A Pocketful of Happiness

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Joan’s birthday. We are unabashed Christmas-aholics, and the house is baubled-up, tree kissing the ceiling, and enough fairy lights to host a Tinker Bell convention. For the past week she’s mentioned feeling breathless and has to pause halfway up the stairs. Nothing more than that. Un-characteristically, for a doctor’s daughter who has resolutely resisted any and every encouragement to see a medic about anything, she suggests calling the doctor, a first in our decades together. It’s also spread into your clavicle lymph nodes. It could be some kind of severe infection, but is most likely to be a form of lung cancer, so I’d like to do a biopsy under local anaesthetic next week.”

I knew he had an "interesting" life and was reputed to be an excellent raconteur and writer ( The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film), but he exceeded those expectations. Grant is an actor who found fame in "Withnail and I" and recently won best-supporting actor awards for "Can You Ever Forgive Me?". He was born and raised in Swaziland but has been based in the UK for most of his adult life. Newly arrived in London, I was waitering at Tuttons brasserie in Covent Garden, and had just secured an acting agent, who suggested getting accent coaching to help me play Northern Irish, as there were so many dramas being made about the Troubles and “you’re dark-haired and blue-eyed, so you could go up for Irish roles.” This resulted in experiencing ‘literary whiplash’ - pulled around from an emotional chapter to subsequently being regaled with glossy celebrity tales in the next one, and feeling slightly uncomfortable about how they could be within such close proximity of one another. I ask if he thinks this is because he grew up in Eswatini (then called Swaziland) before moving to London in his 20s, so although he can charm his way into English society – even going to Prince Charles and Camilla’s wedding – he is always standing a little to the side, trying to understand it. He smiles kindly at my armchair analysis: “It’s always a little odd to hear oneself defined by someone else, but that makes perfect sense. Yes, exactly.” Thank you Mr. Grant for this gorgeous book, this intimate look into the wonderful life that was your marriage to Joan Washington [and by the end, I was so very sorry that I never had an opportunity to meet such a fantastic person] and the extremely intimate look into her illness and death. Even though I cried serious ugly tears throughout much of this book, I would read it again for the first time in a heartbeat. I would read it again for a second time right now if I was told to. It helped me with my own grief and indeed I think anyone who has dealt with grief in any way imaginable, will get something from this book, even if it is an amazingly cathartic cry.You write about “memory-charged” objects that you bought together. Do they lose their power without her there with you? Distract ourselves playing Scrabble most of the afternoon, trying not to fixate on anything other than the here and now. But we know one another too well not to wonder and finally worry out loud— In the early days of their relationship, she was the successful one, flying off to coach Mel Gibson on the set of The Bounty, while Grant pined away in London, hopelessly unemployed. But that shifted and Washington, he writes, “had to readjust and accommodate to being my plus-one at premieres and press junkets, which she understandably found uncomfortable”. No, I thought that keeping a very accurate record would be the best way to try to understand what was happening,” he says quietly. His voice today is a little huskier and flatter than usual, as if the events of the past year have hollowed the stuffing out of him.

She was ten years older than me [when we met], an established top dialogue accent coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal Court Theatre, National Theatre. She coached on movies — and I was a younger actor trying to make a go of it, waiting tables and getting small jobs here and there. But she never wavered.In the midst of grief—the most isolating state of all—Grant rapidly built community. “I’ve found incredible comfort in these thoughtful videos you share with us; their beautiful honesty, their pain—but always the careful reframing of each piece within the greater mosaic of a life well lived,” one woman commented recently when Grant shared that his mother had died. Taken as a whole, the uploads can be disorienting, which is what makes them so revelatory as a record of life after loss. Grant posts videos from friends’ houses; he promotes his own projects; he re-creates scenes from Withnail to pass the time during 10 days in quarantine. But underlying everything is Joan’s absence—the feeling, as he remarked in one post, while walking on the beach in Australia, of being “like an old turtle without my shell.” Maybe: ‘Oh, I’m sure she’s got over that, but you are a complete idiot and you should have your tongue clamped and tied.’ ‘Yes, yes, you’re right.’ Not having those conversations any more. That’s what I miss.” Walk, lurch downstairs, utterly overwhelmed and discombobulated. Tears blurring everything. Grateful to have something to do.