Explainer
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Death & life
4 min read

What they don’t tell you about when someone you love dies

Sharing her experience of her husband’s death, Yvonne Tulloch charts grief’s journey and shares signposts to help. Part of the How to Die Well series.

Yvonne Tulloch is Founder and CEO of AtaLoss, helping bereaved people find support and wellbeing. 

A group of grieving friends with their hands on each others backs.
The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash.

Turn on the news and death is all around us. Yet somehow, we think it will never happen to us.  In one sense that’s good. We have a child-like innocence that protects us from the harsh realities of life.   

A few years ago, as a church minister, I thought I knew about death.  I’d been trained to take funerals and had supported families when a loved one had died.  But it wasn’t until I was bereaved myself - when my husband died suddenly of a heart attack - that I realised how little even I knew.  

Although busy, life had been good until then.  My husband had a successful job, my own work was going well and our three children were flying the nest and finding their feet in university.  Little did I know that in one, short phone call from a colleague, our lives would change forever.   

Simon had been found dead in his hotel in Spain, and I was faced with telling each of the children and his mother, the worst news anyone could convey.  Concerned about social media the news was embargoed until all family members knew, then I had to go to Spain to find, as well as identify the body, and bring him home.  I had to work out our finances – no one knew what we had to live off – close accounts and put things in my name.  I discovered our house wasn’t insured, nor our car for me to drive, that bank accounts were frozen, and that no organisation is geared up to help.  Everyone insists on speaking to the account holder or seeing the actual death certificate before being willing to oblige.  I had a funeral and thanksgiving to organise – two big occasions in just 3 weeks - and a mountain of admin to deal with, which would be difficult at any time.  

Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.

We’ve been a death-denying culture, I now realise, for many years. With death invariably happening in hospices or hospitals, we’ve pushed death away and pretended it doesn’t happen.  Consequently, we’ve lost knowledge of bereavement and the art of support.  We’ve tended only to think about preparing for funerals and then counselling if the person isn’t doing well.  But what about all the other help that’s needed?  Understanding and support is necessary in all manner of ways.  Bereavement is one of the most stressful times of life, affecting everyone sooner or later and every part of their life.  Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.    

At first most of us are shocked or emotionally numb; we run on adrenaline and we’re in survival mode.  At the funeral others can think we’re doing well, and we can too.  But it’s after, when the real sadness tends to hit, when the future must be faced and by then support has dropped away.   

Many of us experience a roller coaster of changing reactions and responses which we don’t recognise as us or don’t associate with grief.  

There are the physical reactions, for instance. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I was cold and I shook for months, I had a heavy ‘weight’ in my gut and was taken to hospital three times with suspected heart problems - our bodies are always in tune with our emotions.   

And there are the psychological reactions.  We can experience anxiety, anger and guilt; we can’t concentrate or remember, or function to do the most basic of tasks.  I kept thinking I was seeing Simon and had a psychosis which made me feel separated from the world.  We can think we’re going mad.  

Grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing.

For me help came from two initiatives I was fortunate to find: Care for the Family’s Widowed Young Support and The Bereavement Journey course run by a church in London.  In each of these I discovered others who had been bereaved, who understood what I was going through and who helped me to navigate the alien territory I found myself in.  They also helped me to understand my spiritual responses which had been the biggest surprise.  I had never doubted my Christian faith but with bereavement, that too was challenged, and God, who had always felt present, suddenly disappeared.  I realize now that this is natural.  Grieving is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning, and therefore some of whatever meaning we had before the person died, will deconstruct as we grieve. 

Roll on a few years and I’m on the other side, running a charity helping people to understand that in our death-denying society bereavement impacts greatly, and that grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing.  Support is needed in various ways which we direct to through our signposting website ataloss.org.  And I’m helping people myself through The Bereavement Journey course to find healing and hope, offering also spiritual support for the faith questioning I find most people have.  Unfortunately, though, because we’ve neglected death, many haven’t been supported through a bereavement in the past and are carrying loss which is unresolved.   

Article
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Economics
Sustainability
4 min read

Black Friday: don’t shop, try stewarding instead

We're so fallible to consumer culture. Here's how to counter it.

Rosie studies theology in Oxford and is currently training to be a vicar.

A phone screen is held up, showing a shopping page, behind a window displays a Black Friday Sale banner.
CardMapr.nl on Unsplash.

Have you noticed how many times in the last 24 hours you’ve been targeted or tempted by a Black Friday marketing campaign?  

It’s estimated that we can see anywhere from 50 to 400 adverts per day - on TV, billboards, online, and, more than ever, through social media. I’ve never felt more seen and known by the Instagram algorithm, and many of us have experienced items popping up on our feeds which we were talking about with friends only hours before. Is it possible to resist such incessant and elaborate marketing schemes? 

In the lead up to Black Friday this year, I’ve been looking out for a new vacuum cleaner (the rock-and-roll life of a thirty-something year-old). Having done all the research, I’m now poised to cash in on the discounts, regularly refreshing my Argos and Amazon tabs for the latest prices. 

But, as I’ve been comparing the relative pros and cons of cordless versus cylinder vacuums (and marvelling at the development of anti-hair wrap technology), it’s been difficult not to have my interest piqued by various other products being put under my nose by these websites, too.  

And difficult not to feel like, if I don’t act quickly, I’m going to miss out on an offer that’ll not come around again. It’s almost as if these marketing executives know how my brain is going work - even before I go online. But are we humans really as transparent as that? 

Netflix’s new documentary, Buy Now? The Shopping Conspiracy, says that we are. It profiles several ex-insiders from the world’s biggest brands, who expose the manipulative tricks used by these corporations to make us buy more, and the extent to which our desire for endless consumption has been cultivated and capitalised on by design.  

It seems that we humans, evolved and intelligent as we like to believe ourselves, are still fallible to serve the things which were designed to serve us. And the consequences are far-reaching. Online shopping may have dehumanised the consumer experience, but we remain connected to people around the world by global supply chains, and it is individuals and communities whose livelihoods are most dependent on the availability and quality of natural resources, and who live closest to the land, who reap the harmful effects of our incessant buying habits.  

Hazardous e-waste, for example (including discarded laptops, phones, and TVs), is rising by millions of tonnes annually. The UK is a particularly bad offender for illegally exporting toxic e-waste around the world, dumping it in landfills where it releases toxic substances such as mercury, zinc, and lead into local water and soil supplies. 

Back here in the UK, we can feel like such small cogs in such a huge, capitalist machine, that a lot of this seems beyond the realms of our human agency.  

There is certainly value in being savvy with our spending power as consumers. In doing the research to get the best Black Friday deals, as we tighten the purse strings and navigate what has become a protracted and painful cost of living crisis for many. It can be hard for Christmas not to feel like an unavoidably expensive time of year. 

But, perhaps there is also an opportunity to take small, subversive acts of resistance against this dehumanising consumer culture. Actions which reclaim our humanity and human agency, and which recognise our global interconnectedness. 

For example, maybe you could resist the urge to impulse buy something this weekend, by stepping away from the screen to make a cup of tea or go for a walk outside, before clicking ‘Pay Now’. 

Perhaps we could get better at comparing companies’ supply chains and ethical brand ratings, using our spending power to support those which align best with our values. 

And, when we’re making a purchase, let’s take a moment to be grateful for the things we already have, the items we’re buying, and the people who made them. 

The Christian faith invites us to reframe how we see our money and belongings through the lens of stewardship. It’s an underrated principle in today’s context. Stewardship goes beyond just thinking about how we spend our income, to the inherent responsibility we have as humans to look after the world around us, recognising that the earth’s resources are not ones we are entitled to, but are gifts which sustain life. 

The principle of stewardship makes it impossible to hide behind a screen and to ignore the impact which our spending decisions have on people and communities around the world, however far removed from our lives they seem. It invites us to use our money and resources to invest in things which will serve us - and others - well, and tells the world that it matters that we challenge systems which perpetuate economic and environmental injustice. 

And, if I happen to miss out on that vacuum cleaner while I’m out for a walk this weekend, at least it’s less than a month until the Boxing Day sales hit our screens.