I’ve been going through something of an emotional maelstrom in the past few weeks. Well, that sounds dramatic: let’s say a small degree of emotional turbulence, anyway. It began when I did something I have never done before. I wrote to an author, a detective novel writer I greatly admire.[i] She hadn’t written a new book for a while, and her husband had died a year earlier.

To my surprise, she replied: “Thank you so much for your kind letter. I am feeling better? (Not sure if that’s the right word.) More settled perhaps, and I’m slowly easing into working on my [next] book again.” Was I being kind or selfish? I did want to read the next book in her series, having become involved in her characters’ lives, as you do when an unfolding story really captures you. But I wanted to offer sympathy, too. I knew about a partner dying. “Feeling better”? Was that the right word? Unexpectedly, that short comment has been playing on my mind ever since, ruffling the usual equanimity of my emotions.

There was a bit more. Her letter also offered a piece of advice, “write to please yourself”. I do, but I had given up on trying to create fiction some weeks ago, and her comments spurred me back to resuming writing one of my own detective novels. There I was, once more contemplating murders and mysteries to be solved. I do write for myself, and I am aware of my limitations. To please myself? In a bad week, my knowledge of my limitations overtakes my enjoyment. Most of the time, I am happy getting satisfaction out of trying. In a really bad week, I can always resort to reading other peoples’ novels, and thinking about my next blog. For sure, since I have been spending a lot of time on writing, it has not just been “to please myself”. I can’t stop thinking about whatever I’m crafting, fiction or non-fiction, and have to get some of it written down. It’s about managing brain overload: I think I construct four times as much material in my head as I type on the computer!

If you write murder mysteries, dead bodies are unavoidable! Unsurprisingly, a death was the beginning of my first novel, of a young woman called Christine. Her sister played an important part in the first of the Eamon Cowan stories, but I didn’t give the relationship between Penny and Christine the space it deserved. They had been close, very close, and I skimmed over all that rather briefly. There was more to be said, but I was (and am still) learning my craft. Plots are easy, dialogue is hard, and creating complex, real characters is very hard indeed!

However, in my fourth novel, the one I have just returned to after being encouraged to write for myself, there is another murder. Celia’s death is central to this murder mystery, and so is the reaction of the people around her: her partner Katherine, the policewoman Penny, who is reminded of her sister’s death, the policeman in charge, and, of course, my ‘hero’ Eamon Cowan. I’m happy with the underlying complications of the plot, but as I have been going through the manuscript this week, I began to see how Celia’s death, and her funeral, were drawing on more than just my imagination. For once, I found myself becoming emotional as I wrote. In fact, two parts of this story have been hard to edit, as I keep tearing up as I read my own words. Dear me, I asked myself: what is going on?

I guess every writer draws on his or her life experiences. In this case, some of the borrowing has been rather direct! It is now twelve years ago my second wife, Trish, died as the result of a relatively short, and very nasty form of lung cancer. Our daughter, Julia was 15 (Trish’s other daughter was 30 at the time). Trish was remarkable as she slowly became worse, writing to family and friends, being realistic and thoughtful. It was humbling. I can still remember her only wish (hope?) was that she would see her younger daughter reach 16. She didn’t.

When Trish died, we chose to follow her funeral with a celebration of her life. What I said at the funeral, and some of what we did in the subsequent celebration have made their way into the same events in Celia’s story, albeit significantly changed in various ways. As I was editing that section of the novel, I wasn’t just emotional, I was reliving the past. And that has been true for each of the six times I have edited a draft of this novel.

At the time of Trish’s death, I escaped from dealing with my emotions, as men often do, by focussing on work. Julia was at school, and I supplied the best I could in physical support – cooking, cleaning, transport – although I think Julia will never forget the limitations of my cooking (good food, but with a paucity of sauces as she would somewhat sadly point out). I doubt I offered the same level support emotionally. And now, here I am saying more about how I felt during that time in 2006 through my novel than perhaps I had managed to do in public. Trish isn’t Celia, but she certainly informs some of what I have written.

Losing a partner, losing a child. They are the most wrenching of life events. You do move on, or most of us do, because you have little choice. I had a school age daughter; she probably was a lifeline at the time. Work was certainly a saviour. But if she had been older?

That letter made me think about my parents, too. Trish and I saw them in England on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. My father, seemingly unchanged from my childhood, tweed jacket, still smoking a pipe (“haven’t smoked a pipe in years, Ruby” he said when questioned coming in from the garden), and as gentle and caring as ever. My mother was always the stronger of the two, slightly fearsome, very demanding at times (my dad had his own way of responding to her; “yes, dear” he’d say, even if he didn’t do what was asked!).

Two years later, my father died, drifting slowly away in the confusions of dementia (obvious short-term memory loss in his case), and probably in an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease. I wasn’t there, as it was exactly the same time that Trish was at the end of her pregnancy: Julia was about to be born. However, we saw my mother a short time after, and I hadn’t realised how much of a blow dad’s passing had been to her. She came to visit us in Australia, but she was obviously lost. She wasn’t as strong as I had thought, and she died two years later.

Losing a partner, losing a child. I know how I would be able to manage a loss like that a second time around. I am constantly asking Linda to drive carefully, and I mean it! In some ways, I’d been lucky the first time: knowing someone is terminally ill helps. Against hope that things will improve, that the next drug will work, you slowly accommodate to what is going to happen.

All this was brought into painful relief in the past fortnight.

First, we heard from a friend that his wife had died in a traffic accident. They were a couple who held an important place in our lives. Linda and I saw them as an example of how we aspired to live, working out ways to share time, work, life together. To learn one of them had died was devastating. A perfect role model broken. Is it better if a partner dies suddenly, without warning, in an accident, rather than slowly and painfully?

If that wasn’t enough, a few days later another close friend wrote to say her husband has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Younger than me, his wife is confronting years of care, knowing slowly but surely the person she loves will become increasingly unknown to her, as he loses a grip on himself, his past, his life with her. I think that may be worse than a sudden unexpected death, or even a short terminal illness. Illness prepares you, but loss of memory, loss of a person’s sense of self, that must be almost too hard to bear.

In my novel, when I address Celia’s death I make a lot of comments about the processes of adjustment, moving past grief to acceptance, replacing a concentration on what has been lost to a focus on all the good things that happened. Easy for a boy to say. Easy for a cardboard character in a second-rate novel! What did my author say: “I am feeling better? (Not sure if that’s the right word.) More settled perhaps, and I’m slowly easing into working …”

When Trish died, I took a lot of solace from Henry Scott-Holland, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, whose sermon ‘The King of Terrors’, was delivered in St Paul’s Cathedral on Whitsunday 1910, while the body of King Edward VII was lying in state at Westminster. I read it at her funeral. I won’t quote it all here, but just remind you of what he said.

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.
…

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.
All is well.

Yes, I used those lines in my story, too. Because Henry Scott-Holland got it right.

[i] Full disclosure! I did write to an author once before. I was 14 years old. The author wrote a television series for young children about a cat character, Willum, who appeared in five-minute segments in Children’s Hour. He became the hero of my friends at school! We received a signed photograph of Willum in reply!