Bonus Episode: Living with Grief and Tragedy, a Chat with a Friend

This evening I chatted with a friend who lives with grief for the loss of children and a husband.  Please be aware that this might be upsetting.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello, hello. So I'm sitting in the garden with ginger cake and lovely drinks, and we're I'm sitting here with a friend, and we're going to see if it works because it's been rainy now for days and days. But it's so lovely to sit in the garden, and so you can hear the birds about us. And I've got the privilege of sitting with quite a new friend called Claire, and Claire is one of these people who it's been a real privilege to meet because she's one of these people you meet, and first of all, you know, you get a smile and then a chat. She's and then bit by bit you find out more and more, and there's there just is so much to her. And I thought, as a as a different tack for the podcast, instead of interviewing someone who's professionally interesting, I thought you'd be interested to hear about a friend of mine who I think you'll find interesting, and there are sort of human interest stories there for for you to enjoy. So, Claire, do you want to say hello? Not awkwardly here's my hello. And say as much as your name as you want.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

My name is Claire, and I've changed it several times during my life, but let's just stick with Claire.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

All right, Claire. And did you I mean I was going to start asking about your your your parentage, and so we Claire's got a very what's the word, well-established sort of paternal lineage. That's probably the best way of putting it. And do you want to say about how you felt growing up with that, what you knew about it, and what your early what what your sort of early upbringing is?

SPEAKER_01 1:40

So my grandfather was a hereditary peer. And when he died, he died when I was about eight. So my father inherited the title, and then he would go into the House of Lords occasionally because my brother and I were still at school. But once I left school, he started becoming a much more active member of the House of Lords and served in there for 51 years until until the present government decided that hereditary peers were no longer going to be allowed to serve. So he's now had to retire at the grand old age of 88, which he's not very happy about.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Yeah. And I mean, I h what it's just after all that time working for the country and so on. I mean, I you can understand why the government's done it. People have strong feelings about it. But perhaps you just want what what are your thoughts on thoughts on it and and how he feels well, I'm probably a little biased.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

But from my point of view, I can understand why the original I can't remember what the numbers are, but the original, say, 500 hereditary peers, I can understand why they were axed, because it was an inbuilt majority for the conservatives. But what was left, I think there were 97 of them that were left behind, and they were elected from within that overarching call it 500. And when somebody died, it wasn't automatically passed on to your son anymore. It went back to the remaining 400 people, and they had to be voted on from within their own group to get back in and govern. And from what the way I was brought up, and I understand is my father saw it as a privilege to be given this role within government, and he voted for what he believed was right for the country, rather than I mean, he would obviously vote the way he was his party wanted him to, but every now and again he didn't, and there was nothing they could do about it, and I I think that is a there's only there were only 97 of them left out of a house, upper house of four or five hundred. So it wasn't gonna change anybody's mind, but people could put their opinions in and be listened to, and they weren't necessarily affiliated to any party. They were affiliated to a party, but they weren't tied to it. They they weren't if they voted against somebody, they weren't gonna be chucked out.

unknown 4:16

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

You can see why I wanted to interview her, she's so coherent, and you are, no, you are. And what part of England I mean, were you brought up in England?

SPEAKER_01 4:28

I was brought up in Hampshire until I was eight, and then we moved to Hong Kong.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

And I spent three years as a child living in Hong Kong, which was very eye-opening. Instead of coming back to England on home leave, my parents took us pretty much all the way around the Far East and Australasia. So the first year we went into we went to Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands when I was eight. We took schoolwork with us, and my dad, who had been a teacher, would teach us every day, and then we'd go off and see things and do things. Then in the second year, we went into mainland China, which was about two years after Mao had died. And my brother and I had white, white blonde hair, and there were cues. We'd go into a museum, and on the way out, there'd be cues of people deep, 5'10 deep, to see us and take our pictures. So I we're probably in all sorts of people's photo albums, going, ooh, look at this, look at this Guailo touching us. It was very strange. And then the third year, which was the year we came back to England, we went through we went overland pretty much through Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, into Paris, picked up a car and drove back to England, but the car broke down on the way home. So that was quite an adventure.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

That's just amazing. And I'm just trying to imagine you with the blonde hair, and I can, of course, because I know I know Claire's daughter, and she's got very light hair too. And so when you came after three three years, why did you come back and what did you what happened to your family then? And also, are you happy to perhaps introduce the characters a little bit of your mother and your father and whether you had siblings? Is that alright?

SPEAKER_01 6:11

So, yeah, my I have a younger brother who was out in Hong Kong with us, but he was there, he was there from the age of six to nine, six to eight-ish. Can't really remember very much of it, whereas I can remember more of it. My mum unfortunately fell ill while we were living in Hong Kong. She slipped down a step and jarred her back and put her back out, and then I'm trying to think what they diagnosed her with depression, and she was in and out of hospital for 20 years. Turned out not to be depression, it was a chemical imbalance of adrenaline because she'd been a very, very fit, active person, and having broken, she slipped two or three discs in her back, and they wouldn't go back together again properly, and she couldn't be as active, so that she had this big buildup of adrenaline and became a little bit unstable. So from the age of about eight until when she died 28, I I I sort of remember looking after my mother rather than the other way around, and and trying to persuade my brother, who would get very cross with her, that that wasn't who she was, that was somebody else. But you know He didn't remember. He didn't remember, he wasn't old enough to remember.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

And so how did you find yourself in Kenya?

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Kenya, right. So when we came back from Hong Kong, I went to boarding school and then I went to Edinburgh University, where I met someone who I thought was the love of my life, and after seven years, he decided he wasn't the love of my life and was posted to Hong Kong. He was in the army, he was posted to Hong Kong, so my thought was yay, I'll move back to Hong Kong. And he's like, Yeah, no, I don't think so. So rather than staying in England and finding another equally suitable boyfriend and marrying and having one and a half children and a black labrador, not there's anything wrong with a black labrador, because I love Lolly, I ended up moving to Kenya. I worked in England for a very well-known environmentalist, and he had projects in Kenya, and I went out to look at linking schools in Kenya with schools in England in a type of a pen pal project. And whilst I was there, I got offered a job. So I came back to England, asked for a six-month sabbatical where they raised their eyebrows at me and went, Yeah, right, you'll ever be back again. And of course, I wasn't ever coming back again. So I ended up in Kenya where I helped somebody run a private wildlife sanctuary, then I worked archiving some film footage for a film producer. Then I ended up working for a large elephant charity. And from there I'd actually done GIS, which is satellite mapping and imagery, as part of my geography degree. And I ended up tracking elephants using satellite technology all over Africa.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

So that was quite new at the time.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Which was very new and not very many people knew how to do it. Now, not unfortunately, but now for me, unfortunately, a lot of people know how to do that sort of stuff. GIS is an integral part of any social science degree, whereas when I did it, it was very cutting-edge.

unknown 9:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

And so you said you don't mind talking a little bit about your personal life. So are you happy to to move to when you started a a family and what and and the other thing is that you know perhaps give an indication of how how surrounded you were at Kenya. I mean, I've been to Kenya and I know that that if you sort of get in with a right crowd, you can feel proper properly sort of supported and looked after. But there are kind of downsides to that as well, aren't there?

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yes. So in England, I guess I felt I was expected to behave and act a certain way because of my family background. And in Kenya, nobody really cared who I was, which was delightful, which was really delightful. Because I was working in wildlife, I got in with a crowd of white Kenyans and got accepted very quickly and became a big part of that scene, which is when I met my first husband, who came from quite a well-known Kenyan safari family, and was the fourth of five brothers. So yeah. I got pregnant and then married in that order.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Had a lovely little boy called Batean, who, unfortunately, at the age of 13 months started being really cranky and throwing up and not walking anymore. And we went to a hospital and they asked me, they did all sorts of tests. We went to the hospital, they eventually did a CAT scan and found a brain tumour the size of an orange, starting at his hypothalamus and going down to the top of his spinal column. So we were medically evacuated to England. We were in Great Ormond Street for a month, where the first doctor looked, had been told all about us, said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can sort this out, we can operate, he'll be fine. Let me see the scans you've come with from Kenya. So we showed him the scans, he went away, came back, and refused to look me in the eye again. And he basically said, I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do about this. Your son has a very aggressive brain tumor that's like one in several million, and pretty much everybody, well, everybody's died from it. It's only a it only goes into small children, little babies. You have three choices. You can give him chemotherapy, which will probably kill him because he's so young. You can give him radiotherapy, which will which kills fast-growing brain cells, which he is all over because he was a 13-month-old child. Or you can take palliative care and go home to Kenya and let him go. So that's what we did. We took him back, we were sent with a nurse back to Kenya with all the drugs we needed. And two and a half weeks later he passed away in my husband's arms, not in mine. But that was fine, because I told him I couldn't cope with him doing that. So he decided not to do it on me, he did it on my first husband. But my first husband was a very complicated man, and he didn't cope with it all very well. So he went through his own trauma and grief in a different way, and we kind of it it wasn't a good fit for either of us because we were both dealing with the grief in our own way. I did then have a second child with my first husband. But when my son's second son was 10 months old, my first husband committed suicide. So I got over the no, I haven't got over, do you ever get over the death of a child? I was getting over the death of my first child and then had to deal with my husband dying and look after a 10-month-old baby at the same time. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

So we took a little bit of a pauser, not I mean, not because uh Claire asked for it or needed it, it was actually just because she wanted to go and get her jersey. She she she's just amazing because she talks about these things, and I look at her wide-eyed. In fact, do you want to tell me about the um businessman the other week?

SPEAKER_01 13:37

So I I did get remarried, and I was at a business dinner with my husband two, three weeks ago, sitting next to a very nice, charming Frenchman, as they all are, who was busy chatting me up and pouring me lots of wine. And he was asking me about Kenya, and I run a safari business, so he was asking me about the safari company and why I had a safari company that wasn't that was called the name of my first husband's family. So I said, Well, when my first husband died, I inherited his family's safari business for my son. And he's like, Oh, so you had children with your first husband? I said, Yes. He says, What's happened to them? Where where are they? You haven't mentioned them, you've only mentioned your daughters. I said, Oh, well, they're both dead. So the poor man was a little stunned and fed me more wine.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

I shouldn't laugh, but it's it's very difficult for I I know from a friend who who lost her sister in a car crash. She said one of the most difficult things about it is dealing with other people, and and you have to find use yourself looking after other people, and you know, you're the one who's gone through it, but you know, other people get sad, and then you're sort of having to reassure them and things. But a minute ago, when we were sort of munching ginger cake, I I I I basically said, Look, you know, even with my normal grief, which is my mother, and and that's all I've been blessed with suffering so far, uh you know, I find myself having massive nosedives and up and down. And one of the things that seems to be the case from you, but I but you were starting to talk about it, then I thought, well, let's let's let's talk about it on the episode. That you you you seem to to be to be on a level, and then do you just want to chat about w why that might be so or how you dealt with the grief? And and at this stage, i I don't know if you then want to talk about Christian as well, whether that's a good time.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

So, as I mentioned, my mum had been ill for 20 years or so, so she had an aneurysm while I was living in Kenya, a first aneurysm, and didn't really recover from it, but they did an operation and they said, Okay, well, she's not likely to have another one, and she did have another one. And fortunately, in a way, she it was tragic, but she didn't recover from it, which I say fortunately because she obviously wasn't the same person after the first aneurysm. It had affected her really badly, and she wasn't going to be, she wasn't gonna have the quality of life she should have had. So, in a way, the second one was quite lucky. Not that that made it any easier for me to deal with. I have seen a lot of different counsellors in my in my life who who look at me in astonishment. So after my mum died, I did see quite a few counsellors, but then I got pregnant with my first child, got married to my first husband. So I didn't really looking after a small baby, you don't have the time to and running a safari business, you don't have the time to feel sorry for yourself. But then, as I said, Batian died in in when he was 13 months old. I then had another small child who was 10 months old when my husband died. So I really again I think it's just I didn't have the time to feel sorry for myself. I think I think that must be what it is. I I was too busy looking after a 10-month-old little boy running around trying to sort out the mess that was left behind after my husband died.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

How much support did you have from friends?

SPEAKER_01 17:17

The family were amazing, his family were amazing. English people are really not very good at showing you lots of love and support, but they were there as in in their own way as they could be. But I was in Kenya and they were in England. So, but after my first husband died, he died in September 2000, and in January 21, one of my sisters-in-law and her three children were involved in a car crash, and my sister-in-law and one of the children died as well. So the whole family went into a big fat spiral going down, so we had to deal with all of that as well as my husband.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

And did that mean that in a way you were left alone to cope?

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Not so much because I I guess I could be with my brother-in-law quite a bit and and talk, you know, we could go through talk about things, and my parents-in-law were really good to me about it all and would always be there for me and Christian. And then probably about a year after my husband died, my first husband died, gotta keep the husband straight here. I met I met my second husband, who is still my husband. I've only had two, I promise. I don't plan on having any more. They're a bit too it's a bit too much like hard work. So my second husband came along and he was amazing with my son and in dealing with the mess that I was and helped me get through it all with love and support. I mean, I guess that's how I got through it the sec the you know that last time was through my second husband's love and support. And he pretty much brought Christian up as his own. I mean, he did, basically. He cr and he adopted Christian. And then we had two beautiful little girls of our own. So there was a very chaotic family of five, which was fabulous. But then Christian developed something called teenage onset epilepsy when he was about 15 and started having full grandmal seizures. And at that stage, I was living in America, and my husband was living and working in Kenya. So Christian would have these, he was about he was 15 when he started having them. And we'd put him on different medication and all sorts of things, but he's a teenage boy. Teenage boys don't want to take lots of medicine and be told what to do and what to eat. So he we stayed in America until he left school, high school, at 18, and then he came to university in England, and the three of us, myself and the two girls, moved back to Kenya to be with my husband. And and the girls went to school and everything was going fine. And then Christian went away. He was studying international tourism and hospitality, and part of the degree was an international well, you had to do a placement for a year, and he was in Hong Kong just as COVID was breaking out, actually, so not brilliant timing. And he basically had something, he didn't go to work one day. And I called, I eventually called because we had him on a tracker because of his epilepsy, and I could see that he was still in his apartment and he wasn't answering his phone and he wasn't at work. And I eventually got hold of the people he was working with and said, Is he at work? Tell me he left his phone behind. They went, No, he hasn't come in today. I said, You need to go to his flat. This is what's happened. This is what is he has he has epilepsy. So they went to his flat and he had passed away from a seizure. Seizure, it's something called SUDEP, which is sudden unexplained death from epilepsy. So he was 20 and Hong Kong was in the middle of COVID. China had just locked down and Hong Kong was still open. So my husband and I flew to Hong Kong. Luckily, we were able to. Flew to Hong Kong, dealt with everything over 10 days, came back with his ashes, and then 10 days later the world shut down. And in a very strange way, we actually really enjoyed COVID because Kenya didn't have such bad lockdown as England or America. And we were all together as a family and couldn't travel and couldn't go anywhere and could just be ourselves together to get over it all.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

But it's Just absolutely horrific, and I mean I I I honestly don't think I've personally known anyone who has had so much suffering, and and as I s keep saying, you know, you would you'd never know, you know, what a sparkly, lovely person you are. But not not just that, I I perhaps would would just say, if you don't m mind, that I won't mention school names or anything else, that I sort of met you through your daughters because I was working at school and and I met I met Claire's older daughter and what a lovely girl she was and how uh impressed I was with her maturity and her kindness and everything. But I remember one year she said, I want to invite my sister over because we bake brownies at the same time every year in remembrance of their their brother Christian and I just wondered what what what your thoughts are about you know moving from your grief to to the grief of poor two poor little girls and I mean I it it's reassuring to know that you had that that time together as a family, but are are you okay to talk a little bit more about it about the girls and how they cope? Are you sure? And because there is you know there are there are people listening, and I know from emails I had have had that because this started off as a grief podcast, you see. So some people who are listening are coping with grief and so on. So I think there will be interest in in in in all this as awful as it is a subject.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

So I don't know if I can speak for my daughters, our daughters. I will try, but I can't promise. I think they've both had a very hard time. I know they both have therap have had therapy at school. I know that my elder daughter went for therapy, went for therapy at university, and the counsellor was like, Oh, yeah, that's really bad. I'm not sure I can help you with that. So I I've you know they both know that they can talk about it with us. I sometimes think they don't talk about it so much to me because they're worried it's going to upset me. And I think my husband does the same. But we do make a point as a family of talking about Christian as if he's just like living in Australia or somewhere else. He's just not here. And I guess you think about it 200 years ago, when people came from went from England to America, you wouldn't hear from your children, you would have no idea that what was going on with them at all, and basically they were lost to you. So I I'm trying to put myself back into that perspective that he's somewhere and he's happy. And okay, this is really bad, and not bad, this is this is gonna make me cry, but here we go. So Christian's best friend at university tragically died probably two years after he did, she broke her neck, and I've seen a bit of her parents because very strangely it turns out I was at university with her dad, even though we didn't know that when they were at university together. And I was having lunch with her mum the other day who had said, I need to tell you this. I went to see a psychic after she died, and the psychic was telling me all sorts of stuff about her, and she said, But the psychic said to me that when she died, there was a young man with white blonde hair there waiting for her to take her, take her up and guide her. And my son had this mop, very unruly mop, of white blonde hair. So I don't know, he's somewhere and they're together.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

So we keep doing this thing where we I'm turning it off and then we chat, and then I realise actually we could we could we could turn it on again because I d I mean I I don't I haven't encouraged you to listen to the podcast, Claire, because there is a part of me that's no, I wouldn't say ashamed, but I know it's an odd thing. It's more like an audio journal, and some people listening to normal podcasts might listen to mine and think, what on earth? Because it's it's super unpolished, unprofessional. I don't edit it. I probably won't go back and listen to all of this. I'll just if you're okay with that, I'll just publish it. We sort of go for it. It's that kind of thing. But we were we were talking about the f the the psychic, and uh I was saying that I was in a half-dream state about six weeks ago, and my mum was sort of present, you know, when you're in a dream and you're just conscious that someone else is there, and w whether the facts fit that doesn't matter. And that that's what's so lovely about dreams, I think actually, that we stop questioning in our dreams we don't question. Well, that doesn't make sense, that doesn't make sense like we do in real life, we just accept it. And I said, you know, so what are you up to? And she said, Oh, I'm I'm just I'm just doing my window boxes. Have you had any moments like that with any of your any of the people you've lost?

SPEAKER_01 27:14

To be honest, I've never been able to dream about my boys. I can I can dream about photographs of them, but I can't dream that they're there talking to me. I have dreamt about my mother, who would I'd go to a big drinks party somewhere, and she'd be there in the corner, and I'd see her, and I'm like, what are you doing here? You're you're not meant to be here. He's got remarried, and she went, Yeah, I know, she's welcome to him. I'm just here. Don't worry about it. She said, It's fine, don't worry about it. And I've dreamt about my first husband. Actually, yeah, I think just after he died, I was asleep in bed. I can't remember if Christian was in there with me or not, and I woke up with all my hair standing up on end on my arms, and he was standing at the end of the bed, and I'm like, What are you doing? He said, Oh, I I just came to pack, make sure everything was okay. And I said, Oh, all right, okay, you okay with what you did because you committed suicide? And he went, Yeah, I was a bit tough at first, but you know, it's all right now, I'm okay. And I'm like, So have you seen Batian, who was our first son? And he went, No, I haven't had time yet. And I'm like, seriously wanted to whack him one. Too busy, too busy seeing all my friends. I'm like, oh, okay, right. I know. So there was that one, and then actually, just after I moved here, I was asleep, half asleep, like you're saying, half asleep, half dreamy, whatever. And I felt a presence at the end of the bed. I have no idea who it was, what it was. And it was like somebody was there. It was just this warmth, peace, happiness, and I sat up in bed and I held my arms out, and this warmth and peace just enveloped me. And I sat there for a while like that, and then lay back down and went back to sleep again.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

And how often do you do you do you have as what I call sort of nosedives? How often do you have really dark days and and if so, what what what how do you do you do do you sort of hunker down, put the duvet back over your head, drink two bottles of vodka, or she's laughing. She laughs a lot, she's so she's so charming and lovely. Or do you or do you say, I'll see if Gretel's free to go and see the water wheel, like she did yesterday?

SPEAKER_01 29:50

I think my way of not having nosedives is basically just to ignore it. It it's I I'm not sure it's a good thing to do. I think I bottle it up. Yeah, I think it's it's it's all there, and I do feel sad, and there's not a day that goes by when I don't think of my boys. But I think I sort of think about them, I feel sad, and then I think I'm a bit too practical. I'm like, right, get on with it, go do something else. Go for a walk, go do something else, go do something practical. I don't I don't know, I'm not I don't I think probably I just don't let myself do it.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

You don't ruminate, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

Yeah. I do remember when my first son died, and it was just when we were all in our late 20s, early 30s, and everybody was having babies, and so initially I was fine. I was with all the nice friends that had babies and things, and then the minute he died, nobody wanted to talk to me because they didn't want to be reminded that things like that could happen to their children, yeah, and people would cross to the other side of the street rather than talk to me.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Did you challenge any of that?

SPEAKER_01 31:02

No, but since Christians done, I have kind of I haven't challenged them, but I've seen people who've just kind of not said anything to me, and I've gone up and go, Oh, hi, how are you? Yeah and chatted to them to deal with it. And I've also gone up to people that I know who they are by sight. A friend's sister lost her child to a brain tumor, and I went up and I said, You're so-and-so, aren't you? And she said, Yes. I said, You don't know me, but I just want to say I know what you're going through. And she kind of looked at me and I said, I've lost two children and a husband. So if you need someone to talk to, you don't know me. But if you do need someone to talk to that's been through it, I'm here. So nobody's really come up to me and asked me about it, but I am it's kind of I did do the last set of counselling I did, I did, and somebody said to me, Why do you want to do this? It was and I said, I want to do it to try and be able to help other people that have gone through something similar. I don't think I want to do it professionally, but I'd like people to feel comfortable enough to talk to me because I have been through it. So there we go. I don't know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

I was just saying to Claire that you know, she would be she would be very good professionally, and I think it's something that a lot of people who've gone through tragedy perhaps think, well, could they help people? One of the things that transformed the way I feel about people who are suffering was this friend. I mean, I can say she's called Claire because, as you know, all my friends seem to be called Claire. I've literally got seven Claire friends, and they're all spelt slightly different. And they're all uh by the way, in my phone, they're all listed in order of how much I like them. No, no, you you you're somewhere in the middle. No, no, no, no. And so she she was about 30 and her sister died, and and although that might seem quite commonplace, they they were so completely close that as soon as she told me, she phoned up to tell me. I knew that that her life was destroyed to a certain extent because she didn't she wasn't the sort of person who had boyfriends, and even now she's single, and then shortly after her parents died, so she's sort of left alone. But by talking to her, she said, Gretel, the most important thing is just talk to talk to people about the loved ones. They want to they want they don't want people to pretend they're not there, that's the worst thing, you know. Talk about the loved ones and and also don't avoid because she said it almost separated the wheat from the chaff's chaff in terms of her friends, because she said, you know, the wheat were the ones who phoned her up and kept asking, even though it's awkward to keep saying, How are you today? Because obviously you're not going to be great. But then there were lots of people who just wouldn't ask ask at all. And Claire also said she was quite surprised sometimes by the people who came out to be more supportive. It wasn't necessarily the ones she would have thought she would have thought would be supportive. And likewise, you know, she had a couple of friends, she said, who she was quite close to, and she just felt pretty much deserted by them. But that's awful to hear about all those friends with small children, and I mean surely they kept inviting you to play dates and things like that. No, no, that that's just awful. So you separated yourself fr from them, did you? But that's quite a long gap, isn't it, between that time and then when you had Christian, was there?

SPEAKER_01 34:34

So Christian was born two years after Batian died.

unknown 34:39

Right.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

But he died when he was twenty, so there was quite a long time in between. And the parents of his friends have been very good about keeping in most of them have been very good about keeping in touch and doing things with us and inviting us to different things.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

And would you say what would the with all the therapy you you you've had, are there any particular tools really for the for helping really listeners that you think, okay, I'll just want to share this?

SPEAKER_01 35:08

I think you just have to keep talking about them.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

And remembering, and eventually the pain, it doesn't ever go away. But you remember more the happy bits than the the happy bits are interspersed with sad bits. The happy bits are sad because you're sad that you don't have those happy bits anymore, if it makes sense. But you need to just keep talking about them and bring them up. There's that they're still there, they're still part of your life, they're still part of who you are, so you shouldn't just cut them off and ignore them.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

And we t we talk about faith in the podcast. I visit churches and things like that, and I it's not like this isn't like a Christian podcast or what have you, but I would say there's sort of spiritual elements. I mean, you haven't mentioned whether you were brought up with any sort of faith or whether that's helped you at all.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

Now there's a tricky one. I was brought up Church of England, and I went to a church school, and my mum was very religious, and after she died, I tried very hard to believe that there was somebody out there that would look after us all and everything would all be okay because that's what she believed. And I kind of was alright with that for a couple of years, and then when Batian died, I went to a I went into more evangel evangelistic church in Kenya and they started talking in tongues, which was a bit strange. And a little red-headed boy, because my elder son had bright red hair, ran down the aisle towards me, and I'm like, okay, that's it, can't deal with this anymore. And I I I think I'm spiritual, there's something out there. There are there's something, but I'm not sure I need to be in a church to that said. I do find churches very I think it's because of the way we were all brought up. I find churches very relaxing and healing, but I'm not sure the actual religion bit helps me very much. But that's just me. If other people find a way of that helping them, then you've got to do whatever you find works for you.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

And I mean, throughout all this, you I mean one of the things I I I find quite impressive is when I talk to you and you just say things like, Oh, I'm just off to the House of Lords for a lunch or something. And you know, how much of a how much of a role has your grandfather played in all the good times and the bad times?

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Ooh, hmm. My grandfather died when I was eight, so I guess it's just and I'm an only girl. I'm not an only I am an only girl. I had eight male cousins, so all of whom are quite a lot taller than me. I am five foot one. My girls are smaller than me and somewhat skinnier than me now. But but I was I guess yeah, I was brought up to do a stiff upper lip. I'd like to think that I can do that if I have to, but that I'm not so like that that I'm not approachable. I do remember I had a rather scary great aunt who married into some major German aristocracy, and she went through a huge trauma just before her wedding, and entire her husband's entire family were killed in a plane crash on the way to the wedding, and they had to accompany the bodies back through what was then just beginning to be Nazi Germany.

SPEAKER_00 39:01

I think I know of it, it's very famous, isn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

So that was my great aunt.

unknown 39:08

Three sisters or something.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

So she went through, but she went through all that, and I remember going to stay with her once in Germany, and there was a major plane crash somewhere, I don't remember where, what it was about. And they had counsellors waiting at the airport for the relatives, and she's like, I don't understand why people would need counselors. You've just got to get up and get on with it. At that stage, I'd probably seen three or four counselors in my life, and I'm like, Yeah, but sometimes it's it's too much for your friends and your family, and there's and there's and and I had got to that stage. I'd I'd tried my friends and my family, and I just couldn't stop crying after my mum died, and I couldn't figure it out. So I figure, right, well, the only thing I'm gonna have to do is go and talk to somebody that's professional that can help me through it and know how to get out the other side of it.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Yeah, yeah. But I mean that's amazing, and I'm but I I I know I've mentioned it before, but you may have forgotten that I'm uh I do genealogy and and it and it frustrates me because a lot of people call it genealogy, but it's not genealogy. And I have done Claire's Family Tree, but this evening, after I've taken my son for a pizza, I'm gonna go back to it because you're interested in your mother's side, aren't you? Because you know so much about your father's side. But I I did ask about your father and what role he's played. And are you avoiding the question for a reason? Are you happy to answer though? Tell me a little bit, maybe, or don't know. Okay, she's shaking her head. That's absolutely fine. It's her way of saying past. No, that's fair enough. All right then. Okay, and I also I I've met your husband a few times. What a delightful, lovely man. And I think there's a few similarities between our our situations in that. I think we both have husbands that that sort of rock, husbands that get us, husbands that really, really are supportive and lovely. And but also, I mean, I I don't want to like speak for you, but it seems to me that they both have quite a light touch, which which I which I love. Like my husband doesn't crowd me, he doesn't, he's not sort of needy of me or my time. And I think could because I went through trauma that I haven't really told you much about, but I but I will at some point in my late teens, and it it made me very h sort of hard-skinned, and I was like that until I met my husband, and then I was able to finally be myself and live the life I wanted to live as myself. And I mean I I I now think unless there was anything more you want to say, that we could perhaps bring it to a close, but I wonder if you want to bring it to a close by mentioning those who are you know, your daughters and your husband and and your future and and the happiness that you hopefully anticipate in your in your future life. That's a very deep and meaningful question.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

I don't know. I think I I do remember as a small child people would say, What do you want to be when you grow up? Yeah. My answer was always happy. And so that's all I really want. I want to when my younger daughter leaves school, I will go back home to Kenya and I will hopefully see more of my husband, because really I only see him four or five times a year at the moment. I don't know. I'll go home to Kenya and we'll start because we've never been a couple without children. It sounds really bizarre, but when I met him, I had a one-year-old, and now we've got children who are 19 and 21, and maybe we need some time for ourselves and to see what adventures we can have together.

unknown 43:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

It's been a complete honour to speak to you. It's been like very moving, and you know, I'm really, really touched, and thank you so much. It's I've asked Claire to do this for a while, but I I think both of us felt it might be difficult. I hope it's been okay for you.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

Yeah, as long as you yeah. I I've got all sorts of stuff I can like blurb out, but yes. Any final blurb? No, no, no blurb. I think I need somebody to ask me questions to be able to blurb it. So no, thank you for making me bring it out.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

Well, it's been a complete honour. We've managed to survive, even though there's been a puppy pestering us for our for our ginger cake. And I'll leave it there. And I um I hope you I hope you enjoyed listening to dear lovely Claire, and I hope she's been a little bit of a help for those of you who are suffering, and I completely admire how she's coped with things, and yeah, I she's like a bit of a guru to me. Lots of love, Claire. Thank you so much, darling. Thank you for listening, everyone, and uh we will go back to our usual readings tomorrow. Good night for now.