happened to me in their own lives and I think that is really helpful um and I think what you must what i need to always remember is it's never too late to address these things and in fact it sometimes it's necessary to to re-go back there or to as you get older you know and i think the fact giles cries a lot is partly because giles is older and you do those suddenly it all comes you know and and less defended yeah and it's actually that's really lovely and good and it's just about trying to lean into that and as you say let yourself cry not just not too late to breathe yeah it's never too late exactly so I think that's a really good message for anyone that's got lost a pet you know lots of people write in who lost a parent when they were 12 10 11 12 at boarding school you know terrible things which you know they were just sent off upstairs to the dormitory for half an hour for a lie down and then off to you know the hockey pitch or you know it's awful and it's never too late to kind of talk about that to think about it and to to try to let that back into your life and to let the dead person back into your life that was actually one of the things in the brain spotting that sorry I'm going on now was so nice was she sort of gave permission she gave me permission to let my mum back in a love never dies and it was that was really really really positive and and i've tried to sort of hold on to that a bit yeah and talk to your children about her what she was like yeah what she did with you like let them have stories and find other stories about her from other people from people that knew her from other family members from your godparents whoever knew her yeah so that you have more stories yes i need to do that yeah that's really good advice if you've got a story you want to share please listeners remind me what is our email address harriet hello at rosebudpodcast.com hello at rosebudpodcast.com we're not going to make a habit of this i want you to know that but this has been a fascinating time with you so julia samuel thank you so much we shall listen to your podcast we shall buy your books and i expect we shall have you back because i've worked out a few problems i'd like to share with you if you don't mind.

1:18:18Okay. Good way of getting free therapy. Yes, it is. We're not fools. Cue the music. Cue the music.

1:18:28Thank you, Julia. And she's gone now. I thought that was wonderful. I thought it was fascinating. I thought it was informative. And if I may say so, Harriet, thank you for sharing your feelings so openly with us. It's quite raw, these things, isn't it? I know. I mean, oh, I hate the fact I cry so easily. I mean, I know you do as well. And I didn't want to cry, but I knew as soon as I started talking that I was going to. So apologies to anyone who didn't want to hear a grown woman sobbing. It's quite strange crying, isn't it? It's not very attractive to look at, which is interesting. The other day or a few weeks ago on this morning television program I do on Mondays and Fridays, there was something about the end of the war in Japan and up popped photographs of my parents during the war and don't ask me why my parents have been dead for many years and we were just talking about the war and they were photographed my father in uniform with my mother and involuntarily tears came to my eyes and I was only momentarily distressed and didn't really matter the moment passed immediately but I saw some clips on social media that people are taking photographs of this and I was I was thought oh my gosh it's not a very attractive thing to see somebody crying it's an it's uncomfortable to see it's uncomfortable really to experience it's strange but clearly we need tears well I mean you know people obviously you've all just listened to that it was interesting Julia you know our instinctive reaction yours and mine was to go oh I must stop and make a joke and try and sort of gloss over and move on through the tears as quickly as possible because in that sort of slightly English embarrassed way and Julia kind of encouraged us to sit with it and I noticed she sat with it often with tears in her own eyes yes which was interesting but it is hard yeah you know everybody, Ariat.

1:20:34Well, you've got Julia in here. I wonder if there's a doctor who could explain to us why it is we actually physically, why tears come about. I don't even know the answer to that. Why, when we're amused, why do people laugh when something is funny? And why do people cry? Sometimes they cry with laughter. Sometimes they cry because they've been emotionally manipulated. sometimes they cry as we were both crying during this episode what is happening inside the head that triggers the ducts to produce the tears maybe a doctor could write to us and explain how these this physical phenomenon of crying is yeah isn't it amazing because it's a moment of release isn't it that you need but physically your body is releasing and are we the only creatures that do it elephants do it don't they cry i know that man is the only creature that blushes or indeed needs to as mark twain observed speak for yourself so that's enough crying for this week and next week it's back to diaries we're going to be in the 1970s i think i well i'm interested to see what what you'll be like in the 70s giles i don't think of you as a 70s person do you you know Will I be wearing flares?

1:21:53That's what you're wondering. Grow your hair? Let me see. Yes, I do grow my hair. Let's see if I can uncover some photographs from those boxes in the basement so we can share with people. The look. The look on our website, www.... I know I don't need to say that, but I still do. No, no, you can. It's fine. rosebudpodcast.co.uk And if people want to write to us about their experiences in relation to bereavement and counselling and grief, and how they have coped, how they've made it work for them. Yes, because there are lots of, I mean, so actually I have had an email this week, which I haven't read out today from somebody sharing their experience and saying actually not in every situation does it feel as if you should do loads of counselling.

1:22:44No. You know, some children, for example, when they lose a parent, they want to move on. They want to go to school. They want to kind of forget about it. And actually, that's sort of how I felt at the time. It's only now I look back and think, was that the right thing to do? But I think we should say, there's no one size fits all. I think we should say, you and I, certainly I would like to say, we don't have all the answers. I don't have all the answers. We are just giving airtime. What? I thought you did. You thought I knew everything. But you do, Giles. No, that's not me. That's my son, Bennett, and all of my grandchildren.

1:23:17I'm quite disappointed. They're the ones who say, I know everything. I know nothing. As the years go by, I know less and less. So we're not presuming by sharing this with you, we're giving people the opportunity to share their views, their experience. We do not come to this with any agenda on a prescriptive way at all, do we? No. We don't. We don't know anything, do we, Charles? We know less than nothing. Yes. But we do know some very good people and we like to share them with you. So there we are. And that's it. The weeping is done for this week. Good. Just get my Kleenex and blow my nose. Dry your eyes, Harriet.

1:23:53We're going to have a few laughs next week. Thank you for being part of Rosebud. Thank you, Julia Samuel. Cue the music.

1:24:25Thank you.

1:24:51Thank you.