Mentally Interesting: My grief

This is the full transcript of Ouch -  Mentally Interesting the cabin fever podcast as broadcast on 11th March 2021, and presented by Mark Brown and Seaneen Molloy.<?xml:namespace prefix = "o" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Mark - This episode is about grief. It includes conversations about death and the grieving process. Grief is a really raw and really present thing for a lot of people right now, so we really understand if this episode isn’t for you and we’ll catch you on the next one.

[Music]

seaneen - This is Mentally Interesting, a podcast series from BBC Ouch. I’m Seaneen Molloy.

MARK - And I’m Mark Brown. We’ve known each other for ages, we’re long term friends. Between us we’ve got years and years and years of professional and personal experience of mental health difficulty, and we’re here talking about the awkward stuff so you don’t have to.

SEANEEN - Each episode of Mentally Interesting has a broad theme. This one’s about grief, for reasons that will become clear. Grief psychotherapist, Julia Samuel, will join us later, so stay tuned.

mark - Ouch@bbc.co.uk is the email address to get in touch with us and we’re on Twitter and Facebook at BBC Ouch.

SEANEEN - I listened back to the last podcast that we did which was about shame, and honestly it feels like a more innocent time. It’s been a rough month…

MARK - Back when we were young.

SEANEEN - Yeah. And yeah, it’s been a bit of a rough time since then. Things haven’t quite worked out the way we were hoping they would do.

MARK - All of our listeners at home will have got a heads up that grief features in what’s happened. I lost my sister on 14th January this year. My sister died, so I’m going to be talking a little bit about that, and more broadly about how grief feels and, you know, what we do about it. Whereas with you, Seaneen, stuff’s been happening for you as well.

SEANEEN - Yeah, so the baby is born. The much awaited baby. Baby Jack. And he’s doing very well, he’s healthy, happy, he screams a lot, but it didn’t go quite to plan for me. I sounded very cocky in the last episode about how everything was going to go and it hasn’t gone very well. I basically wasn’t very well, still, to be honest, struggling mentally and physically, but I’m going to come back to that in the next episode because this one, we really couldn’t not explore what had been happening to Mark and grief. So we think it’s the only topic that we can really do justice to at the moment.

MARK - Yeah. One of the really weird things about losing someone and about grief is it’s really not like it is in the films. Like, you don’t put on your black dress and your black veil and walk around with a sour face all of the time, just kind of shaking your head and sighing. Although to be honest, I’ve been doing quite a lot of shaking.

SEANEEN - That’s the way you live normally anyway, so…

MARK - Full of grief and sadness, sighing.

SEANEEN - Sad face and…

MARK - Just like slowly deflating one of those inflatable men that, you know, waves their arms around in front of car dealerships.

SEANEEN - But you did want to talk about it. So why? Why did you want to explore it on this episode?

MARK - Well, I think one of the things that’s very difficult for us to talk about right now is how much this pandemic period, this cabin fever period, this lockdown period, about how much the last year has been haunted for a lot of us by the spectre of death, the fear of illness and the fear of loss. But we never really think that it’ll happen to us, like, you always think that things will turn out all right and, you know, in the final reel of the film you all get together for that big party that’s been put off for all that time and then everything will be all right and you’ll get to see all the people you wanted to see and you’ll get to pick up all the threads that you wanted to pick up. And unfortunately that’s not the case with me and my sister. So the last time I saw my sister was on her birthday in February, just before lockdown started. And being very good, very conscientious people we observed all the lockdown rules, you know, kept ourselves safe and stuff, so we didn’t see each other all year.

She fell ill just before Christmas and had to go into hospital for a medical procedure and she was really, really ill. I couldn’t go and see her. I was standing in the field outside of the hospital in the dark waving a torch up at the windows in the hope that she would see it, because that was as close as we could kind of get. Then she was moved to a care home for kind of rehabilitation and whilst she was there she contracted COVID and it wasn’t very good but, you know, it’s all right, she’s young, she’s healthy so she’ll be fine. She was 39.

Then at kind of four o’clock in the morning I got a phone call from the nursing home saying unfortunately your sister’s died. I’m a month, a month and a bit, nearly two months into the kind of process of getting used to being a person that doesn’t have a sister anymore. Me and Alison lost our mam when I was 19 and she was 16, so both of us have kind of spent a lot of our adulthood trying to get used to there being a gap in our lives that other people didn’t have. So in some ways it wasn’t like an inoculation against loss, because I’m obviously absolutely devastated, but in some ways I feel, not prepared, but at least having had a chance to have the kind of conversations we have on the podcast about grief and loss and shame and all of those kind of lovely sexy things that you definitely should put on a dating profile if you really want to pull people, or possibly pull the grim reaper.

Yeah, so I thought it was really important for me to talk about it because it’s something very real that’s happened. We can wang on about mental health stuff and talk about stuff in the abstract, but for me this was the kind of experience of all of the headlines coming home.

seaneen - Yeah.

mark - And almost, you know, like echoes from the future resounding back through the past, like all the things that I’d been worried about for other people happened to my sister, and kind of happened to me and her partner and my family and all of her friends.

SEANEEN - Because of the pandemic, I mean, you can’t grieve in the way that you probably would like to, or that, you know, people have done for years in order to say goodbye. I mean, what’s life been like since Alison died?

MARK - Life since Alison died has been a kind of mixture of feeling the good stuff and also feeling the loss. It kind of takes a long time to even begin to, like, reset your internal settings. So I remember I went out for a walk and I was thinking about Alison’s partner who’s on their own now, and I was thinking, God, you know, they must be absolutely knackered. And I was thinking, you know, all this emotion and all this feeling and all these feelings of sadness, I’m really knackered. And then my mind just ran on and I just thought, God, and Alison must be absolutely done in from, like, all of these people saying that they miss her.

And it was like I hadn’t reset my thinking to stop worrying about how she was feeling, like, I was concerned about how her death was affecting her. And that’s that kind of, you know, that’s what you feel for your sibling, that you’re always thinking, you know, this is happening to me but how do they feel about it, losing someone who you couldn’t see and then not really being able to get together with the people that knew them, the people who have a kind of role in keeping the essence of her alive, just not being able to do that hanging out. You were talking about the Irish Catholic funerals.

seaneen - Yeah. My friend died last year and it was just after lockdown happened when there were really strict restrictions, which there are now. And he doesn’t even feel gone because there’s been no way to sort of go through that process of saying goodbye and of people being gone, it feels like he just stopped updating Facebook. And I’m kind of checking on the page, being like, where’s Sam? And obviously I don’t know where he is now.

But death in Ireland is a cultural event. I’ve always been a bit discomforted by how death rituals are in England and stuff when I lived there but, you know, we get together, we get drunk, we have a very physical presence of the people who died. And people come round to the house and you’re just making loads of sandwiches and the funeral happens really quickly and there’s such a set rule to follow. You know what’s going to happen and you know what’s going to happen afterwards and it’s really comforting.

And that kind of superstitious element sort of feels like you’re connected to this long line of people who’ve just been there too. And I think right now there is such a disconnection between what other people have experienced because you’re going through something unprecedented, even though death isn’t unprecedented and, you know, obviously we lose people, but the way we’ve lost and the way to say goodbye is unprecedented. It’s dictated by these different rules, not your own inner cultural values or even the values of your culture, by law, by health and safety. And I think that’s a really kind of isolating and disquieting thing.

MARK - Yeah.

seaneen - And I wonder what’s going to happen afterwards. I mean, how are we going to remember?

MARK - I mean, that’s a massive one. I mean Alison worked at the Cartoon Museum in London and knew everyone in British comics, and for about three weeks after Alison died I was kind of inundated with other people’s memories and other people’s thoughts and other people’s remembrances of Alison, which was amazing because all of the things that they described about her and all the things that they warmly, in a state of shock, but still with warmth, shared and remembered, were all things that I recognised. Like, what I saw in my sister was what other people saw in my sister, and that was terrific, but it was kind of weird as well because it felt for a while my job was to be the kind of administrator or the secretary to other people’s sense of loss and shock and grief. Kind of I was just like the filing clerk, kind of thank you for your kind message.

SEANEEN - It is noted.

mark - Yeah, it’s noted. Here’s the GDPR notice and we won’t retain your grieving for more than 30 days etc, etc. That was really, really nice. And kind of I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between the feeling of cold remembering and warm remembering, because I think part of the experience of grieving is oscillating between something that feels like being submerged in the bottom of a murky lake and everything’s cold and everything’s hungry and everything’s empty and there’s no way of seeing anything, and then there’s this beautiful warm bittersweet remembrance that’s like, you know, the kind of buttery sunshine on the top of the trees during the golden hour as the sun goes down, that kind of warmth and mistiness. And kind of switching between the two and kind of realising that in some ways, like a lot of the truisms about losing someone are true in a lot of ways. You know, you’ll feel empty and you’ll feel bereft and then sometimes you’ll feel so full of kind of love and joy and disappointment that that won’t go on.

You know, so with Alison it’s like the world is still full of things that I would like to show her, so making pointless play lists of songs in my head that I would play to her that I’ll never get to play to her, and kind of recognising that. But it’s really nice that out in the world there are lots of other people who shared a part in her life that miss the part that she shared. And I’m really sad for all of those people, and they’ll all be thinking exactly the same as me, like I thought we would get together for a drink and we’d see each other on the other side of this, and we won’t.

And, you know, ((laughs)) it’s funny, me and Alison’s partner went into the undertakers just this week, so we kind of went in and said to the undertaker, “We’re really sorry, we’re a pair of Herberts who are really sad and have never organised a funeral before. We haven’t got a Scooby Doo what we’re doing.” It was like sitting in the headmaster’s office waiting to be kind of told off. I sat looking at the carpet thinking I would never have thought that an undertaker would have a Burberry carpet. ((laughs)) But then they were really brisk and really nice, and that thing about rituals was kind of correct. Like someone who knew what to say and knew what the difficult bits were and didn’t feel like they were tiptoeing around us as if our grief and our loss was like an unexploded bomb with a trembler switch that either needed to be defused or just concreted over.

And that’s really nice. Like, because one of the things that’s very difficult about grief is when people don’t know what to say and end up not saying anything, and that’s where your grief kind of turns inwards, like there’s no space for, like, the remembering and the loss. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot this year about how we will remember people we’ve lost but also collectively in our communities, in our cities, in our countries, like how we’ll remember all of the people that aren’t there anymore. It feels like at the minute inside of me there was something where there were two hearts doing the work and now there’s just one, and I just feel absolutely exhausted. Like, I feel like, you know, I feel like a motor being run on a very low voltage.

Just before Alison died when I was really worried because she was unwell I found a tweet that said something like if you feel like you hate the world have something to eat. If you feel like the world hates you have a nap. And that has actually been the most important bit of looking after myself, it’s been feeding those physical needs. Also a little bit, learning how to soothe myself. Like, you know, there’s a bit of me who’s a little child who isn’t ever going to see one of their favourite people in the world again. And that little child is frightened and scared and upset and it’s okay to soothe yourself and it’s okay not to think about how terrible and awful things are in that kind of much bigger, broader grown up sense and philosophise about it.

Sometimes those feelings are kind of irreducible, like sadness is sadness and is sadness and it’s okay to feel that. And that’s often like a physical state, so I’ve just felt like I’ve had flu or just felt physically awful. I’m quite a neurotic person and I tend to experience my emotions through my body anyway so, you know, what’s your mental health difficulty? Intense indigestion. [Laughs] Not panic, intense indigestion.

Those of you at home who listened to our last episode will be familiar with the idea of the bum kicking machine, and I’ve been doing everything I can not to get on the bum kicking machine and peddle it so it hoofs me up the backside telling me what I should have done and making me feel bad for not feeling different. Just allowing it.

SEANEEN - Don’t get on the machine.

MARK - Don’t get on the machine. As beautiful as it may look, as shiny as its pistons and pedals may appear.

SEANEEN - It’s the worst thing when someone dies though. I think it’s probably the hardest thing, is just like the things you feel like you should have said or done or even in the aftermath, things you should have said and done. But it is like literally the machine that goes nowhere, it’s just endless and it just goes into the void, there is nowhere else for it to go.

MARK - But it’s funny actually, I don’t feel any regret in that sense, what I feel is just sadness and sorrow for all of the years of my life where my sister isn’t going to be there. And I feel sorry for everyone who knew her, and I feel sorry for myself. Not like, oh you’re feeling sorry for yourself, but I feel just…

SEANEEN - It’s okay to feel sorry for yourself [Laughs] in that way as well.

MARK - But, you know, I just feel like that world that unfolds will not have her in it, and it would have been fantastic if she was there.

SEANEEN - Yeah.

[Music]

SEANEEN - You’ve been dealing with it in a way that I don’t think I could have done. Like, you have been volunteering at the vaccination centres.

MARK - I have, which has been absolutely brilliant. If you ever want a pick me up in a time of global pandemic and crisis get yourself a volunteer role talking to cheerful, cockney 80-year-olds, right? Yeah, I’ve been helping out with the vaccinations at a local mass vaccination centre. Really that’s just been involving waving my arms around and telling people not to worry and pointing them towards the people who have the needles. But it turns out, and I think we all know this, that actually older people aren’t more respectable and more shocked by things, they’re absolutely filthy and love a bit of a cheeky giggle. So I’m like, you know, “If you just head through those double doors there and my colleagues will grab you on the other side.” “Oh, I could do with a good grabbing!” or like, all the things about, you know, “It’s just going to be a little prick.” “Well, that’s what he said.” All that kind of stuff which is kind of wonderful.

But like, I did my first shift two days after Alison died. I’d signed up to it before she died and I thought do I do this, do I not do this? It’s been weird to have accidentally almost prepared myself a curriculum of activities that would fit really well with trying to carry on and remember and think about and inhabit this experience of just losing someone that I absolutely loved to bits.

[Music]

SEANEEN - You’re listening to Mentally Interesting from BBC Ouch. To share your take on anything we’ve discussed so far, email ouch@bbc.co.uk putting Mentally Interesting in the subject line.

MARK - Leading on from the first half of our podcast we now are very, very lucky to be able to talk to someone who has a bit more of a wider perspective than my perspective of being at the hot end of loss. We’ve got Julia Samuel. Julia’s a grief psychotherapist and an author of two books on the subject, ‘Grief Works’ and ‘This Too Shall Pass’. Julia, is also the proud holder of the prize of being Mentally Interesting’s first guest. Thank you for being here Julia. How are you doing?

julia - I’m well, and I’m very honoured to be your first guest.

MARK - How did you first become interested in grief psychotherapy? Like, were you a kid at school with, like, scuffed knees and a pocket full of acorns saying what I want to be is either an astronaut or a grief psychotherapist? What was it that led you into this field?

julia - I think me being a grief psychotherapist was the most unlikely job that I would ever have taken from my scruffy knees playground. And now that I’m 61 and the first thing anyone thinks when they look at me is about death, [Laughter] they think of someone who’s died, they think of a funeral, and that really wasn’t what I was after. I was probably after being more like Brigitte Bardot when I was… wanting boyfriends and had no thoughts of what my job would be, but for 35 years this has been my job, very unexpectedly.

MARK - So how did grief come into that? Was it a shadow on your life or was it seeing something in other people’s lives?

julia - I think it was two things. One was both my parents had very significant losses by the time they were 25. So by the time my mum was 25 her mother, her father, and her sister and her brother had all died, so she had no family members left. And my father, his father and his brother had died by the time he was 25. And neither of them ever talked about any of their family members. There were black and white photographs around the house, but I didn’t really know who the people were. I vaguely knew I had an uncle that was killed in the war.

So I think what I kind of subliminally learned was what you don’t talk about matters and their way of dealing with grief is what we don’t talk about won’t hurt us. So I was always kind of wanting to understand what was going on and I never could. And the other thing is I’m a twin and so I’ve always wanted connection and closeness, and being a therapist is a really good way to have connection and closeness. And I think I wanted to be needed, so I think it was all of those things. So they were all kind of childhood experiences that I had no idea where they would lead me to, but that is where they led me to. 

mark - I know that you, Julia, have a kind of phrase for siblings, describing them as hidden mourners. Do you think there’s something special or unspoken about the grief and the grieving of a sister or a brother?

julia - I do. I mean, I think they’re often the hidden mourners because the attention goes to the parents, particularly when it’s a death out of time, you know, when it’s a young person that dies all the attention turns to the parents and often the sibling’s role is to sort of make their parents happy. They often feel that they need to kind of be both the sibling that died and themselves. So they take on the mantel of being the good sibling, and they kind of lose often their sense of identity of being able to be themselves. And often with siblings the depth of the relationship, the importance of the relationship, isn’t recognised, that these two people have known each other from the moment they were born, and all of their family memories, their family history is held in each other.

seaneen - So earlier in the podcast we were talking about how do you remember when you can’t do the rituals that you’re used to doing? For example, you know, Mark was chatting about he can’t go down to the pub and have a drink for Alison. Is there a template for grieving for other times of disaster and pandemic that could guide us in how to remember the grief of this one? And if not, how are we going to do it?

julia - I mean, I think that you’re absolutely right, that we need rituals, and funerals have often been the first kind of ritual which is then surrounded by people coming together and having a drink and talking. And then there have been many rituals in different religions, sitting shiva, which all have been taken away and many people have had Zoom funerals, even if they’re close family. And so I think the complexity is that when someone dies the grief that you feel and the fact that they’re no longer present is invisible, and what the ritual does is make overt what you can’t see and that represents the meaning and the importance of the event that’s happened and a kind of part of the task of mourning is facing the reality of the loss, letting yourself know in a way that you can’t not know that this person has died.

But the biggest thing that predicts outcomes is the love and connection to others, that when someone dies it’s the relationship with others that helps us survive. And I think that, along with the ritual are the two most significant absences from COVID bereavement, is that you haven’t been able to be with your friends. Hopefully you’ve been able to Zoom them or talk to them on the phone or have other connection, but having a hug says so many things that words can’t say. And often with grief people don’t know what to say, but giving you a hug and giving you that kind of look, like I really care about you, and giving you a pint, you know, it can be amazingly supportive.

So when I’m talking to clients now who are going through this we talk together about developing their own rituals and it may be that they light a candle at a particular time of day with a photograph and they just take five minutes out, or they might write a journal or they might read a poem. They might go for a walk with a friend and talk about the person that’s died and they might do a particular walk that becomes the sort of remembrance walk for, say, Alison.

Planting, this time of year, would be a natural thing to do in memory, like planting a bush or tree or bulbs so that we can, I think, be creative and find touchstones to memory, because that, you know, in your question, that is what we need to do, is that we need to keep the memory and the connection with the person alive, although they’ve died. And we need to do that through our life, but having rituals is a fast track way of doing it, so you don’t have to think, like, how am I going to remember Alison today, it’s like, I always know that on a Friday I do this particular thing and that always puts me in touch with Alison.

MARK - What really interests me is we’re kind of living at a time where the spectre of death is very real and very close and we have been, during this pandemic, you know, nationally and globally for the last year. Do you think that nations and communities need rituals as much as individuals and families?

julia - I think there definitely is a collective grief and that that again is kind of invisible, but I think we kind of can feel it and at times I think when we kind of look at the numbers or read a story each of us can feel very overwhelmed and we kind of turn away from it because it does feel quite scary. And so, for instance, on 23rd March Marie Curie are doing a remembrance day for those that have been bereaved by COVID and they’re marking that with many different kinds of events and memorials through the day. And I hope there will be a national acknowledgement and remembrance.

So I think again, it’s this thing of making external what’s invisible and marking it and naming it and acknowledging it. You know, like the cenotaph service seems to me very significant, it really marks the wars, and it’s very simple. You know, it’s poppies, people coming together, saying a few words, takes half an hour, but it really kind of helps all the families through generations to remember those that died in the war.

MARK - Yeah, I sat down and did a bit of, like, back of the envelope maths, and I worked out that if you spent half a day interviewing and writing up a little account for every family who’d lost someone in the UK due to COVID, if you took the weekends off, because you’d need to, you’d need a bit of a break, it would take about 197 years. And that’s the magnitude of what we’re facing.

julia - The loss. The other significant number is that for every death there’s probably eight or nine people that are very significantly bereaved. So…

SEANEEN - It’s nearly a million.

julia - That’s nearly a million people.

seaneen - Yeah. It’s incredible, the scale, to think about. You touched on this earlier, but we’re kind of living with this spectre of death at the moment and you’ve mentioned people not wanting to think about death as a sort of way to superstitiously avoid it, kind of magical thinking.

julia - Yes.

SEANEEN - So death anxiety, it’s something I’ve struggled with for years, I’ve been in and out of therapy to try and deal with it, to no success, to be honest. How do you approach the topic of grief which is often the root of death anxiety with people who experience panic at the thought?

julia - I mean, Seaneen, if you were coming to see me I would ask what’s your first memory of fear and death and where does that take you to?

SEANEEN - [Laughs] Oh, don’t ask that question.

MARK - Yeah, don’t ask that one, not right now. [Laughter]

julia - Well, I mean…

SEANEEN - Well really my first memory of death isn’t like a family member, it was Freddie Mercury.

julia - Oh really? That’s interesting.

SEANEEN - And it was…

julia - How old were you?

SEANEEN - Oh, I think I was… So that was ’91 or ’92, so I would have been about six or seven, but it was such a big thing, I remember it being everywhere and everyone being very sad. And I got kind of fixated on him and Queen for a while. Like, because of the scale of grief that was outpouring when he died. And that was my first memory of death and I’d had, you know, since childhood I’ve had quite a lot of losses and some very significant ones in my teenage-hood. Definitely childhood is where that anxiety started. I’ve had it since childhood and I’m also noticing my son is experiencing the same thing. And I found it hard to have that conversation with him, trying to hide my own feelings. I say I’m frightened but obviously I don’t want to really have a panic attack. [Laughs] But it’s interesting because I’ve never actually been asked that question before in therapy. What’s the most effective strategy you use with people like me?

julia - I use something called EMDR, eye movement desensitisation reprocessing.

SEANEEN - So you treat it like a trauma kind of thing?

julia - Yeah. What it does is you go back to the memory and the way you felt it in your body and the belief that gave you. And it’s the belief that’s distorted probably. And it’s the belief that gives you anxiety. It goes to the core of it rather than the adult you, because it’s the child that is sending you signals of fear, the child in you. And so it’s an adaptive processing system that takes the distress out of the memory, so the adult you, the cognitive understanding, you can use that wisdom once you’ve taken the distress out of your body. But it would have a rapid and remarkable outcome for you.

SEANEEN - I might need to look into that. Kind of talking around trauma, I mean, do you think there’s an assumption that people who’ve already had a lot of trauma in their lives will just get on with grief? I mean, it’s just another bad thing that happened?

julia - Absolutely not. That if someone’s been traumatised you have to deal and process the trauma before they can even begin to grieve.

SEANEEN - Do you think trauma’s one of the kind of things that blocks people’s ability to grieve?

julia - Completely. It completely blocks their ability to grieve. You know, all the stats about mental health are around addictions, around kind of very negative behaviours, psychosis, a lot of those come from traumatic memories that haven’t been processed.

SEANEEN - I’m not saying that you do this but I think it can happen, even with friends and family, that feelings of grief are pathologised. Has that been something you’ve ever seen, that if someone has a mental health diagnosis that any sort of feelings of grief might be attributed to their experiences, rather than just feeling really sad?

julia - Yeah, I mean that’s such an interesting… I haven’t heard anyone put the two together in that way. I mean, what my understanding is, that grief is a natural process and that it can be a living loss. So, you know, what I term a living loss, everybody has had a living loss through the pandemic of their routines, of their events, of their life as they knew it, and then you can have grief from death, and the level of the grief would equal the level of the emotional investment in what has ended, whether it’s someone’s life or whether it’s your way of life. And that the task of mourning, if you like, is to adjust and accommodate it, not to accept it, not to be okay with it, but to find a way of living with this reality that you didn’t want and you didn’t choose.

And it’s a process of adaptation where you… pain is the agent of change, where you need to allow the pain to adapt your reality so that you now know that someone has died or something has ended, and in the process of doing that you incrementally heal and find a way of living this new version of your life, your new normal that you didn’t want and accommodate the loss.  And that means that the loss never goes, you don’t get over it, but you come to find a way of living with it, and the pain of it, the intensity changes. So over time it changes, but you can be 20 years down the line and have a smell of something and that will bring back the grief like it was yesterday but that doesn’t mean you haven’t grieved, it just means that people live on in our bodies. The body remembers, the body holds the score.

If somebody has a mental health diagnosis already and then something bad happens to them a new loss would always go back to the first loss. So if you’re already suffering, an additional grief will add to your suffering. It complicates the process of grieving.

MARK - It’s interesting you mention things like smells and sensations and physical things. It’s quite nice sometimes to be visited unbidden by the memory of someone. A smell or sound, a song, stubbing your toe, doing some swearing, any of the things that might bring back someone like my sister.

julia - And that’s a lovely thing, I agree, because often the process of adaptation is we’re in denial but our senses, sight, sound, touch and smell, don’t go through our brain or our memory, they come through the body, so they’re in you before you have a chance to deny them. And that’s where they can be very powerful and really lovely, so you feel suffused with the person that’s died in a nice way or you can feel overwhelmed by it if you’ve been very busy blocking it.

MARK - I wanted to ask you about that kind of physical aspect of it, and you mentioned, you talked about the importance of hugs and going to people and face to face stuff. Do you think there’ll be a kind of noticeable blip in the kind of story of grief based on so many people being isolated from the person they lost during the pandemic? Is this anything that happens with kind of the grief from wars or the grief from other disasters where someone doesn’t get either the contact with the person who’s died or contact with friends and family? Is that a particular thing?

julia - It’s something I’m extremely concerned about, that the natural grieving process will have… You know, all the people I’ve spoken to or they’re clients of mine so their grief isn’t as suspended as it was, it isn’t as surreal, but for many people who haven’t sought support or who haven’t got support, they’re much more likely to have complex grief and unresolved grief. So if that’s the blip you mean, I think yes, that will be much higher in huge numbers. And also, parallel to the COVID pandemic, from the dislocation and disconnection, there is a mental health pandemic, so people who have had a mental health diagnosis before lockdown, most of them have done worse. Not all of them, but most of them, it’s increased their anxieties, it’s increased their symptoms.

Because connection is strong medicine, connection probably is the most healing thing that we have, and that’s been removed. So I have a very serious worry about the mental health of our nation and the nations round the world, and what’s strange is that most of the counselling organisations have had less referrals. So somehow people, it seems to me, have been frozen in their pain and not been able to even reach for the support that would make the difference, and that worries me as well.

MARK - Thank you so very much for spending the time with us on this podcast this afternoon, Julia.

julia - I hope that people who listen, kind of it helps them understand themselves with a bit more self-compassion.

SEANEEN - Thank you. Another episode of Mentally Interesting has come to an end. Thanks for listening to us talk about grief, we know it’s an uncomfortable thing for lots of people to hear about or speak about.

MARK - So if you’re able to share your thoughts on that, on grief or anything else, drop us an email at ouch@bbc.co.uk, putting Mentally Interesting in the subject line, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter by searching for BBC Ouch.

SEANEEN - If this podcast floats your boat it’ll appear on your device as soon as it gets published when you subscribe to BBC Ouch on the BBC Sounds app. We’ll be back next month when I’ll talk a bit more about mental health and motherhood, so see you then.