Zibby Mag

By Louisa Young

When my difficult, hilarious, hyper-talented, sweet fiancé Robert died at age 51 after many years of alcohol abuse (and a few miraculous years of sober recovery), I still loved him with my entire broken heart. We’d known each other since we were 17. What was I to do?

I’m a writer, with fifteen books published, so of course I wrote. First, I wrote a darkly serious and bleak but funny memoir about us, based on diaries and letters and memories, called You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol. It tore me apart to write, yet in the end, it put me back together again. Six years after his death, it was published.

By then, I was three years into a new romance with another writer, Michel, who was also widowed and who helped me so much—not just with the writing, but with living to tell the tale, the surviving and the thriving. He had written a volume of poetry about his wife’s cancer and her death (Undying, by Michel Faber. Look it up. It’s ferocious). We found we had a shared project: get through this; find life anew. Seven years on, we’re doing that.

It’s a mystery how life inspires writing, and how writing affects life. I don’t know how it works. While writing the memoir, I also wrote an album of songs about Robert and recorded it using the money he left me. He was a musician so it seemed right to give him a musical memorial and to employ some musicians along the way. The songs on You Left Early are pretty sad.

But as grief began to shuffle over and allow a little room on the bench for new happiness, I found I wanted to make a new version of a widow story: a more upbeat one, something sunlit and loving and sweet with a happy ending. Not based on no longer loving the person who died, but on working out what to do with the love you still have after your darling dies. On everyone finding some room for happiness.

Whom do I mean by everyone?

It became apparent that I meant all four protagonists. Two couples; two deaths; two grieving widows and two — yep—ghosts.

These were going to be lovely ghosts though. Less Heathcliff or Hamlet; more Truly Madly Deeply, or The Ghost and Mrs Muir. Crossed with The Parent Trap. Matchmaking ghosts!

After that realization, the story which became my new novel, Twelve Months and a Day, wrote itself. I poured all the joy and sorrow of getting together with another grieving person into the silliness and romance of two ghosts arguing about whether they could or should use the ghostly powers they didn’t yet understand to try to get their bereft partners together.

But as grief began to shuffle over and allow a little room on the bench for new happiness, I found I wanted to make a new version of a widow story: a more upbeat one, something sunlit and loving and sweet with a happy ending.

People ask me if it’s autobiographical or tell me that it must be. I tend to say, in a jocular and distancing manner, “Yep! Every word is true to my own experience. Especially walking through walls.” But no. Robert was a composer, not a paramedic. I’ve never worked in film. Michel is funnily enough not a rock star, and his wife was certainly not a Ghanaian doctor.

Or I say: “You do know two of the main characters are ghosts?” But there’s a problem there. On the one hand, of course I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m a rational person. But on the other hand, I do. I can’t swear that ghosts aren’t real. Certainly it depends how you define ghost. Tricks of memory and psychology? Wishful thinking? Hallucinations? Genuine paranormal creatures? Whichever way you cut it, I kind of do believe. I’ve heard Robert whisper in my ear—he made a terrible joke at his own funeral, which had me snorting so inappropriately during the vicar’s address (which would have delighted him). I’ve seen him in dreams, felt his presence at home, taken his advice on matters of songwriting, had conversations with him about how he is now. Lots of people experience it. So what’s that about?

I feel about ghosts the same way I feel about about Father Christmas (as we call him over here) — if he’s not real, how come we all know who he is? Clearly, we (the living) do a lot of the heavy work. As parents, we set ourselves up as Santa’s elves and allow the delightful idea of Santa to stay real a little longer for our children’s sake. As widows, or bereft friends, we yearn to be haunted, long to be visited and talked to one last time, held, kissed. Our minds and hearts can’t let go of our dear dead; we carry them with us. One of the most beautiful pieces of music Robert wrote for me was a setting of the E.E. Cummings poem ‘i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)’. I read the poem at my father’s funeral; a wonderful singer sang it at Robert’s. And it’s true. We do carry them.

Writing Twelve Months and a Day was an exercise in keeping the dead alive a little longer, letting them come to terms with their own deaths, and finally setting them, as much as ourselves, free. Anyone who’s lost someone they love knows the feeling that they’re kind of still around for a while, that they don’t leave immediately and all at once. But the time comes when everybody must let go.

In the centuries-old folk song from which the book is named, a widow says that she’ll “do as much for my true love, as any young girl may, I’ll sit and mourn all on his grave, for twelve months and a day…” But then, “when twelve months and a day was passed, the ghost did rise and speak.” And what did he say? He said: “Who is it sits all on my grave, and will not let me sleep?”

I love this image. The dead man wakes, crossly, and tells her to stop bothering him.

His widow explains that she only wants one kiss of his clay-cold lips — but he’s not having any of it: “You crave one kiss of my clay cold lips. But my breath is earthy strong. Had you one kiss of my clay cold lips, your time would not be long.” He is dead, he says, and she is not. He’s moved on; why can’t she?

And he’s right. Being dead is a terrible quality in a boyfriend.

People die, love doesn’t. But the living and the dead have to come to some kind of arrangement, and the living love has to be redistributed among living people.

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Louisa Young was born in London and studied history at Cambridge. She co-wrote the Lionboy series with her daughter and is the author of nine further books including the bestselling My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award and was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice; and Baby Love, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her work has been published in thirty-six languages. She lives in London.