Four years ago, Catherine O’Neill’s best friend Evie died of cancer. Her journey from diagnosis to death took five months. During Evie’s illness, O’Neill, then 45 and single, took a big share of the nursing with Evie’s husband. She struggled emotionally to cope with the horror of her friend’s death, and the shock of the growing attraction to her dying friend’s spouse.
They became lovers after Evie died. “We soothed our souls with our bodies. It felt right, physically and emotionally, almost preordained,” O’Neill says. “Maybe this was justifying what felt like almost indecent behaviour. But grief and love were so entangled. It was as if we had been to the depths of compassion and suffering together in caring for and loving his wife and that contributed to this spiritual feeling of unity and harmony.
“I never felt it was wrong in Evie’s eyes because she spoke often of wanting us to get together after she died, but I felt awkward with other people. You could see the shock on their faces when they realised this was more than supporting each other in friendship.”
The experience, far from being an orderly sequence of loss, grieving, recovery and then new relationship, was of love and sexual attraction pushing their way into the midst of grief and confusion. O’Neill, a therapist, hunted for information that might help her to make sense of her feelings. She discovered a dearth of material describing the sort of experience she had undergone. But that does not mean her experience is particularly rare. “It was as if it were taboo,” she says. Trying to puzzle out answers led her to co-write a book, Love and Grief: Dilemmas of Love after Death.
Susan Quilliam, a psychologist specialising in relationships, says that sex can be therapeutic during grief. “Physical touch is comforting,” she says. “Sex is about affirming life. It’s about giving and receiving comfort very directly. If you talk, you have to think, but if you have sex with someone, it short-circuits the thinking.”
Sarah, 45, a social worker and mother of two boys, helped to care for her friend Anya, who was dying of leukaemia. Anya frequently said that after her death, Sarah would be her ideal choice as mother for her two girls and a boy, and partner to her husband Tim, 44, a designer. “Six weeks after she died, we got together. Although it felt too soon, I admit I wanted him. The physical contact of sex was incredibly comforting. We were raw with grief.”
While Anya was dying, Tim had begun thinking about sex. “I’d look at women and wonder if they were available. Did I fancy them? This made me feel guilty, but I had sexual needs and I was frightened of loneliness. I just wanted them for sex. That wasn’t so with Sarah. I felt there was a bond between us. Anya made it clear that she liked the idea of me having a relationship with Sarah because she’d been close to us both, so it gave me permission,” he says.
“I didn’t register at the time that we had got together so very quickly. It wasn’t until somebody pointed it out that I felt guilty and backed off emotionally while continuing to have sex with Sarah. That was hard on her. She hadn’t been in a relationship for seven years since her husband left..”
The outsider’s critical remark unnerved Tim. Yet there is enormous variation in how fast people move on, says Brett Kahr, a marital psychotherapist and a senior clinical research fellow at the Centre for Child Mental Health, London. “Some people spring to their feet and form a new relationship relatively quickly, whereas others go on for 20 years and still can’t make a new alliance. If the right person presents him or herself, I’d say good luck. But, in my experience, the longer the grieving partner takes, the less likely they are to end up sharing the bed with a new partner.”
Richard Sweet, 47, a student and former IT project manager, whose wife Mary died, aged 42, of breast cancer two years ago, feels that he is not yet over her death. When he tried to have a relationship six months after Mary died, he found it too soon and ended it after three months. The same happened with his next girlfriend. “I love Mary,” he says. “I don’t think anyone can step into the breach. I’m not looking for a replacement wife. I want a girlfriend to go to the theatre and have dinner with.”
So how can bereaved partners tell if they are ready for a new relationship? Colin Murray Parkes, the president of Cruse Bereavement Care, says: “Grieving involves constant oscillation between missing the dead person intensely and what you had together in the past, and getting on with your life. As long as you do that, you’ll come through the grieving process. It is the people caught at either extreme who get into difficulties. People know intuitively when they’re over the grieving because they’re more engaged with the present. The aim isn’t to forget the dead person, but to find a new place for them.”
Four years after Tim’s wife died, he and Sarah feel they have finally come through a difficult period. Sarah says that she has reached a level of acceptance and feels more loved. “Making a relationship from an existing friendship is lovely,” she says. “I’ve known Tim and Anya’s children since they were born. Losing Anya is a grief we’ve all known together. In grief, you turn to friends.”
Belinda Farmer, 45, a civil servant, agrees. Her husband Roy, a glass engraver, died of a heart attack nine years ago at the age of 38. Five months later, she turned to his friend Tony Bennett, 39, a plasterer. “Perhaps it’s because there is less fear of the unknown,” she says. “We all went to the same pub: Roy, me, Tony and his ex-wife.” Roy’s trilby and jacket are still hanging on Belinda and Tony’s coat-stand. But far from being jealous, Tony is happy to make space for him in their relationship.
“It’s not as if there’s any danger of Belinda running off with him,” he says. “Roy and I were friends. I joke that when Belinda and I die, we’ll all be in Heaven with Roy. I have this feeling that Roy is pleased with how things turned out.”
Love and Grief: The Dilemma of Facing Love After Death, by Catherine O’Neill and Lisa Keane (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, £15.99), is available from Times Books First at £14.39, p&p is free. Call 0870 16080880, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
Moving on
Nigella Lawson Nine months after Lawson’s husband, the journalist John Diamond, died, aged 47, of throat cancer in 2001, Lawson (right) moved in with, and subsequently married, Charles Saatchi, the advertising millionaire. Lawson, Diamond, Saatchi and Saatchi’s ex-wife Kay had been friends.
Russ Lindsay Ten months after his wife, the former Blue Peter presenter Caron Keating died, aged 41, in April 2004 of breast cancer, Lindsay has now found love with her close friend, the TV presenter Sally Meen.
John Bayley Within a year of the death of his wife Iris Murdoch, from Alzheimer’s disease in 1999, the academic and writer John Bayley, now 80, had begun a relationship with Audi Villers, 63, an old family friend and widow, who is now his wife.
