Sorry for your loss

When people at parties asked me about the book I was writing, I’d pause and wonder: should I tell them? No, best not. It will only make things awkward. So I’d try and fob them off with something comic like, “It’s about two hundred pages!” They’d smile and say, but seriously – what’s it about? And I’d think: OK, you asked for it: “It’s about my son’s suicide.”

I confess, I used to get a kind of sadistic pleasure in watching them squirm with embarrassment. I think they were expecting something fun and frothy from me. I was fairly well known as a dating columnist for The Sunday Times. From dating disasters to death by suicide is an unexpected switch.

As awkward topics of cocktail and dinner party conversations go, suicide sons – and daughters – are about awkward as they come. It’s the landmine of small talk that suddenly goes off and leaves us lost in silence.

Eventually they’d say something like, Oh. Sorry for your loss. (This trite phrase is the Have A Nice Day of death.) Or they’d ask if writing the book was “cathartic”. “No. It’s fucking depressing!” I’d say impatiently. I was, back then, a Grief Grump – one of those people who always complain about the ineptitude of people who try in their clumsy, caring way to show a little human sympathy.

There was a time when I disapproved of people like me: people who bring out their dead. That is, people who talk at social gatherings about their deceased husband/wife/sister/brother or worse of all their dead child, to strangers.

I remember before my son died in 2015 meeting a very attractive woman at a drinks party. Our conversation was fun and flirtatious and I had high hopes for a night of whoopee back at her place – when suddenly she started talking about her dead son. Goodbye whoopee, I thought. And I was right.

I decided I didn’t want to be known as the guy with the suicide son. So I stayed silent

Another topic I tried to avoid was the My Dead Wife conversation. When I first met the broadcaster Robert Peston at a dinner party I was asking him about his romantic life. He told me he’d been married. “What happened to your wife? I asked, “Did she dump you, ha ha?”

“No,” said Peston, “she died.”

Oh, shit! I was so embarrassed by my faux paus that I began telling him a long, pointless story about another journalist friend whose wife had died. An amused Peston watched as I kept digging myself into a deeper hole – trying desperately to make my anecdote funny or interesting – until he came to my rescue, “Well, you did ask,” he said, good-naturedly.

I remember in the weeks that followed my son’s suicide wondering if I should tell people about what had happened? Sooner or later someone would be sure to ask about my children, how many did I have etc. I decided I didn’t want to be known as the guy with the suicide son. So I stayed silent.

I was at a book launch when a certain male columnist at the Times – that blokey one – introduced me to the people he was chatting with: “This is Cosmo Landesman, his son died recently.” Everyone went silent. Eyes hit the floor. There was the nervous clearing of throats. A bit of coughing. I made my excuses and left.

I always believed that mentioning your lost loved one at social event was anti-social and very insensitive. You just bring everyone down. There’s a time and place for that sort of talk but not at a cocktail or dinner party; people will just get embarrassed. So please, spare us your sad story.

This might sound odd coming from a man whose sad story – Jack And Me: How Not To Live After Loss has just been published by Eyewear Press. Consequently, I’ve been writing and talking about my son Jack incessantly. I tell people about my suicide son even when they haven’t asked about him. How did I change?

I remembered something the woman who told me about her dead son had said, something that made me rethink my don’t ask/don’t tell position. She’d explained that she didn’t particularly want to tell people about her boy – but equally she didn’t want to leave him out of her conversations. She didn’t want to edit him out of her story just because it might be socially awkward for some people.

For a long time after Jack died I avoided the topic of his death. Like the “madwoman” locked in the attic, Jack was the troubled dead suicide son hidden away in my memory.

I’d also been put off talking about him because there had been a cultural shift in the way we as a society viewed loss and grief. Once a taboo topic it had become rather trivialised. In the wake of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, it seemed to me that grief had become a kind of glue that held us together. We couldn’t share values, but we could share sorrow. Grief gave us back the intensity of emotions and feelings that were missing from modern life. It eased the numbness of our existence. And I wanted no part of that.

This cultural shift gave rise to what has become known as the “misery memoir” – those true-life stories of tragic deaths that many readers delight in. The form has become so ubiquitous that Abi Morgan entitled her book about the death of her partner, This Is Not A Pity Memoir.

And I hope my book isn’t either. People have said it’s very moving and that’s fine – but I hope it’s also more interesting than that. One other point needs to be made about these books, which is that the author is invariably called “brave”. Maybe some are, but not me. I’m not brave; I’m shameless! Bravery is for firemen and those who risk their lives in the service of some greater truth or cause.

Since finishing my book I’ve become happy to talk – and write – about my son’s suicide. I’ve discovered there’s no reason to feel so awkward talking about death. And I’ve been surprised to discover how many parents in my own social circle have children with serious mental health problems. We need to talk about Jack – and all the Jacks of this world, be they male or female, before it’s too late.

My book is about trying to find a life after loss but now I wonder if we need to talk about life before loss

The theme of my book is about trying to find a life after loss but now I wonder if I got that wrong; maybe we need to talk about life before loss. We’re all under a sentence of death – the time and method of our execution varies – so how do we live? How do we treat each other before the last breath?

That beautiful moving eulogy we will give to our friends at their funeral is all well and good – but shouldn’t we give that eulogy while they’re still alive? Frankly, I want to hear how wonderful/kind/loving/sexy and great in bed I was before I croak – not after!

We’re still pretty awkward about the topic of death and how we should react to it. I’ve had people tell me how much they enjoyed my book and thought that in places it was “hilarious” – and then apologise for saying that. But I want it to be enjoyable. I want people to laugh as much as I want them to cry. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Life does not cease to be funny when someone dies, any more than it ceases to be serious when someone laughs.”