Words by Emma Grey
Ten years ago, with no warning, I became a widow. I was 42 with three children, the youngest just five. My husband’s heart attack swept away our world. Plunged into shock, terrified of the future, I had a message from my friend Rebecca Sparrow, with one line of advice that became our beacon. When Bec lost her baby daughter, Georgie, she decided she would have Georgie’s life turn up the light in their lives, not turn it down.
Scrambling in the dark, entirely new to this and barely able to breathe, I wondered how we might make that happen. I’d gone for a lakeside walk with a friend in spring – our route lined with blossom trees, water sparkling. I remember looking at the view, thinking, “I can see intellectually that this is beautiful, but I don’t feel it.”
That day, I made a choice. I could stay at home, wait to feel better then re-engage with the world. Or I could keep showing up, even if I felt nothing, hoping my heart might eventually catch up with my eyes.
The day of Jeff’s funeral, coming into our cold, dark house after the wake, I was confronted by the sight of three children, each looking at me, hoping for some leadership. What were we going to do now?
I told them we would invite our family and friends over the next day and we pull apart all the flowers that people had sent us, make up fresh bunches and deliver them to the hospital where the three kids had been born. We did that, through tears, and it offered us that first glimpse of the light that Bec had mentioned.
Weeks later, after my first dinner out since Jeff’s death, I found myself remembering something my friend had said over the meal and smiling. That smile was chased by guilt! How could I have had a nice evening when my husband died? But it occurred to me that, if he could have, he’d have been watching for that first smile amidst all the tears, the insomnia and the pain. He’d have been desperate to catch it. And that if I was handed even the smallest, most fleeting glimpse of happiness or hope, I should grasp hold of it.
Months later, I was flown to the United States for a conference held in Jeff’s honour. It felt like a second funeral and I was freshly devastated, surrounded by his loved international colleagues, while he kept on not coming back. That same trip, I decided to visit New York for the first time – a city he adored. I went to the 9/11 memorial – a sobering reminder of that city’s immense collective loss. As I walked through the dazzling lights of Broadway and the flowers blooming in Central Park, the city struck me as being resilient and alive. Perhaps there was hope me for me, too.
I took myself to the New York Public Library and wrote the opening sentences of a novel about grief that I could not have known that, six years later, would be picked up by a New York publisher and become a USA Today bestseller. Then I flew home, still distraught, and got on with pulling us through the rest of our lives.
The next year, I found myself crying in the audience of a high school musical I’d co-written with composer Sally Whitwell, based on one of my teen novels, as the glitter cannon shot confetti all over us. For a tiny moment, I’d successfully escaped my life, thanks to the exuberance of teenage theatre kids.
Then, during Covid, when we were allowed a one-hour walk each day, I took up photography. I’d find myself lying on the ground taking macro shots of tiny dewdrops on blades of grass and forgetting I was a widow, we were in a pandemic and life was hard. Eventually I stood alone on a deserted country road in the pitch dark, under a dazzling aurora sky. If this wasn’t turning up the light in the dark, what was? And the tears then weren’t from grief. They were from relief. Because I’d kept showing up in the world, through all of that pain – pain that still strikes me down every so often, a decade later – and finally I felt something again.
These tiny moments of light had demanded nothing more from me than standing there, hoping for them. These glimmers never “fixed” the grief. That was never the point. They were about taking Jeff’s memory and looking for chances to make his senseless loss meaningful. Continuing to live, even when that seemed impossible, because I had the great fortune of loving a wonderful man, who would dearly want to see it.
Start at the End by Emma Grey (Atlantic Books) is available from 31 March.
