When Hearts Break.

A great sadness has hit the family. I was not going to write about it, because it was not my story to write. But then one of the relations sends me a note. It wrenches at my heart. It says, ‘We need your words right now.’

She has been reading my little essays here and she says the one about the moon and Jupiter made her smile, if only for a moment. That’s why she wants me to write.

I thought of why I’d resisted writing of this in public and I realised I’d fallen back into the old, British idea that grief must be kept private, almost as if there is some shame in it. I’m not sure I can even write about the death itself, because it was so monstrous. My sister rings up and says, ‘Do we even know anyone who was purposely killed by another person before?’ And I say, because I’d been thinking about it all day, ‘Yes, there was that lovely artist who lived on the Talgarth Road and his sister-in-law was blown to pieces by an IRA bomb.’

We pause for a moment, remembering those days in our youth, when people got blown up in pubs and parks and outside shops, when there were explosions in bandstands, when dead horses lay in the streets.

And I think: the thing about sudden, violent death is that it is so against the natural order of things. It is so random and so shocking and so unfair. It wrenches apart everything we humans like to believe in, like goodness and kindness and community. It’s not just the loss of the person; it’s the tearing asunder of a whole set of deep beliefs and values, so that we have no certain ground on which to plant our feet.

In the grief, then, there is rage and terror. C.S. Lewis said, famously, that nobody told him grief would feel so much like fear. T.S. Eliot said that he could show you fear in a handful of dust, and I always thought his dust represented death.

So what do we do, when this kind of thing happens? What do you do? What do I do? What do my poor, stricken relations do, as they try to make sense of mourning an unexpected, vivid, way-too-early death? What do all the ones who are bereft do, all the ones who loved and lost, as their wounded hearts ache and ache?

The truth is there isn’t a clear path. The stages of grief don’t come steadily, neatly, one after another. There is no rational, linear progression. One day you want to hit everyone with sticks and one day you want to love everyone, because surely love is the answer, and one day you think you will never be happy again, and one day you think this tragedy will make you rise, and give you a meaning and purpose, because you will live for two.

And one day you just want to sleep for a hundred years, because you are so exhausted, tired in your bones, and nothing makes any sense any more, and everyone is going about their ordinary business as if everything is perfectly fine, and you are translucent with pain, and you are so removed from any kind of normality that you are not sure you can even go to the shop to buy food.

All of those are right and all of those are wrong, because there is no right or wrong. Someone has thrown a bomb into the centre of your nervous system and all your transmitters are fritzing and reality seems like a distant memory. There is only before, and after. Sometimes, you wake up in the morning and you forget, for a tiny second, and you smile to greet the day, and then you remember, and all the lights go out.

I think perhaps the only work of grief - and it is work, like having a second job - is to see if you can gently, one by one, put the lights on again.

What did I do, with the last death, which was also sudden and shocking and violent and way, way, before its time? I wrote and wrote and wrote. I allowed every single emotion, however inappropriate or scary or overwhelming they seemed. I talked to all the people who loved the lost one most, over and over again, so we laughed and cried together over the telephone. I walked and talked and walked and talked. (Julia Samuel, the great expert of grief, speaks often of walking and talking.)

A wise friend told me of something, in those dark days, that she had learned from a Buddhist nun. (She is the kind of remarkable person who knows Buddhist nuns.) She said that in Buddhism there is a wonderful tradition where you do something for your dead person, every day for forty-two days. It might not be forty-two; I can’t remember now. It was a surprising amount of days, and I liked that. Anyway, you do something to send them into the next world, onto the next plane, into the next stage of their voyage.

I rode for my dead friend. I got on my thoroughbred in the dour, dreich December chill and I rode up into the hills and I gave him to the mountains and to the sky and I yelled out, ‘Go peacefully’. I wanted him to be at peace because he had chosen such a sudden way to finish his life. I wanted him to know that I understood and that I did not blame him and that I was not angry.

I wanted him to know that he could go, and that I would always love him. He would leave, but the love would stay.

And then I’d cry all the way home and the incredible little bay mare, who had a core of steel in her, would find her own way back, because I could not see for tears.

I think you have to do those kind of things, which sound mad when you write them down five years later, but which save you at the time. I think you have to throw yourself into the love, as much as you can. Maybe one of the works of grief is to find a place to put that love, when the physical person is not there any more to receive it.

I go to the poets too, then and always, because they know all about the human heart breaking. I’d read Joan Didion and all my compadres in heart-shatter. I needed to know that I was not alone. The brilliant, broken ones who wrote it all down were my people, and my goodness, you need your people when the grief comes.

And then you find one thing which reliably makes you laugh or smile, and you do that for five minutes a day. I used to watch old comedy programmes on the internet. I told myself I could not cry all day long. I wanted to prove to myself that I could still laugh. The five minutes turn into ten, and then you find you can watch a whole programme of funniness and that’s when you know that you will survive.

Clive James once wrote a forgotten but totally marvellous novel called Brilliant Creatures. In it, he had a line I loved. It went, ‘Knowing you will survive doesn’t make it any easier to bear.’ I love that line still, and I radically disagree with it. I think knowing you will survive is the first of the lights that goes on. And once that is on, you can follow its benign beam, and find another, and another after that.

You know you can bear it.

There is darkness, but you don’t have to live in the dark.

A love has gone, but there is still all the love.

Your broken heart will mend. It will have a golden line in it, like the Japanese cups which have been lovingly repaired in the gorgeous process called kintsugi, and it will be more precious for that. You can go back to the poets again, to my favourite singing poet, Leonard Cohen, who said there is a crack in everything. He said that’s how the light gets in.

And there is one more thing. I put my Dear Departeds in physical places, so I can say hello to them in their new homes. My father is in a little tree in the garden; my mother is in the evening star; my dead friend got the whole sky. The little bay mare I rode to say goodbye to him died herself, a year afterwards, and I put her in the mighty horse chestnut outside my back door.

I like putting them in a living place, where they can continue to grow. Plant them a hundred trees, and let them live in them all. And the most beautiful thing about that notion is that trees grow towards the light, just as those of us left behind can, if we let ourselves.