Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group call this a ‘conflict of interest’ in preliminary hearing
The team behind the Covid inquiry has insisted there is no conflict of interest in having a PR firm which worked on Whitehall’s response to the pandemic running a listening exercise with bereaved families.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group reacted with dismay after their concerns were dismissed, saying they were “unbelievably let down”.
Continue reading...Split over colour of heart symbol – and who it represents – and date of annual commemoration
An emotionally charged dispute over how best to memorialise Covid in the UK risks dividing people bereaved over the course of the pandemic.
A split has emerged over whether a red or yellow heart should become the long-term symbol of loss, and over the date of an annual commemoration. The crux of the dispute is a claim from some people who lost loved ones to Covid that their experience “needs to be treated differently” than those bereaved during Covid.
Continue reading...He was the fake medium from Florida whose scandalous cons almost got him shot. So why did M Lamar Keene then blow the whistle on psychic swindlers? A new podcast finds out
What does it take for someone to impersonate a dead teenager to the grieving mother of the deceased? For M Lamar Keene, a prominent Tampa-based medium in the 1960s and 70s, it was a cinch – all it required was a cocktail of cunning, charisma and sheer audacity. In front of the congregation of his spiritualist church, Keene would enter a trance state and appear to speak as the deceased 17-year-old, Jack, and ask Jack’s mother, Lona, to donate thousands of dollars to the church. One day, Lona asked Jack about the secret name he used for her, to prove it was really him, and Keene was stumped – until he attended a gathering at her house and feigned a headache. While pretending to rest in her bedroom, he searched her belongings and found the name scribbled in a family Bible: “Appleonia”. He pulled it off.
Keene confessed to being a conman in his 1976 book, The Psychic Mafia. Jack and Lona’s was just one of many audacious cases he revealed in the exposé, which shook the world of spiritualism so much that it led to an attempt on his life. Someone took a shot at him on his lawn but missed, leaving a bullet in the side of his house. In the book, Keene described how mediums shared client information so that they could conduct “hot readings” based on solid facts. He recounted how they would steal jewellery from clients for a few months, only to pretend a dead family member’s spirit had made it reappear (which usually resulted in generous tips). Ultimately, he confirmed that mediums formed a vast network to fraudulently monetise people’s grief. So why did Keene – the so-called Prince of the Spiritualists – choose to blow the whistle on everyone?
Continue reading...Ten years after my dad died, I felt rudderless – a manchild still making sense of life. But suddenly, surprisingly, I met someone with whom I had an immediate bond
For most of the winter of 2011-12, I was a slightly reluctant member of the Guardian’s spin-off dating site, Guardian Soulmates. I was still in my 20s, just about, and pouring the energy and naivety of youth into a busy social life, a career as a writer of newsprint ephemera and a room in a shared flat. I think I was also a bit lonely and rudderless – a manchild still making sense of life 10 years after the sudden death of my dad. Whatever it was, something was missing.
By late February, I had been on half a dozen first dates – and no second dates. I was getting tired of the whole thing. It was all so procedural. But I’d agreed to meet a girl called Jess, whose profile handle – “good_grammar_is_hot” – had somehow not entirely put me off.
Continue reading...Whether it is to commemorate a lost loved one, bask in their independence or mark a new stage of life, many people now get inked when they are older. Six tell their stories
For many older people, tattoos came with baggage. Now, social mores have changed and for those in their 60s, 70s and 80s: “The stigma associated with prisoners’ tattoos, or sailors or misfits getting them, has disappeared,” says Louise Krystahl, a tattoo artist. That may be why she now gets a lot of clients over the age of 60, who feel ready for their first tattoo at her studio, Inkscape, in Bexhill-on-Sea. She once tattooed a ladybird on the wrist of a woman in her 80s.
“For older people, it’s usually a sentimental reason, not just that they fancy a butterfly,” says Krystahl. “Some of them have a new lease of life, or want to tick it off their bucket list.” The pandemic, she says, may have spurred on others: “I think people are doing stuff they have thought about for a long time and it has given them the impetus.”
Continue reading...From an early age, she encouraged me to be strong, physically and mentally. Those gifts helped me through the day we buried her
My mum was a PE teacher and coach. One of her early gifts was to help me feel like a physically capable female. For the couple of years before she died, my body had taken a battering, with illness and major surgery, then pregnancy and the aftermath, so I wasn’t feeling at all hale. Carrying a coffin is not something a woman necessarily plans to do – usually men perform this task; assumed to be stronger bearers. It’s a frightening, demanding duty.
But I wanted to do it for Mum. I wanted to be involved practically with the process of grief, and “put my hands under the stone”. My cousin R, an upland sheep farmer and incredible woman, walked at the front with me. What the congregation in church saw first as we entered the building was not a typical sight – a beautiful white wool coffin carried in by women. The coffin was chosen by my dad, my brother and me. It was constructed from local fleece and covered with flowers, a visual antidote to fear and darkness.
For the interment, we had the catastrophic challenges of storm Desmond’s tail – a Met Office red weather warning, flooding and damage in the village cemetery, debris everywhere. The entire burial was in question. Throughout, the undertakers were superb, calm, stewarding, agents of a remarkable humanity. Drains were unblocked; the grave was dug, the burial would go ahead, they insisted, the coffin taken via a high passable pathway, between the oldest headstones.
It’s an old Westmorland tradition that mourners walk in a cortege from church to cemetery behind the hearse, and everyone did. The scene was like something from an oil painting; the formal procession through a drenched Lakeland village, the gales dying out and black clouds breaking apart, rays of brilliant, gilded light. People had fought to get to the funeral – train lines and roads were shut and there were long delays, blockages, power cuts. Those who tried all made it, or sent representatives from as far afield as India and the US.
It was an incredible experience – a good disturbance in the heart. I’m haunted, but not traumatically, and a few years later wrote a short story about it all called Sudden Traveller. It is the only story I cannot read out in public.
Regardless of the epic December weather, there were absent people who might have come in support – of me, if not my mother. At the time, my marriage was breaking down and my daughter was only 16 months old. Mum had been sick with cancer for a year and I lived six hours away from her and Dad. I was in the eye of a personal storm, too.
With 93,000 children in Peru losing a parent to Covid, many face depression, anxiety and poverty
When Covid-19 began shutting down Nilda López’s vital organs, doctors decided that the best chance of saving her and her unborn baby was to put her into a coma.
Six months pregnant, López feared she would not wake up, or that if she did, her baby would not be there.
Continue reading...Like for most young Americans growing up, 9/11 was a fairly constant presence, with online videos and TV documentaries, memorials and references to it on the news. I never wanted to ask Mum too much, instead putting the pieces together as I got older. I think I always knew my dad had died that day, but I’ve never felt a hugely emotional reaction. I know the basics of what happened, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.
Continue reading...The actor, comic and writer talks about her bestselling debut novel, the cruelty of costume fittings, how it felt to be in the Harry Potter franchise – and finding hope in small things
As a compulsive diary writer – she has kept one since she was eight – Jessie Cave knows that, unless it gets written down, life gets forgotten. She is glad, then, that she wrote her debut novel, Sunset, because the way she felt at the time “would have just gone, and then you’re in a different place and you don’t remember”. This book, says Cave, was “absolutely the only thing I could write during that period”.
In March 2019, her younger brother Ben died in an accident aged 27. Her book was written in the aftermath, that manic feeling that sometimes comes with grief pushing her on. It went straight to No 1 on the Sunday Times’ bestseller list after being published in June. “I don’t know if I would have that energy now,” she says.
Continue reading...One of 11 children, Séamas O’Reilly was just five years old when his mother died. In an extract from his touching new memoir, he recalls with childlike clarity the awful day of her wake
One thing they don’t tell you about mammies is that when they die you get new trousers. On my first full day as a half-orphan, I remember fiddling with unfamiliar cords as Margaret held my cheek and told me Mammy was a flower. She and her husband, Phillie, were close friends of my parents and their presence is one of the few memories that survive from that period, most specifically the conversation Margaret had with me there and then. “Sometimes,” croaked Margaret in a voice bent ragged from two days’ crying, “when God sees a particularly pretty flower, He’ll take it up from Earth, and put it in his own garden.”
It was nice to think that Mammy was so well-liked by God, since she was a massive fan. She went to all his gigs – mass, prayer groups, marriage guidance meetings. She had all the action figures – small Infant of Prague statuettes, much larger Infant of Prague statuettes, little blue plastic flasks of holy water in the shape of God’s own mammy herself. So, in one sense, Margaret’s version of events was kind of comforting. It placed my mother’s death in that category of stories where people met their heroes.
Continue reading...In 2010, Katie Allen was days from giving birth to her second child when she felt his movements slow. She talks about the ordeal – and how she was helped through it
I woke to the barely there contractions of early labour. It was a few days before my due date in my second pregnancy – a pregnancy seemingly without complications. The Moses basket was out and my hospital bag packed; everything was ready for our baby boy. He was kicking as normal.
As the day went on, my contractions remained mild and far apart. I kept to the plan discussed with our midwives: stay at home as long as possible, no rushing to the maternity ward. I took our two-year-old son, Alex, for a walk with a friend and we collected conkers. When I sang Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star at Alex’s bedtime, the baby kicked hard, as he had done most days, as if he recognised the song, knew our routine.
Continue reading...Dr Cristina Catteneo made it her mission to put a name to each man, woman and child found in the overcrowded hulls of sunken boats bound for Europe
At a glance, Dr Cristina Cattaneo assessed the lifeless body on the floor of an abandoned Sicilian hospital – a thin, young Eritrean refugee about 180cm tall. While most of the corpse was intact, his face and hands were skeletonised, probably the work of sea animals.
It was the morning of 3 July 2015, and this was the first body to be recovered by a navy robot after a shipwreck on 18 April that year, which left more than 1,000 people dead.
Continue reading...Lockdown and the loss of both parents have transformed the entertainer. He talks about the disappointments of TV, outgrowing his comic persona – and his move into the glamping business
I remember the buzz around Johnny Vegas at the Edinburgh fringe in 1997. Everyone knew a star was being born – but a star of what, exactly? No one had ever seen anything quite like this overweight northerner, screaming and sobbing at his audience, raging at life’s injustices – then breaking off for another bout at his potter’s wheel. Was this comedy, ceramics or a Lancastrian on the verge of a breakdown?
But the oddity – that defiance of categories – couldn’t sustain a career. A handful of years after becoming the first newcomer to be nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, Vegas went mainstream as a man with a monkey sidekick in an ad campaign for the pay-TV service ITV Digital. People shouted “moonkeh” (St Helens accent not optional) at him in the street. He became – and remains – a well-loved household name, albeit for a brand of (hoarse, boozy) comedy that part-obscures what made him extraordinary in the first place.
Continue reading...Against a backdrop of Covid, a striking number of musicians, from hard rock to jazz, made music rich with positivity. In the first of a two-part series, they tell their stories
I had really given up on music after my mom passed away [in 2014], and then of course the record that I saw as my death rattle [2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet] got picked up in a big way. It was a very bittersweet moment where all these great things were happening in the wake of loss. I didn’t allow myself to feel that for a long time. Now I feel ready to embrace feeling.
Continue reading...After my first boyfriend died, Elverum’s Microphones and Mount Eerie helped me make sense of a bleak world
I first encountered the music of Phil Elverum in August 2010, a month after the death of my first boyfriend. That summer I spent hours sitting numbly in the park with my headphones on, listening to Elverum describe a landscape without colour or movement: “no black or white, no change in the light, no night, no golden sun”. That dissonance between internal and external worlds made sense to me as I watched children play and rollerbladers pass by in the sunshine as if everything was normal.
I listened over and over again to his album The Glow Pt 2, released in 2001 under the name the Microphones, trying to make sense of the previous six months. I met Marc in my first year at university: a pretty, hyperactive French boy who shimmered into my life at a club night in Birmingham. I fell in love with his perfect sweep of sandy blond hair, the way he played piano with the exaggerated melodrama of his beloved symphonic metal and video game soundtracks and his habit of wrapping a USB cable around his neck like a protective amulet.
Continue reading...Duke writes about his mother’s death in book for bereaved children as part of National Day of Reflection
The Duke of Sussex has reflected on the pain of his mother’s death in a foreword to a book for children of health workers who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.
Prince Harry wrote that the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 when he was 12 had left “a huge hole inside of me” but that it was eventually filled with “love and support”, according to the Times.
Continue reading...A year after her husband Joe Hammond’s death from motor neurone disease, his widow reflects on grief, parenting through loss, and survival
How do you decide upon a day to die? For my husband Joe and me, that meant finding out when the doctors we needed were available, then we took note of our two sons’ school holidays and, finally, we looked at the carer rota for that month. Who could we trust with Joe’s death as much as we had trusted them with his life?
The next step was a meeting with the relevant doctors; what incredible women they had been throughout our whole, surreal journey. They asked us how we imagined the process might unfold, during which Joe would receive a huge amount of morphine to sedate him enough that his ventilator could be removed. We were bemused. What were the options? Apparently, some people choose to watch television and the programme of choice is Countdown. This gave Joe and me the giggles. We said we thought we’d manage without more conundrums than we already had.
Continue reading...The rock star and poet on solitude, her lifelong friend Sam Shepard, and writing her latest memoir
Patti Smith, rock star, poet, visual artist and writer, won the 2010 National book award with her memoir Just Kids. The Year of the Monkey, her moving postscript – about loss, serendipity, friendship and hope – is out now in paperback (Bloomsbury).
Did you plan The Year of the Monkey or did it almost write itself?
Truthfully, I had no goal. It was the end of 2015. I’d had concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco and was supposed to go on a trip with my good friend Sandy Pearlman. But he had an accident and was in a coma and I was without a plan. I don’t drive, so decided to linger to be in his proximity and, being alone, started keeping a journal. I find writing a journal is like having an imaginary friend.
A polarising US election, a global pandemic, the rise of cancel culture: what does the queen of dystopian fiction make of 2020 so far?
Margaret Atwood is smiling, waving a green copy of her book The Testaments at me, while I wave a black one back at her. High-cheekboned, pale-skinned, her curly grey hair like a corona, she’s wearing a jewel-green blouse that makes her eyes glitter. Behind her stretches her large, comfy, slightly darkened sitting room in Toronto, with books and wall hangings and a whirring fan. Atwood gleams out of my screen, bright in all senses.
She is talking about being a grouch. She tells me she turns down a lot of interview requests, “and then I get a reputation as being very grumpy and hard to deal with. But who cares?” Grumpy seems wrong to me. I had been warned that Atwood was scary – super-sharp and impatient – but she’s not like that either. She is unsentimental, clear, sure of her facts and opinions, but she also has a light, mischievous quality. She says my name as though constantly on the verge of teasing me.
Continue reading...This year’s isolation has been painful, but in some cases it has also provided a valuable chance to pause, reflect and take decisions that seemed unthinkable before. Here, six readers describe how lockdown inspired them to turn their lives around
As soon as he heard about the impending lockdown, Alex Harrison, 34, drove to his local casino in Liverpool and asked them to ban him for life. In the manager’s office, his photograph was taken and his details were recorded on an iPad. To his surprise, the manager congratulated him.
Harrison has battled with a gambling addiction for 10 years. When he walked into the casino that day, he owed around £1,000 to friends, family and payday lenders. Occasionally, he would gamble his entire month’s salary on the day he was paid.
Continue reading...