I’m not usually a fan of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! but I’m making an exception at the moment. My wife and eldest daughter enjoy the show, so it was thanks to them that I saw the extraordinary footage of Barry McGuigan talking to his campmates about the loss of his daughter, Danika, five years ago.
What was so remarkable about the clip was that The Clones Cyclone spoke openly and movingly about Danika and wept about her loss with a group of people he’d known only a few days. It’s not so long ago that a man who shared his emotions so readily would have been told to ‘man up’ or castigated for doing so. Thankfully, we live in more enlightened times and the group rallied around McGuigan, Tulisa in particular praising the Irishman’s “strength” and observing that “there’s no time limit on grief”.
The exchange, which was covered by both BBC News and ITV News had a significant effect on me for a couple of reasons. One is that I am a Dad who has lost a daughter, the other is the timing; the broadcast went out at the start of the week which contains our little girl’s heavenly birthday.
Our third child, Josie Jean Coates, was born sleeping on 21 November 2020 thanks to an extremely rare genetic condition which meant she had no chance of survival. In the days following her loss, I wrote about it on this blog. Part self-administered therapy session, part survival guide for any other parent in the same situation as us, the piece was raw and unfiltered. Four years later, I’m still not sure how I found the clarity of thought to put it together but am very glad I did. It gives Josie an ongoing presence in this world; this torrent of words both helped keep me sane in those dark, painful days and represents a kind of legacy for her.
What Barry McGuigan showed the millions who saw him open up to his campmates was a simple truth; that grief never goes away, especially when a parent is mourning their child. It does not diminish. They say that “time is a great healer” but it’s not. Time does not offer healing, only evidence that you are continuing to find a way to keep going, despite everything which has been taken from you. That’s important, of course, but keeping going isn’t healing. In allowing himself to be vulnerable in a situation so alien to him, Mr McGuigan demonstrated that almost brutally.
But he also showed the watching audience something else. That it is possible to grow around your grief. To get back out into the world and challenge yourself anew. This is something I’ve learned for myself over the last year or so, while having counselling through Love, Jasmine. Love, Jasmine is a remarkable charity supporting bereaved parents in the Merseyside region. This is how the charity describes its work:
We provide bereavement support to families who have a lost a child of any age from 20 weeks gestation to adulthood. We take an holistic approach to the support we provide families as we understand that everyone deals with their grief and trauma in their own way.
I’ve been working with Jasmine’s mum and co-founder of the charity, Kathy. We talk over Zoom, which is an accommodation made to help me both in terms of managing my anxieties and to accommodate my responsibilities at home. By meeting regularly, if virtually, with Kathy and being honest with her, I have been able to understand that Josie is always with our family, in our thoughts and the love we feel for her. I now draw strength from that in a way that maybe I couldn’t before.
I felt a sort of kinship with Barry McGuigan this week but I also felt gratitude. After all, in the mid-1980s when McGuigan became a World Champion boxer, any man who wept as openly as he did this week would have been asked something like “Wassa marra wiv’ you? You a poof or summink?” Thankfully, we’ve moved away from such primitive attitudes.
There is life after loss. The grief doesn’t shrink, but imagine it’s a ball in a box. It might be a marble, or one of those squeezy stress ball things, but it only just squeezes into its box, like it’s been vacuum packed. The person feeling the grief is the box. In the days after we lost Josie, her ball was wrapped in cling film. Four years later, the ball remains the same size but the shrink wrap has been replaced by a solid plastic box. The ball bashes the walls of the box, but it can’t escape and now other things can go into the box too.
Earlier this year, we welcomed Josie’s little sister into the world. There was extensive genetic testing which revealed no repeat of what happened to Josie. There was a lot of preparation work to try to manage going back to the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Things didn’t go as planned at all but our little girl came home at nine days old. She is a wonder and while she can’t and won’t replace Josie, she is a blessing in every way.
If the tears shed by Barry McGuigan help one person get an early diagnosis so that the bowel cancer which killed his daughter, Danika, can be treated then he will have done a great thing. If his vulnerability persuaded one bereaved Dad to open up to someone, then he will have done a great thing. By opening up, he showed as much bravery in the bush as he ever did in a boxing ring.