CANON Yvonne Tulloch was 45 when her husband of 25 years had a fatal heart attack while he was overseas on business. She describes what ensued as “a total landslide” of life falling apart.
“I was a stable, well-functioning individual until the day Simon died,” she says. “Suddenly, I went from being highly capable, to being this person who couldn’t even sign her own name.”
Over the weeks that followed, she recalls, “just one thing after another was the most enormous challenge.” She lost her job, and eventually had to sell her house.
Canon Yvonne Tulloch
“Six months later, coming up to Christmas — which is a horrible time for people who have been recently bereaved — I felt like there was no point in carrying on. For the first time in my life, I started to have suicidal thoughts.”
Until the day she was widowed, she says, she would “definitely” have said that she understood bereavement, and knew how to talk to people who were grieving. “I was Canon for Mission at Coventry Cathedral, and had been taking funerals for years. I thought I was on top of it, but, actually, I had absolutely no idea.”
This is a common problem, she believes, and not just for clerics. “It’s doctors as well, and all professional people who work with bereaved people. You get a little bit of training, and you think you know the score, and then you discover that it’s a bigger thing than you ever imagined.”
Canon Tulloch did not find that she knew instinctively how to deal with grief. Nor did the Church, or the wider culture, offer her any guidance. “That was the big surprise, that the immensity of it all was accentuated and exacerbated by people’s lack of understanding.
“Bereavement is a universal experience: it’s something that we’re all going to face sooner or later. How on earth did we get to a point, as a society, where we’re not familiar with the natural grieving process? In fact, we’ve created a whole way of life that makes it all so much worse for people.”
She gives an example: “Someone says: ‘I need to talk to the account-holder.’ You say, ‘Well, he’s died,’ and they say: ‘Well, I still need to talk to the account-holder.’”
A particular fault of the limited training that she received as an ordinand, she says, is that you think that the grief is all around the funeral. “Clergy and other Christians think they’re supporting people in grief when they support them around the funeral, when really they’re supporting them in shock and numbness.”
For most people, she says, the funeral is difficult — but often, it’s nothing compared with what they’re about to face. “As clergy, we need to know that.”
Often, she says, people’s faith is challenged by a bereavement. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it at all: either God becomes really close, or the rug is completely pulled from under you.”
The latter was her experience, she recalls. “Literally, at the point that I was bereaved, God disappeared. As a minister, that is a dreadful place to be, when you need God more than anything.”
A BEREAVEMENT can prompt other emotions than grief. In 2020, just before the first lockdown, Canon Andy Perry, Vicar of St Mary’s, Longfleet, in Poole, was blindsided when his younger brother, a chaplain to a small group of schools in Oxfordshire, took his own life.
Canon Andy Perry
“All the family were aware that Tim had been battling with his emotional and mental health for a couple of years,” he recalls, “but he was back at work, and most of us felt he was on the road to recovery. And then I got a message from his wife, who said simply: ‘He’s gone.’ He had taken his own life in their home.”
Grief takes each of us across different terrain, he says. Those who are close to someone who has died suddenly, particularly by their own hand, can feel a lot of guilt. “I consciously tried to manage how much guilt I allowed myself to feel,” he says.
“I also felt some anger towards Tim, because [taking his own life] felt like quite a selfish act, as well as a deep frustration that we hadn’t been able to help him believe that his life could become better again.”
He even experienced a degree of shame. “There is still stigma around the word ‘suicide’. I think that’s wrong, because some people who reach that point have lived with immense courage with all sorts of dysfunctions and personal demons; but I now have a much deeper understanding for those who have lost loved ones through suicide.”
Canon Perry comes from a clergy family — his father was formerly Bishop of Chelmsford — and had already learnt, from observing the way in which his parents engaged with people, the importance of attentive listening. “In most cases, the journey of bereavement is deeply turbulent and unsettling, and the question [to ask] is not just ‘How are you?’ but ‘How are you today?’”
For him, “a particular strength” of his two-year MA course at Trinity College, Bristol, was being trained as a bereavement counsellor at a hospice. “It equipped me for coming alongside those who have been bereaved, or who know they are close to experiencing bereavement — and also those who are dying, to give them permission, finally, to let go and entrust both themselves and their loved ones to the Lord’s care.”
Like many people who were educated at boarding school, he says, he had been taught as a boy to be very self-contained. “My heart has always been quite tender, but I’ve never been able to cry very easily.”
He notes that some priests conduct funerals in a very professional — even slightly clinical — manner, to protect their own emotional health. “As a curate, I once took five funerals in one week, which included a cot death, a deeply loved mother who had fostered 48 children, and someone who had been murdered. You try to come alongside each bereaved family as well as you can, but you have to find ways of navigating that yourself, as well.”
After the death of his brother, he says, “I found myself weeping spontaneously and at unexpected moments. There is much I’m still processing, but I think I am probably better at expressing my emotions now than I used to be. I hope I am appropriately vulnerable.”
He has no doubt that the experience has changed the way in which he relates to people stricken by grief. “I can walk alongside them at a deeper level than I was able to before.”
He refers to the words of 2 Corinthians 1.3-4, about “the father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
“For so many, it can feel as though — as C. S. Lewis expressed it in A Grief Observed — you’re screaming out loud, and heaven is not listening; but I have been able to encourage them that, even in that desolate moment, God can be just enough to meet their need.”
DR MARIAN BURLING became a bereavement befriender a year or two before she retired from clinical practice. As such, she is, essentially, “someone who will listen and support in confidence”.
Dr Marian Burling
She meets individuals who have been referred to her, “usually by a GP or another agency, or they have seen an advert and they just want someone to talk to, who will understand what they’re saying”. She and her fellow befrienders receive regular supervision from a professional counsellor, and training “to maintain skills and focus”.
Over the years, she has lost her mother and father, her brother, and her brother-in-law, besides having two miscarriages, which she had found “pretty catastrophic”. “I didn’t expect that,” she recalls. “I got very depressed both times, and I had to get help.”
She found each bereavement “an experience that took time to adjust to. They all affected me, and they all changed the way I approach life.” In each case, she says, there were “seeds” that have helped her to understand other people’s grief.
“For example, what I took away from the death of my dad was the agony of not being there when a parent dies. So many of us are not there when the actual death occurs: I was a junior doctor, and I had to get back to work in London. That is something I had to live with for a long time, feeling dreadful about it, but it’s helped me be more aware for other people.
“There is so much misleading stuff said about a ‘good death’, that people are distraught because they think they’ve failed because they weren’t present. But it’s not always in your hands whether you’re there or not, and it doesn’t mean that it was a bad thing that you did leave.”
She has not lost a partner, she says, but has “learnt a lot” from observing people who have. That has included patients who have lost a partner, or ex-partner, whom they did not love. “They go through a very strange bereavement, because the sense that they failed comes back to them, or they feel: if only it could have been better. Those are what I call complicated bereavements, where the person has mixed feelings about what has happened.”
Any experience of grief or loss can help you to be a friend to someone who is bereaved, she says, “but it’s only relevant in that it may make you more sensitive, more aware of what that person is going through.
“The danger is that you say, ‘I know what you’re talking about. I’ve had that’ — and then you start giving them advice: ‘If I were you, I would. . .’ But you’re not them, and their path is not your path. What they’re going through is a unique experience.”
Does she feel that she herself has learnt how to grieve well? “There are things that I know make a difference to how you face the reality of it, but I think my job is — to use an expression from psych-speak — just to hold the person I’m befriending. Walking the path by their side is the most helpful thing, not trying to lead them into another stage that I think they really ought to be in. It won’t work, anyway, if you try to do it.”
In fact, she objects to the idea of “grieving well”. “I don’t think there are targets for grieving. If somebody seems to be ticking all the boxes, they can still have a crash.”
She does not believe that grieving follows a distinct path or pattern. “You can fall off the log and you’re back in the water again, struggling with something, and you have to go through it again at a different level. Something can set you off years later, decades later, and the grief washes back over you.
“I think it’s because the dead never leave you, really, because they’re part of you.”
CANON Tulloch explains that “the bereavement sector” no longer talks in terms of stages of grief. “I tend to refer loosely to ‘phases’, to give people a rough idea of the journey, which is going to be unique for everybody. Most importantly, it helps us to gauge whether they’ve got stuck.
“People ask me: ‘How do you know when you’ve got through your grief?’ If it’s a high-impact bereavement, you never really get through it, but you get through the intense period of grief and you aim at finding a new normal, where the grief has become a part of you. And that’s a healthy place to be.”
Both of them believe that ours is a “death-denying society” that lacks “the language of grief”.
Canon Tulloch pins the blame specifically on “white British culture” and “the whole ‘stiff upper lip’ thing since the two world wars, when there was so much death that you just had to put it behind you, and somehow carry on.
“And then, our communities have changed; so we don’t live with our extended families any longer, and we don’t see death in the same way: it’s not part of our everyday experience.
“Also, because our medicines have so improved, and our finances, we almost kid ourselves that we won’t have to deal with death until we’re 90. That has made people even more reticent even to address the subject, because it means they have to face up to their own mortality.”
Her own recovery from despair came when she heard of two Christian initiatives: the Bereavement Journey, then based at Holy Trinity, Brompton, and Care for the Family’s Widowed Young Support.
“Finally, I met with people who got it: just nice Christian people who understood grief, who were able to give me tools for navigating my circumstances. My whole situation was turned around.”
Today, she is the founder and chief executive of the charity AtaLoss, which raises awareness of the effects of bereavement, provides “a central signposting and information service” for anyone bereaved, and trains and equips churches for community support.
ataloss.org
thebereavementjourney.org
careforthefamily.org.uk