When Prince Harry recently spoke about his own mental health in the wake of his mother’s death, I wondered if the therapist and writer Julia Samuel had been a major influence on him, and therefore the nation. She was a close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales, and in 2013 she was asked to be godmother to Prince George.
When we meet for a coffee one sunny morning in a café in west London, she is too discreet to discuss the Prince’s decision to talk openly about his own grief, except in general terms to salute his courage.
“His intervention has helped raise awareness and it’s been an important springboard for conversation. Young men in particular need to acknowledge their needs,” she says.
Samuel’s book Grief Works, published to acclaim earlier this year, has in turn been a springboard for the country to discuss bereavement and death, which in Samuel’s view are among the last great taboos. Her wisdom on loss and how best to cope with it has never seemed more timely after the events last week on London Bridge.
“Five hundred thousand people die each year, but people mistakenly believe that, thanks to modern medicine, we will win against death. The taboo is because we are afraid.”
Though grief is the most intense pain there is, we will do almost anything to avoid the pain. “We run away from it, from our own grief, and that of others,” Samuel says – and it’s the exact opposite of what we should do.
Her book has already helped me to change how I view bereavement. Samuel argues convincingly that if we ignore grief we may be able to function, but our lives will be the narrower. Instead, we must do what Samuel calls “the work” of grieving, and let the process run its painful course. On a more optimistic note, pain allows us to change and can bring with it growth.
For Catholics, the pain of death can be softened by the belief in an afterlife. Samuel was raised in the Church of England, married a Jewish man from the Samuel banking dynasty, and has raised her four children as Jewish though she herself didn’t convert.
“Research shows that faith helps people facing bereavement,” she says. She says she is comforted by the ritual, sense of community and guidance on how to live a good life provided by the Church.
“I love churches and synagogues,” she says. “Weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals – these all mark stepping stones in life and give people a sense of being part of a tribe. There is a lot of alienation and loneliness.”
Born in Kensington, west London, Samuel boarded at North Foreland Lodge, completed two A-levels at 16 and left to work in publishing at Chatto & Windus. She married aged 20, and a year later had her first baby, Natasha. Emily, Sophie and Benjamin soon followed. Though she didn’t need to work in a financial sense (her father James Guinness was from the wealthy brewing family) she always chose to do so. Initially she ran a decorating business, Radnor Design.
She was drawn to becoming a therapist after she attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a friend and was struck by the openness of the participants. “I didn’t know you could talk so clearly about what was on the inside,” she recalls. She trained at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation and the Metanoia Institute. By 1994 she was a counsellor at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and helped to launch Child Bereavement UK.
Her own family had never discussed their feelings, though her parents had lost three parents and three siblings by the time they were 25. Though she describes her own childhood as happy, she feels there was much not said and unresolved by her parents, especially her mother. “Her brother Tony was killed. My mother was at cookery school and was called out of the class. She was told her brother was killed at Arnhem. She finished the class, went to a Ginger Rogers production, and the subject was never spoken of again.”
But as Samuel says so perceptively in her book, feelings don’t age. She finally talked to her mother about her sense of loss late in her mother’s life. “It was a relief. She had shut it down. She had no mechanism to talk about it.” Sadly, her mother died just before the book launch.
So many of those who lived through the war couldn’t afford to grieve. “My parents were the generation who in turn were brought up by those who had survived the First World War. They simply had to survive and didn’t have the luxury of talking. There’s no point berating them or thinking they could be different. They had to shut down the pain in order to survive.”
Yet our generation can experience death and grief differently, chiefly by being more open and honest. The mistake is to imagine what we don’t know or talk about won’t upset us: in fact, our imagination makes the unknown much worse.
Samuel’s own therapeutic approach is a humanistic one. Unlike psychoanalytical therapy practised by Freud and Jung, which returns to our childhood, or cognitive behaviourial therapy, which seeks to change the way we think, humanistic therapy helps individuals pursue their own healing by the therapist supporting rather than judging them in any way.
Now 57, Samuel is blonde with an elfin haircut. She looks fit and well, and is stylishly stressed in patterned green silk and a mean pair of pointed multicoloured pumps. She pulses with life and fun, an impression enhanced by an earthy delight in swearing.
At one point, I ask if she always applies her own advice to herself, in terms of preparing for death with a living will, for example.
“If I’m telling the world to do something, I’ve —-ing well got to do it myself!” she explodes.
My sense is that she is careful to support herself while processing so much of the grief of others with cycling, tennis, running and kickboxing, keeping a journal, meditating for 10 minutes a day, regular reading and listening to music, as well as an ability to live in the moment and appreciate the small things. Finally, Samuel is organised and disciplined. She never sees a client in the evening, for example. All these are habits she recommends to give order in the face of the discombobulating chaos of grief.
Meanwhile, her proximity to death has given her a sense that life is short and must be grasped. She admits to being impatient thanks to her curiosity about others and the world. Indeed, sometimes when I’m chatting to her I find myself answering her questions rather than the other way round.
Our time is up and Samuel is off to the BBC to share her own pillars of wisdom for those facing bereavement. That’s been the best bit about publishing her book, she says: helping and connecting with others, though she hasn’t enjoyed revealing her private self.
She has no plans for another book. She’s said what she wants to say. Like Prince Harry, she has started a conversation about what has hitherto been taboo, and there’s no stopping her now.
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