I don’t know how long we stayed actually, I think maybe two hours. And also we wanted, I wanted to touch Nicholas’s body, I didn’t want him with a wooden surround and covered up and everything and you know, it was only hours ago he was alive, so why shouldn’t I want to be with him now that he was dead? And the other thing is he he looked remarkable, like my mother who died a few months later, of cancer actually and had only just been diagnosed three weeks before Nicholas died, she’d been diagnosed with cancer. She and Nicholas had this ecstatic look on their face, as if some orgasmic ecstasy had happened which also was a wonderful thing [laughter] you know, there wasn’t a scary impression, it was like an ecstatic expression on his face.

Were you left alone with him?

No we were all together but I actually, was I alone with him, but we went to see him for three days, every day.

You didn’t have to have a police officer there or?

No, no, no.

They left the family?

No they just left us [her and her friends], and also, yes. They made time for us, they were just so kind. I have one regret, that I didn’t bring a, I didn’t think of it, you know, [laughter] now I would think a little bit better, I know a lot more now, but I should have brought a record player with me to play his particular Hari Krishna music to him, which he used as a way of meditation every morning, dancing naked around his room learning poetry by heart. And this music is very beautiful and I just felt it would have been, you see this is the other thing, this is just me and again the coroner was so kind, there needed to be an autopsy but I didn’t want his body interfered with until I felt ready to let him go and I said to him Look we have Buddhists belief and we don’t want the body to be interfered with for three days and he accepted it and so we had a sort of wake, for three days, we came every afternoon and spent , friends came also, spent time with his body in the room and you could feel his presence there. It was as if he was there in a way. And I left my scarf with his body somehow, because his head was bent backwards and I wanted it, and so I put my scarf under his head and by the third day I practically lay alongside this trolley with him, holding him, I was sort of getting used to, that his body was now cold and lifeless but was so familiar and, you know, it was important to be allowed to have that.

I wasn’t ready for anyone to interfere with the body and also I’d told them that I would, we would organise a funeral ourselves and that we were the funeral directors and so they [the hospital mortuary] kept the body for us for a week.

When it came to Nicholas’s funeral we very much did what we did for our friend. We had a sort of initial ceremony down below in this field where there was a structure set up so that people could sit around the coffin and a Quaker style ceremony where you could speak when you felt moved to speak and it was very, very beautiful. I think every funeral should have such a wonderful set up [laughter] and there were lots of us there, the elderly people sat on chairs and we all sat around on the structure we built and then up the hill there’s this little area for the graveside and we had another ceremony there and a very set ceremony, and one beautiful thing you can do with abamboo coffin is you can weave flowers into the lid and it looked like a piece of jewelry, so beautiful. And June at that time on our land there’s a lot of Rhododendron [in flower] and people also brought flowers, well, I asked everybody to bring just one flower anyway but it was just so nice to be physically decorating the coffin together whilst it sat above the grave. And then we had a tea party in the field until the end of the day and the end of the day was where we danced in a very big circle around the grave as the sun was setting and we went back home to London, we had a whole day.

I think there’s a journey you see between death and funeral, it’s a journey and you go on this together and I think to arrive together at the station and walk all the way to the site and then, it’s like a ritual it’s an important thing to be involved in. And people obviously were talking to each other on the train and, you know, so it was a wonderful, wonderful funeral, very satisfying and the next day we had the big event in London with a live band and the video being played three times on a big plasma screen and photographs of Nicholas all around the room.

Where was this?

A big space, a big space in central London which belonged to a close friend of ours. And so it was partially outdoors and partially indoors this event and I think about 300 people came, I don’t know.

In June, 3rd June in 2001 my husband Nicholas was killed on a Sunday evening in a little country lane he’d been to see his mother for tea whilst I was at home having been busy. On the way to the station, as they drove out of the little country lane, out of the drive into the country lane, a car came up and just as they had stopped to turn and see if the road was free, if the road was free, this car came up, it was an inexperienced driver and hit full frontal and the car turned around, spun around and Nicholas died of a broken neck.

And I don’t want to feel, I have never held the people responsible, neither his mum nor the other driver, I feel this accident could have happened any other time and I feel I was in absolute shock when, I never suspected anything was wrong at all when Nicholas didn’t come back at 9 oclock or something when I ran a group at home and it had ended and I was washing up and I didn’t think anything when the police came, two policemen came to the house. And it was half past eleven and I thought something happened to somebody else and they came in and said nothing and I said What is it, is it my son and they said N, because I have one son who was at that time in Germany, working and I’m German. And then I asked Is it my husband and they said Ye. And because Nicholas and I had set up The Natural Death Centre together and The Natural Death Centre was set up in 1991 and The Natural Death Centre had taken us into becoming experts on green funerals family organised funerals and it had, it was sort of, being a psychotherapist death, you know, embracing death is part of life, that is sort of my daily mantra to, to live more consciously and more fully so I had even that very day as we lay in bed in the morning been thinking here I am lying in bed with you, one day, I imagined I mean, you know, no magical thinking involved, one day you will be dead, but here we are together alive, look at me and he did look at me but he didn’t really look at me in the way I expected. He looked straight through into the distance and I thought, Well I don’t know what’s going on with hi, I thought our relationship had it’s difficulties and we had some arguments and I thought it’s going to change and I’ll just take it lightly I won’t intrude and ask him what’s going on. And we had a wonderful parting that day and just really amazing and when he left that day to see his mum for tea, and I was about to work, I said to him, as I kissed him goodbye what do you say Come back to me safel and I never say anything like that. And he didn’t come back, you know, he didn’t come back and that night the policemen, they were probably feeling terrible and I was just blank when they told me he had died in a car accident.

Do you have a spiritual belief?

Yes but, you know, my spiritual belief you could say, I have a catholic background which I rejected when I was 14 and a Buddhist view on life without having been a signed up Buddhist. I’m not, I’m a spiritual person but I’m not a religious person.

But something extraordinary happened and that’s what I want to say really, I couldn’t sleep after Nicholas died and I had some sleeping pills at some point, can’t remember. I couldn’t sleep very much and I was, I had no appetite and I think that these are all just part of shock, you know, also I had no energy really to cry, I wasn’t emotional at all. It was like as if that takes you into yourself and I wasn’t in myself I was just doing things, you know, organising two major productions [the funeral and the memorial service] you could say and I was between two phone calls, the upstairs telephone and the downstairs office phone, giving information, speaking to people and I couldn’t bear to repeat myself. I just thought haven’t you got it already, no that’s the same. And so one day, it probably was about ten days after Nicholas died I spoke to somebody on the phone and I made an emotional connection and I cried and I felt, I was sitting down on the, you know, on the stairs in the hallway and crying and suddenly Nicholas was there and he bent over me and put both his hands on my elbows and I could, this hand I couldn’t see but I felt it, his hand, but this hand, I could see his hand and my arm my elbow here. And I felt such, I felt him standing behind me bending over me like that, I felt so, as if somebody had put a glass bowl over me, you know, like a glass bell really. Sudden stillness and I felt, like before I was very emotional, it was like, you know, I was tossed by my emotions and then I felt this stillness and I felt so, I took the time to look at his hand it was so nice to see the little hairs on the back of his hand and I felt as if it was the most normal thing in the world and I felt he was conveying somehow or saying, I’m okay, you’re okay, everything’s okay and I felt it’s okay. And this happened a second time and when it happened again I realised that it had happened, it happened in this moment when I was crying on the telephone, and then I told my friends, my son and my girlfriend who was staying with me and also people in the office and my mother-law and I was absolutely amazed, they were amazed too, unheard of, I’ve never heard anyone, I’ve never heard, I mean just so unexpected. I thought, Oh wow, God there’s something I didn’t know, come now, come now, I couldn’t make it happen that was so frustrating and so I thought well what a wonderful thing, it made me, it gave me something, it gave me I suppose acceptance and peace somehow, there was this feeling of and this stillness was a kind of, a real, on a cellular level an okay feeling, you know, it’s okay although I don’t understand it, it’s okay.

Did you talk to any professional counsellor or therapist yourself about these experiences?

Yes, yes I talked to my analyst about it and she was very accepting, she had not experienced anything like this herself but was open to not knowing or to something unknown, which you cannot easily slot into place. And what I feel about this now, although at the time it made me feel very strongly there’s life after death, I can’t say now what there is, I can only say there is; these experiences happen and I think we should allow people to talk about it and people who are working with people who are dying or bereaved shouldknow that this is very normal.

Had you been, do you have an analyst you see regularly anyway?

Yes.

This wasn’t a particular appointment?

No. And I went to see a medium it was just some months actually, it was in the, when was it, it was in September of 2001 so Nicholas had been killed in June and my mother was ill and she actually died a week after I saw this Medium. The Medium was amazing, I couldn’t make quite sense of it then but it’s, it’s amazing. I suppose I at that time, it was true I was surrounded by death and that’s what she said, I mean I don’t want to go into that, any of that. I have seen her many times since then say once a year maybe I’ve been seeing her, and it helped me to understand these experiences and just find they’re normal, these experiences I was having and

What happens when you see a Medium what’s, what’s the aim?

I suppose the aim is to understand better this mystery. And Nicholas is, he talks to her.

Organ donation was never discussed at all?

No, I’m so against organ donation, I’m sorry but I don’t think we are spare parts, we are not, you know. I don’t go along with the idea that it is a great thing but I just feel that way. I don’t want to support that kind of medicine that behaves like that or thinks like that.

Which thinks you take organs and put them in there, you take that bit out and put it in here. But I suppose I would give parts of my body to my family where it is sort of, if my body, if my tissue was, you know, it’s somehow acceptable to another, the tissue of somebody in my family, then I think yes but I don’t know. it’s an issue that I’ve always felt very strongly against, I could maybe change my mind.