but it isn tjust because i m somebody who lost. you know, i lost andy, i lost the love of my life. but that doesn t mean i think that s the only thing that mattered about the pandemic. i think that there are many lessons that need to be learned. but, i mean, ithink the biggest thing for everybody who campaigned for that inquiry was to make sure that people are spared what we went through. and so if there is a sense from the inquiry that it has, you know, even if a few lives are saved because of the inquiry. i promised myself i wouldn t cry. it s fine. these are angry tears. these are not the tears i cried before. i would like to go back to, you know. back to a purer grief. catherine, thank you so much
comparing experiences. as i say, for many people it was such a. people conflate grief and trauma but they are very different things. people didn t get to be with the person they loved who was dying. they not only didn t get to be with them, they didn t get to celebrate them. they often didn t really have any contact at all, they would be taken away in an ambulance or be consigned to a care home and they would not see them. so a lot of them also had notjust trauma but disbelief. they couldn t actually believe that the person was gone. it s like the war dead, it s like the empty sarcophagus, the cenotaph. there wasn t even a focal point for that. so this group became the focal point for it and it began channelling. i remember those early conversations and we were all talking about the lesons that there were. there were these lessons that
it was started with this video. with lot of families who had lost their loved ones, explaining what it all meant to them, so i was doing the dishes the next morning and i was like, oh, i will pop that video on while i am doing the dishes and i was completely transfixed by it. it is so powerful, it is so moving and the stories are just incredible. and then all week i have been sort of thinking back, to like, experiences i had like that with people who had gone through that and one of the big memories i had was chatting to the person who is in the studio now, the journalist catherine mayer. hello. we chatted back in may 2020 when things were so bleak, and you very movingly told us the story of the death of your partner, andy, who was in the band gang of four. do you want to remind us, if it is not too traumatic, why you wanted to talk to us that day? do you know, i m not sure i can remember why i wanted to talk to you, but i do know that there was something i felt impelled to say, and it