Andrew Marshall is best known for his self-help books, but his memoir demonstrates that mental health, even for experts in the field of psychology, is a universal struggle. Failed counseling sessions, spontaneous vacations, and romantic dates are all attempts Marshall makes in order to move past “the black holes of Thom.” Zane DeZeeuw, Lambda Literary, reviewing My Mourning Year
Although known in the United Kingdom as a top-notch couples therapist and author of 18 self-help books, Andrew Marshall‘s My Mourning Year: A Memoir of Bereavement, Discovery and Hope, about the death 20 years ago of his partner, may be his best writing, according to Zane DeZeeuw, Lambda Literary.
My Mourning Year is an almost unedited version of the diary he kept following Thom’s death. “He does not offer steps or guidance for how to navigate the mourning process; instead, Marshall uses his experience as anecdotal evidence that a person can survive and learn to live again after being affected by a tragedy.”
As Marshall explains in a Telegraph article, “When my partner Thom died 20 years ago, he was just 43 and I was only 37. I did not have the first idea how to cope with the grief that enveloped me.”
By publishing such a personal book, going against the usual privacy he’s maintained throughout his career, Marshall states, “I want to show that there is no right or wrong way to grieve and everybody – even therapists – make mistakes.”
One significant point Marshall makes in My Mourning Year (and I will continue to quote from Telegraph) is that “Bereavement has the knack of finding the fault lines in your life and blowing them apart. It exposed that my parents were not entirely comfortable with me being gay and I was not comfortable with their polite but distant way of showing they cared.” He needed to take some space from them.
And, adds Marshall, “the most important message of all: grief does not work to a conventional clock. Sometimes it feels like 20 months since Thom died and I still find new things to mourn. (Just recently, I wept about never getting to know him as an old man.) At other times, Thom’s death seems so long ago that it happened to someone else – perhaps because I’m not the same man I was 20 years ago.”
In the aftermath of Thom’s death there were certain things that failed to make Marshall feel better: a rebound relationship, for example—also counseling, it turns out. He actually tried it twice. This “was particularly upsetting because up to then, I’d thought of therapy as the holy grail. The problem was partly me. Just as doctors are terrible patients, therapists make terrible clients.”
(My own take on that latter statement is that it’s overly generalized and certainly not always true. I’ll accept, of course, that he is a therapist and that he feels he made a terrible client.)
Some of the things that did help Marshall’s grief process included the catharsis involved in attending theater, learning to be assertive about specific needs, taking a course in something new to him, and a one-year death anniversary dinner shared with close friends.
Eventually, moreover, he mended the rift with his parents that Thom’s death had provoked. Too, he was able to love again:
Bereavement is a wake-up call that none of us immortal. So I worked hard on improving my relationship with my parents and they have not only learnt to accept me but came to my wedding, two years ago, with joy in their hearts.
Perhaps this is the reality of mourning: you never get over the loss, but if you allow it to open you up to new experiences, you can transform your life into something that might be different, but still rewarding and meaningful.
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