Dear Bel,
I’m sorry, but sometimes the content on your page can feel insignificant. For example, there was a letter from a mother who quoted another mother, both struggling with their sons’ drug addiction.
When I came across this, we were preparing to leave our home in France for the second time in three weeks to attend my grandson’s funeral in England. Our previous trip was following his sudden passing at the age of 27 due to cardiomyopathy.
Unlike the sons mentioned in the letters, Jack was a wonderful young man who had never been in trouble and was always employed. He lived with his partner and their three-year-old daughter in the home they were purchasing together.
The daughter was unplanned but we are so grateful to have her because she’s Jack’s legacy.
Jack and family had their evening meal with my son and his wife on that fateful Monday. As Jack left to drop his partner and child at home before going to his football game his last words to his parents were ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ But within two hours he was dead.
Another letter you published featured a grandmother worried that her granddaughter was not speaking grammatically correctly.
I’m afraid I felt that issue paled into insignificance compared to having to tell a three-year-old having a meltdown and crying ‘I want my daddy’, that he can never come home.
I’m afraid other problems have struck me as incredibly trivial and I very much admire your ability to give reasoned replies as sometimes you must feel like slapping the writers.
What I’ve learned from this awful experience is that the bereaved person does not want to be told about every other young person’s sudden death.
Talking about your parent’s or even sibling’s deaths is of no comfort whatsoever, and I’d like people to realise that losing a seemingly-healthy child or grandchild at this age is absolutely no comparison to your 90-year-old mother dying in a care home.
Jack’s many friends who attended his funeral reminded me just how nice the majority of young people are. They really do get an undeserved bad press – the two drug-addicted sons mentioned above are the minority.
I’ve dealt with a lot of deaths in my life but none have hit me as badly. What helps is people just saying how sorry they are, giving me a hug and accepting I will still cry when something trivial sets me off like hearing the song ‘Everything I Own’. And I truly would give absolutely everything I own to have Jack back.
JEANNE
Bel Mooney replies: You topped and tailed your email by saying you are not making a request for advice, but I’m choosing to publish something I consider very important, because it is as full of wisdom as it is of tears.
I couldn’t remember the song you mention so looked it up. Released by Bread in 1972, it encapsulates loss, longing and love and listening to the lyrics after reading your heart-breaking email reduced me to tears.
Millions know what it is like to feel like this:
And I would give anything I own
I’d give up my life, my heart, my home
I would give everything I own
Just to have you back again
…and yet, of course, every loss is unique. That is why you feel quietly outraged (I know you do and I understand) by the well-meaning comparisons people sometimes make to the recently bereaved.
Yes, you are right to say there is no equivalence between the demise of a very old parent in a care home and the sudden death of a young person with his or her whole life ahead. Death may be the common factor, but that’s all.
To tell somebody bowed by grief, ‘I know how you feel,’ may be well-meaning yet it is also presumptuous, simply because (I repeat) each death is experienced uniquely. At the same time I just whisper that there isn’t a league table of sorrow.
Whatever the situation, just murmuring quietly and with utter sincerity, ‘I’m sorry for your trouble’ (in the traditional Irish way) is enough. To reach out a hand in silence and touch somebody’s arm can convey a sympathy as eloquent as any poet’s formal elegy.
But let me assure you that I never want to ‘slap’ people, metaphorically speaking, for writing to me with problems that seem pathetically small to you, so full of inconsolable grief at the sudden death of your fine young grandson.
As I have said here more than once, people’s frustrations, anxieties, guilt, sadness and other seemingly-trivial concerns loom so large in individual lives they can actually, in extreme cases, ruin them. They can cause quarrels and real worry.
Getting a ‘trivial’ problem off your chest can be so positive, helping you to find ways to deal with it. Just writing it down can help people start to make sense of whatever trouble is. Readers tell me that so often, and it makes me glad.
Interestingly, the derivation of the word ‘trivial’ doesn’t reference being small, but it does imply ‘common’ in the sense –without giving a Latin lesson here – that the street corner you cross each day is a common thing. It’s ordinary. Nothing to see. So, in one of those shifts of language, it becomes unremarkable, therefore ‘trivial’.
Therefore I just want you to know that people’s everyday worries (yes, about the education of a grandchild, say) are not nothing. They may be commonplace, but they still matter.
Of course you understand that deep down, I’m sure. But why should you give it a moment’s thought when your family is still reeling from such a trauma and a three-year-old is missing the father she will inevitably forget?
In your situation I too would rage at some people’s paltry preoccupations and want to scream like King Lear holding his dead daughter Cordelia:
‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all? Oh thou’lt come no more / Never, never, never, never, never.’
There is such horror beyond further words in that terrible fivefold repetition of ‘never’.
Understanding the truth of it is the cruellest torture, the scars of which can never heal. I am so grateful you wrote and know countless readers will forget their woes and bow their heads with real empathy, understanding the yearning at the heart of all grief.
I love my wife but our sex life is over
Dear Bel,
The problem with getting older is you wake up in the middle of the night – and think. Your mind goes into over-drive.
I love my wife and am pretty certain she loves me back but have we ever been ‘in love’? Probably not, because to be ‘in love’ it has to be a two-sided affair, an all-consuming passion, revolving around sex.
I have shared a bed with my wife for all of our married life and on no occasion has she instigated sex.
I always had to make the first move and of course was met by the response: Too tired. Headache. Work. Period.
When I did get over the first hurdle, I was met by another: ‘Don’t touch.’ How can you make love if you cannot touch your partner?
We are English, so you don’t talk about your problems in case you hurt your partner’s feelings. So it went on for 47 years until my sexual urges gave up and I stopped trying.
I still love my wife and always will. Maybe I can turn over and get some sleep now.
ROBERT
Bel Mooney replies: When I wake in the middle of the night, I’m worrying about whether my children can keep their heads above water financially and what the future holds for my grandchildren when so much feels under threat, not least our borders and the culture I value.
The last thing on my mind is sex with my sleeping husband, and yet, you see, we are very much in love. I am not being facetious but making a serious point.
I do understand how many men feel rejected because their wives have lost all interest in sex – and not just older people. It’s difficult when a couple’s respective sex drives are so very different and a wife (or husband) has just grown tired of the hurdling event.
What I take issue with is your implicit belief that real love ‘revolves around sex’. Yes, when you are young, passion is important. But when passion dies down – as most passion certainly will because it’s pretty tiring – that can actually be the time when a far deeper love evolves.
This is the ‘in sickness and in health’ devotion which has nothing to do with sex but represents the most sublimely powerful love possible. We could, of course, debate the difference between ‘loving’ and being ‘in love’ but I hope you will understand what I’m talking about.
I suspect you and your wife were indeed ‘in love’ once but now, after so many years, remain contented to hear the breathing in the night of the person you love.
Sex can be very disappointing at any age: ask the twentysomethings wondering why casual, lustful ‘hook ups’ leave them miserable and empty. But you have much more than that.
Here I recall the last line of my favourite film, Now Voyager (1942) starring Bette Davis: ‘Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.’
