Manchester bombing: the use and abuse of personal testimony?

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The power of personal testimony was every where yesterday.

Radio 4 is effectively audio wallpaper in our house but throughout the day the voices of those who had been at the Ariana Grande concert or picking up their kids from it stopped me in my tracks.

Emotion surged through my body like an energy with no outlet for expression other than to prickle into a few hot tears.

Conflicted

But as is often the way with these kind of terrible events I felt hugely conflicted about the era of 24 hour news that we live in. Even the journalist on the radio sounded shell shocked yesterday morning as he said, ‘it’s hard to believe that this terrible event took place less than ten and a half hours ago.’

And here’s the thing. If it’s hard to believe for the journalists, if it’s hard to bear for those of us listening to the radio, watching the news, scrolling our twitter feeds, how much harder must it be for the people involved, the children, teenagers and families?

Is it therefore okay that almost as soon as it had happened reporters at the scene were interviewing the victims as they emerged from the arena?

Is it okay that adults and children who most definitely have not had time to process the experience are interviewed, albeit by sympathetic reporters?

News agenda

During our Journalism Masters programme at UWE we used to have weekly ‘news days’. We operated like any newsroom in the country, we came in with story ideas, the editorial meeting was held, decisions made about the days news agenda and we were each assigned roles.

On one of these occasions, two of our class were sent out to get footage for a story about a mugging that had taken place. They were encouraged to find the address of the elderly lady who had been attacked, go to her home and ‘doorstep’ her for an interview. As I remember it was known that she had said she was not interested in talking to the media, hence we couldn’t phone ahead to set up an interview.

Being good students the girls set off to do as they were told. And being good would-be journalists they got the footage. But none of us felt okay about it and over the next few days we raised our concerns (via our Media, law and ethics tutor) about the rightness of this action.

During the group meeting that was held at the end of our next news day we were encouraged to talk about how we felt. Our course tutors were both former journalists and editors who had worked for the BBC and ITV.

As good journalists they listened well. As good journalists they gently explained, ‘this is the job, whether you like it or not.’ As good human beings they shared the rationale that they had internalised over the years, no doubt as part of their own coping mechanisms. ‘The thing is,’ they explained, ‘it’s actually really helpful for people to talk, for people to tell their stories. It helps them heal.’

Storytelling as healing

I’m big on storytelling, I’m big on storytelling as part of the healing process. After the death of my dad and then years later after the death of my mum I know from personal experience that strange, pressing need to keep retelling the story. I know too how hard it can be to feel okay about the need to retell the story.

I also know that in the days immediately following the death of my father my journal falls strangely silent on the subject. There are no words to begin with.

I’m no expert on trauma and grief but I believe when those first words come out the kind of environment they emerge into is incredibly important.

Now the BBC and other news agencies may well have support teams in place to help the people they have interviewed afterwards, and I understand that Manchester as a city is doing its utmost to provide the survivors with all the help and support they possibly can.

So hopefully these children, teenagers, mums, dads, friends and family will have all the comfort and aid they need to help them in these first few days of staggering unreality.

My even bigger hope is that support remains in place in the weeks, months and years to come, long after the news agenda has moved on and the media machine has forgotten those voices. I really hope those people have someone to turn to then, someone who is still willing to listen to their story and to do so without any agenda beyond respect, care and love for the people who are talking to them.

Manchester, Ariana Grande, Manchester bombing, concert, grief, trauma, interview, #ManchesterBombing

Why I hate ‘grief memoirs’

I’m not a fan of grief memoirs as it turns out. Which is ironic as I flirt so often with the idea of writing one myself.

I recently heard an interview with Cheryl Strayed. I liked the sound of her no-nonsense Midwestern approach to life and writing so I looked up her book ‘Wild’.

The blurb told me that in 1995 she’d walked along the west coast of America single-handedly as a way of dealing with the grief of losing her mother and the break up of her marriage.

‘Urgh’ I thought, ‘of course you did’ and clicked off the page in disgust, with no further wish to read her writing.

Uncharitable 

Last month I read ‘H is for Hawk’ by Helen Macdonald.  I read the book to the end but quaked with irritation through the sections devoted to Macdonald’s experience of grief, preferring those parts about the life of TH White or the progress of Mabel the hawk.

I don’t know what it is about grief memoirs that makes me so uncharitable.

When I was sixteen my best friend’s mum died. I went round to ‘pay my respects’ as soon as I heard the news with my mum and dad. Whilst they burbled their condolences to her dad in the other room I remember standing in front of my friend.

“I’m so fucking sick of everyone telling me they’re sorry,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

She was standing in the corner of the room. The late evening summer sun behind her reflected off the garden wall and in through the window.

I nodded, as though I understood, but all I really got was a sense that grief was personal, that you couldn’t touch it or get close to it, not even if you really loved the person who had died too.

Spirit of friendship

When my own mum died, almost sixteen years later, another friend gave me a copy of Joan Didion’s ‘The year of magical thinking’, a grief memoir that Didion had written during the year immediately after husband died.

 “I think you’ll find this helpful,” said my friend with confidence.

I hated that book. I threw it across the room a couple of times whilst reading it, only to retrieve it later feeling guilty, as though I had betrayed the kindness and spirit of friendship in which the book had been given to me.

But here’s the thing.

What these memoirs have in common is that they are written in the context of someone stepping out of their every day life for a year to deal with their grief by taking a major hike or training a goshawk for a year.

I’ve known a lot of people who’ve lost people they loved.

And in all cases, life demanded to be carried on.

And so their grief is lived in the getting up and the going to work even when nothing makes any sense. The insomnia they suffer means another day of numbed reactions, mistakes, slowness and a sense of disjointed, unbelonging. Their grief is a weight carried around that shifts and kicks likes an inverse, never ending pregnancy, varied only in the frequency and potency of attack.

I have, it turns out, read grief memoirs, however unknowingly, looking for these heroes, the people I have had the good fortune to know in my life. Inevitably, then, the selection that I have read so far can do no other than fall short.

That does not, of course, in any way undermine the pain that the authors felt or the routes they took to manage and self-medicate their loss. It does however point  the way to the kind of thing I would most like to write, if I were to pursue the theme…

Grief, or, things I normally avoid blogging about...

Grief is such a peculiar creature. She doesn't behave at all how you'd expect her to. Like today, just over four years since my mum died and boom, I had to run to the ladies and have a cry because a dear and wonderful friend text me to say she's going to run a coffee morning to raise money for Macmillan nurses and would like to do so in memory of my mum.

Such a nice, thoughtful thing to do, so why the tears?

Reading the word 'Macmillan' in relation to mum my memory jumps, split-second, to attention.

Flash one: the image of the first Macmillan nurse who came to visit us, a kindly blonde haired lady who misunderstood the extent of mum's illness and thus wove a beautiful tale of a future we wanted to believe in, with my mum, sister and I taking trips to the coast, where we wheeled her up and down the promenade, poorly, yes, but happy to be out and together. We wanted that reality so much.

Flash two: an image now of the second Macmillan nurse, a blonde haired, tanned gentleman, who quickly sized up the situation we were existing within, foresaw that we could no longer continue in her little devon terrace without the necessary equipment (a hospital bed, a wheel chair and walking frame) and knew he couldn't get us those things as quickly as he could get mum a place at the hospice. "It's just for a few nights Mrs Megson," he said, and we were reassured, grateful. "Just till we get all the furniture in here and have it all nice for you."

With breakneck speed the cancer ate her all up, faster than the oncologist predicted, faster than Macmillan could've known, faster than the hospice expected. Less than a week later she inhaled for one final time.

And my grief reminds me, in flash backs more often than not, that quietly, in the background of existence, I am still waiting for the exhale, for the moment where we can pick up from where we left off.  I've so much to show her, so much to share.

Because you see that's the oddest thing, the thing that makes grief the most peculiar creature: there has almost certainly never been a time in my life when I have been happier, more contented, more delighted and more grateful for the world I find myself living in and yet.....And yet happiness is no foil for grief. She stalks the sunny days as much as the dark nights; laughter and high jinx are no protection from the sharp claws with which she'll knead you.

And cat like, this pain is one borne out of love, a kittenish throwback of shocking flashbacks and a deep deep harrowing knowledge that life is finite and once gone won't ever come back.