I don’t want to talk about death anymore

Two Sarahs and two books about grief

I had two speaking engagements last week entitled from Grief to Glitter. Great alliteration but I’m losing interest.

Perhaps it is the hot weather – we are all melting.

Interest is on the wane. Book sales are negligible, I’m just ticking over waiting for the wind to blow, a change of direction, a bit of breeze would be welcome.

Of course, I don’t need to talk about death and bereavement, not now I have a new book out. But these talks were booked a year ago, so this is expected.

Yes, some people appreciated my words and nodded along sagely, others were visibly overcome with emotion, one lady left mid-talk and I wonder If I am too blasé on the topic now. Grief is NOT a taboo in my house. Perhaps I am de-sensitised.

I used notes for my first talk and then adapted an old Powerpoint for the second – somewhere along the line I missed out the all-important quote from Queen Elizabeth II saying “grief is the price we pay for love”. That would have softened things a bit, grief will affect us all at some time in our lives.

Last month I did a talk at the inaugural Grantham Book Festival alongside another author, Sarah Tarlow. Her book The Archaeology of Grief is also a memoir about the death of her husband. There are similarities to our stories, our boys were about the same ages when their dad’s died, we were both in our 40’s when widowed. As well as the obvious - we are both called Sarah!

There are silly little incidences which resonated such as the stresses of food shopping on your own, the little things that trip you up.

Both of us also write with complete honesty about the hardships of marriage, Sarah writing about the difficulties of living with and caring for someone with an undiagnosed debilitating condition and me about living with someone diagnosed with depression.

There are also many differences. She has a career as an archaeologist; I was a stay-at-home mum. The other Sarah has no religious faith, she describes herself as a humanist, whereas my faith in God which helped me through the tough times.

I made a throwaway comment that we should pitch the idea of us chatting to other festivals.

“I want to talk about something else now.” She said, and I was a little disappointed. The talk went well and in my usual dreamlike state I could see us reaching more and more people, breaking the taboos surrounding death and grief. Ultimately selling more books.

But could we really continue the conversation again and again?

Grief never ends it just changes over time, if you allow it to. Maybe after last week’s talks I have realised, I have also come to the end and need to move forward to pastures new.

I don’t expect my new book of Flash Fiction will ever set the world alight, but it was right to get it published, now I need a new focus.

A novel? Can I really expand a story into thousands of words? If I were to count up all the blog words I’ve ever written I think I would even surprise myself with the total. And I’ve had an idea for a long time, which I will share when things progress.

So now I have a challenge, a distraction from talking about grief, I suppose I had better get on with writing it…