on it, do you think you really did go mad for a while? yeah, i think so. and it really made me understand how i m sometimes a bit puzzled by grieving people, by these odd surges of anger or odd failure to grasp what, to me, would be an obvious reality. and i realise now that your perception, your cognition, all that stuff goes a bit a bit haywire. the one thing in it that kind of is solid, is the experience of other widows and widowers. so that was really good. i didn t want people to tell me what i should feel, you know, there s lots of people who do that and lots of online stuff that would do that. i wanted people to walk alongside people who d been through the same thing. just say, what was it like for you? that was the stuff that was kind of solid. i wonder if you still feel lost in a way, because you ve done lots of important things since david died. you ve moved, the village you were rooted in as the vicar of the parish with david, your partner, living in the vicarage with you.
you knock bits off. it s not always sweetness and light. and that, i think, needs to be part of the telling of the story. the anger that we referred to that you felt at times within your loving relationship has other layers to it, and i want to explore those. anger with the church, of which you were an important part. and david was, too, because he was also a vicar. yeah. here, the two of you living in a loving relationship and your own church would not recognise, fully recognise your relationship. indeed, you had to promise the church, as i understand that, that you would be celibate within your live in partnership. you couldn t have a blessing of your civil partnership inside the church. why did you stay in that church? because i love the church, because. but the church, in a sense, didn t love you. well, that s always true of institutions, isn t it? same of the bbc.
bedside situations, you d been counselling families in the most difficult situations. and yet, i guess, you also felt, this is me. yeah, and i was powerless. and david, who was also ordained, but he was a medic before that, he d worked in a&e. so these were scenarios that we both had encountered professionally, but i couldn t do anything about it. so i thought, what can i do about this? and i thought, well, i love him and i m going to make sure that i just locate, i d centre myself in that. when i did that, life got a lot better. he didn t stop drinking, though, but life got a lot better. there s so much that is very raw in this account of yours, and it is gripping to read, but it s also very difficult to read in a way. why have you done it? well, i thought if i m going to do this, i m going to do this. so i thought, full, there s never full disclosure, but i thought as much disclosure as i can. i got permission from david s family. i was going to say, because, you know, you re writi
lots of people love the bbc, doesn t love you back. you learn this, right? so you make your accommodation with it. if you think it s something worth doing, and i did, and there s much about the church that i do love and lot about the people in the church that i loved. and also my day to day experience was always of being affirmed, actually. and david and i managed to find a way in which we could conduct the necessary intimacies of our relationship without subjecting that to this kind of weird forensic process that the church expected. i mean, again, this is difficult territory. i don t want to sound. i m very happy talk about this. ..voyeuristic or prying in any way. but i mean, could you be honest to yourself and to those promises that the church required you to make? no, no. and where did it, where did it break? where? where was the dishonesty or the failing to fully truthful? celibate relationship. we didn t have a celibate relationship. we didn t, no. but then i ve often thought, y
no, i think, i thought you could, actually. and also as a vicar, i spent a lot of my time with people who were going through that. so i knew what it looked like. i know the technicalities, registering a death, the coroner s office, all that kind of stuff, probate. but of course, that s from the outside. and when, of course, it happens to you, it s completely different. and it is, for me, it was like a depth charge that sort of blew up and disrupted all the surface, but also stuff that was very, very deep within came up and sent me completely mad for a while. i remember going to, the day david died, i went to the co op on the way back from the hospital because i had to buy milk and bread. and when i got home i looked in my shopping bag and i d bought three kinds of parmesan. it s funny the metaphors you use, the depth charge, you ve talked about the explosive effect of it all, and indeed the title of the book, the madness of grief. it is very striking. do you really think, and of course