Nothing like lockdown to make you flit so dramatically between the gargantuan and trivial aspects of your life. After Caroline died, I’d find myself in floods of tears because I missed her so much, then immediately snapped out of it by a small child asking me for a rice cake. Kids are a useful distraction, I think. Although there were times when I longed to sit alone with my sadness, to have no one take me away from it and just sob and sob until it got easier. I guess the worry with that is that it doesn’t get easier. Or that, in the time you take to wallow, so many other aspects of your life get ignored that when you get back to it, you have a huge mess to sort out. Maybe having two small people who give you little time to sit with sadness is a good thing, though there are days when it really didn’t feel that way. I hid most of my grief from them. I never tried to explain to them that my friend had died. I felt that being kept home with no mates and me not being able to get their favourite brand of peanut butter was enough for them to cope with, rather than their mum being someone they had to be worried about. They are so young.
Grief is an all-consuming emotion that you cannot fight in the early stage. People have always spoken to me like I know about it, because of my mum’s death a few days before my seventh birthday, but honestly, until recent years I really had no idea how hard it was. We’d lost two very close family members a few years ago (on Chris’s side). It isn’t my place to talk about it here, but it was a very sad time. Both had been ill for a while, so there was a certain amount of mental preparation that could be done. I don’t know how much that actually helps the people closest in those times, as the reality is the people they love still just disappear, but the total shock of Caroline’s death was certainly a huge part of the pain.
I didn’t see it coming. It’s like a car bursting through your living room window and setting your house on fire while you were watching trash TV. A catastrophic shock where everything feels destroyed in a heartbeat.
It was 7.30 a.m. on a Saturday morning here in Los Angeles, just moments before the news broke publicly in the UK, when I got the call from Josie. Of course, my reaction was shock and disbelief. All the obvious feelings that people talk about after something like this happens. I cried immediately. The kind of tears I’m not sure I’ve ever cried before. It was guttural. I sobbed hard and out loud. No space for self-awareness, no control. I remember my body shaking and my heart beating like I’d just run a marathon. Pins and needles up my legs, a pain in my head. I’d slept so badly the night before, I’d been up all night with terrible period pain. It’s always bad, but this was particularly bad. I’d taken too many painkillers so had to stop but I was still really sore, so I just had to writhe around and deal with it. To think what was happening with Caroline while I was doing that. Was I feeling her pain too? I’ve come to a point where I think everything is connected.
After the call, a whole new pain started. This one emotional. I kept thinking it would never stop. How could it, unless it wasn’t true? I then called a few people who deserved to hear it from a friend first, rather than on Twitter. When I’d done that, everyone seemed to know within minutes. Twitter was flooded with it. It was so fast. People were calling me and texting me, and I wondered when she would be in touch to tell me it was a hoax. My body detached itself from my head and went and tried to live a normal life.
We had plans to be at a kids’ birthday party that morning and we went. I can’t believe we went. The friends were British, it felt like being around people that at least knew of her would feel better. It felt like it would have been harder to be home with the kids all day, having to entertain them, that if we took them to a party at least they would have been out. Chris could have gone, but I couldn’t be alone, I needed to be with him. He was everything to me in those moments. I didn’t want to be without him. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I put on a green dress that I had worn with Caroline at Glastonbury one year. I cried at the party and people talked about what had happened, but they didn’t know her and I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, which was fall to my knees and beg for it to not be true. The media was alive with the news that she was dead and all I kept thinking was ‘She’s my funniest friend in the world. This can’t be happening.’ But it was. I had to leave because my dear friend Mel was doing a performance of the Vagina Monologues and it meant a lot to her that I was there. She didn’t know about Caroline yet, and I didn’t want her to look into the audience and think I hadn’t come. So I went. I kept telling myself that friendship was everything, I had to show up for her. Caroline always showed up for me. I sat with Mel’s husband and his mother, who were very supportive but kept talking to me and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Luckily, Mel was on first and after she’d done her monologue I ran out. Sitting in that auditorium felt impossible. I needed to get home, and I needed to meltdown. I had to be with Chris.
While I waited for my Uber I stood on the corner of Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, scrolling through her Instagram feed. I read the texts she’d sent me days before. I stared at the last message, willing a speech bubble to pop up underneath it, but it never ever did. I was sobbing again. Loudly. People were looking at me, I didn’t care. The world wasn’t real. Reality was in my phone, it was going to light up any minute, and say it wasn’t true.
I’m not going to share the final weeks of Caroline’s life. That is her story, not mine. But what happened to me following her death is something I feel I need to share. Grief tore me in half. For months there was no space in my head for anything else. Even writing this, I still feel like I have 20 per cent of my brain on the job. I don’t even know what I’m talking about – does any of this even make sense? Since that morning, I’ve been scared to look at my phone when I wake up, in case more bad news comes. When it happened, I was scared to be outside because I did crazy things like walk across roads without looking both ways. I should never have driven with my kids in the car, I wasn’t safe. I found being with them a huge comfort, but I didn’t want them to feel my heartbreak. I was so anxious and sad. I was also afraid. I didn’t have any faith that something else terrible wasn’t about to happen.
My main fear was that I had to continue to live my life as I did before, just to protect other people. When you lose someone, you get a lot of love and support, but soon, and naturally, that begins to fade away. I remember a moment around three weeks after she’d gone, where people stopped asking about it. The texts slowed down. The support bubble popped. People got back to their lives. People spoke to me like I should be doing better. I wasn’t. That’s when the sinking feeling of ‘oh, the world moves on, but I am stuck with this forever’ kicks in. The unrelenting torture of grief, knowing that nothing can fix it, is a frightening path to look down. It’s endless. Too exhausting to even try to start moving forward. You’re fucked, everything is fucked, and there is nothing you can do about it because they’ve gone. You don’t want to be that person who can’t recover, but when you wake up in the morning and get out of bed, it’s as if you look back and your body is still lying there. You can’t re-inhabit it because too much has changed. That’s not your body any more, and neither is this head. You have to walk around broken, either pretending to be OK, or not pretending to be OK. Both equally as horrific. I felt so far away from home, I wanted to go back but I couldn’t. I needed to wait for funeral details, as I could only do the long haul once without the kids. The wait was awful.
I can look back on it, even though it was only five months ago from writing this, and I do see that things have got easier. The fog has lifted, I can cross a road like a normal person, I can have other thoughts, I can feel happy at times. But I can’t see how the anxiety will ever go. I wake in the night, every night, and the first thing I see is Caroline. It’s as if my sadness sits by my bed, staring at its watch, waiting for my eyes to open. I learned to pack the sadness away for the day. Enough to get through it, anyway. But it was always there, tap-tap-tapping on my mind. I think it always will be. No one who loses someone they love tells you it goes away. They say it gets easier, but it doesn’t go away. It’s actually comforting, in a way. You cling to the grief the way you would cling to the person if you had your time with them again.
Grief is like a helicopter that circles over your head (I have this thought as I look up to the sky, there is one circling my house right now, a common sight in Hollywood). The sound fades away sometimes, but you can always hear it. Other times it’s so close that it’s deafening, frightening, even. You know it could spiral out of control and come crashing down on top of you at any point. Some days, it’s all so agonising that you kind of wish it would.
I tell myself the human race is designed to cope with death and that of course time is the greatest healer. I know that and I believe it. But Covid-19 slowed down time and I cannot for the life of me work out if that is a good thing or not. As the months went by, I’d find myself doing so much better. I’d get through hours, maybe sometimes an entire morning without feeling sad and actually focus on something else, giving it my full attention. When it hit me again, I’d be aware of what I’d just achieved and see it as progress. Maybe I’d walked the dog and chatted to my dad, not mentioning Caroline at all. Or perhaps I’d done some exercise and got into it enough that my mind didn’t wander back to her. At the start, I thought I’d never again get through an hour without crying. The problem now is that I have learned to cope within the parameters of isolation, but as soon as I step outside it I am at a total loss. As things open up a little and I see friends, if they so much as mention Caroline I feel just as I did at the start. Like a cloud of smoke immediately fills my brain. Tears impossible to hold back. My voice stutters, stupid embarrassing hiccups come out of nowhere. It makes me anxious that, when life goes back to normal, I’ll go through it all over again because it won’t be normal. Caroline won’t be in it. I worry I have so much to get through before I’ll be able to accept it.
The pandemic has been such a weird time to be sad about losing someone who didn’t die at the hand of coronavirus. The relentlessly terrible news took the personal experience out of death. It became about numbers and predictions, and each and every case instilled fear into us all. Who next … you? Me? Dad? Sister? I felt like it got in the way of what I wanted to be feeling. I resented it at first – why couldn’t this huge thing go away so I could get back to just me and my thoughts? I hated the distraction, I wasn’t ready for it. Four months after she died, it felt like it had happened so much longer ago because so much had happened in the world. Other days I’d wake up, I still do, and feel like it happened yesterday. It’s dark to think about how many people have lost loved ones in 2020, but it provides no comfort or solidarity to know it wasn’t just me and those of us who loved Caroline. To think how many people feel this sad at the same time is unbearable.
I miss her texts. Four hundred of them coming in, one after another. I miss her silly jokes, her infectious laugh. Karaoke was always so fun; but now as it makes me think of her I don’t know if it will be fun again. I just want to cry. It will never be the same. I’d like to come back to the UK but I don’t get how the streets of London exist without her tiny feet strutting down them. I don’t know how the world keeps turning without her laugh making it spin. I know, of course I do, that people move on and grief makes us stronger, rounder, more emotionally mature or blah blah blah, whatever people say. But also, it just fucking sucks. It sucks so SO hard. I feel like sadness is now just a part of who I am. Right now, whenever happiness creeps in, so does a feeling of guilt that she isn’t around to share it. There will be times and places when that guilt is unbearable. I find myself often saying that things remind me of her, but the truth is nothing reminds me of her because I never stop thinking about her. To be reminded would mean she would have to be out of my thoughts, for even a minute. And that has not been the case.
I know I’m not alone. I guess all we can do when we feel this way is to accept it that some days will be OK, and some days won’t. It’s as simple as that. Along with grief should be a gratefulness to be alive, because there is nothing like death to make you realise that. But as much as it’s important to rebuild, sometimes it’s OK to just feel really, really upset. I’ve learned trying to fight that is just a total waste of time.