Grief and Bereavement

Grief and Bereavement shapes Dexter Mayhew’s life not as a single episode with a settled aftermath, but as a recurring encounter with absence. The decline and death of his mother, Alison Mayhew, unsettle his sense of adulthood and deepen his reliance on Emma Morley; Emma’s death later makes remembrance both a source of connection and a force he cannot control. The novel gives grief physical settings and objects: a doorway, an unanswered call, a night of drinking, two boxes of possessions, and a photograph kept against its owner’s stated wish.

Alison’s illness and the failure of readiness

When Dexter arrives at his parents’ house in the Chilterns, he sees his father as stooped, tired, pale, and drawn by the six months of Alison Mayhew’s deterioration. His father’s changed appearance makes Dexter see himself from the older man’s perspective: the shiny shirt, sporty car, and jaunty music seem suddenly embarrassing. The visit turns a familiar home into a place where his usual self-presentation cannot protect him from the fact of illness or from his father’s exhaustion.

Alison’s vulnerability makes the prospect of loss difficult for Dexter to imagine. After saying goodbye, he watches her turn away, then forces aside the thought that he may soon leave a room and never see her again. In his old bedroom, now crowded with stored furniture and boxes, he imagines that emotional maturity should arrive at forty-five or fifty as a kind of equipment for surviving a parent’s death. Instead, he is twenty-eight and Alison is forty-nine. He regards the timing as a mistake and admits, in thought, that his busy, promising career feels like a competing claim on his attention. He has not cried for fifteen years; when the urge comes, he attributes it to chemicals and goes to sleep, promising himself that he will wake, apologize, and show his love. The promise exposes the distance between the decent, selfless response he imagines and the response he can manage in the moment.

Bereavement and strained dependence

After Alison’s death, Dexter’s father is also changed by bereavement. His calls become more frequent, hesitant, circular, and distracted; on Dexter’s visits, the man who had been self-made appears defeated even by the kettle. The loss has altered their relationship as well as his father’s daily competence. Before Dexter’s television show, his father leaves a message wishing him luck and saying Alison would have been proud. A pause makes clear that both men recognize the claim may not be true. His attempt at encouragement carries the awkwardness of a family trying to speak across grief without knowing what can safely be said.

Dexter turns increasingly to Emma Morley after his mother’s death, expecting her to remain available as a resource he can summon. But Emma is building a life with Ian, and her replies no longer arrive immediately; sometimes days pass. Dexter’s dependence therefore meets her independence as a fresh injury. He feels resentment and jealousy, though he resists naming the jealousy, and interprets her absence from his live television broadcast as another sign that the friendship no longer organizes her life around him. His bereavement does not simply make him seek comfort: it sharpens his expectation that Emma should provide it, and her changing circumstances expose the limits of that expectation.

Emma’s anniversary and destructive celebration

On 15 July 2005, the first anniversary of Emma’s death, Dexter tries to define the day as a celebration of her life and their good memories. He rejects his manager’s protests, takes two hundred pounds from the café’s cash register, and brings three staff members out for the night. In a basement bar in Camden Town, with his fifth martini and a cigarette, he insists that he is marking the day as Emma would have wanted. The language of celebration becomes a defence against stopping, looking around, or thinking about the loss.

The evening does not sustain that defence. Dexter finds his companions’ caution irritating, moves from bar to bar, and proposes a strip club. Later, after provoking a man whose drink he has taken, he is beaten and thrown into an alley. Lying on the ground with blood in his mouth, he repeats to himself that this is what Emma would have wanted. The repetition does not turn the assault into a meaningful tribute; it shows how urgently he tries to recast a damaging night as an act of remembrance. The anniversary makes grief visible as behaviour, but the behaviour isolates him from the people attempting to keep him safe.

The work of memory in objects

Later, Dexter opens the boxes containing Emma’s possessions. Marked Emma 1 and Emma 2 in her handwriting, they hold notebooks, letters, wallets of photographs, and ordinary ephemera. He sorts items for disposal, for Emma’s parents, or for himself, working without tears and avoiding her journals because he imagines her disapproving of him reading them. The task gives bereavement a practical form, but its apparent order cannot make the contents emotionally neutral.

Because the boxes have been packed in reverse chronology, Dexter moves backward through their shared life: from their years together, through the 1990s, and into the 1980s. Among photographs and papers from Paris, he finds a Polaroid of Emma naked on a bed, taken after a drunken, amorous evening following a French-language screening of Titanic on a black-and-white television. She had snatched the photograph from him and insisted she would destroy it, yet had kept it hidden among her possessions. That contradiction offers Dexter a momentary suggestion that she liked the image more than she admitted, then presses him again against her absence. He puts it back in its envelope and sits in silence.

The archive also makes time tangible. Among later papers are school mementos from Cromwell Road Comprehensive School; farther back are postcards, student work, and Emma’s graduation certificate, still rolled in a cardboard tube. Its date is 14 July 1988, eighteen years before the day Dexter finds it. Such items do not restore Emma, but they preserve different versions of her life and the long duration of their connection. Sorting them becomes a journey through shared time whose oldest layer reaches back to the beginning of their adult lives.

Memory carried into family life

Grief remains part of Dexter’s relationship with Jasmine Mayhew. When she asks whether he misses Emma, he answers that he does every day and calls Emma his best friend. Jasmine says she thinks she misses her too, though she was only four and remembers Emma mainly through pictures and the wedding. Her recollection is incomplete, but the conversation gives Emma a place in the family’s present rather than confining her to Dexter’s private memories.

Across these episodes, the novel does not present bereavement as a process that simply ends. Dexter’s responses shift from evasion and postponed apology, through dependence and resentment, to a deliberately staged anniversary and the difficult handling of Emma’s belongings. Photographs, letters, a dated certificate, and a daughter’s partial memories keep the dead in circulation among the living. Yet remembrance can comfort, unsettle, or become an excuse for self-destruction; its persistence, rather than a final resolution, is the defining condition of grief here.