I was wearing a bikini when he died - the absurdity of it’

Six weeks ago, Helen Bailey was sorting through some bags she had moved to her new home from the place she had shared with her late husband. One, a checked laundry carrier, had been untouched for three years. She unzipped it and found notebooks, pens … “almost a bedside drawer tipped in there”. Then her hand fell on a bikini. Whose is this? she wondered, puzzled as to how someone’s intimate item of clothing had infiltrated her belongings. Briefly, she wondered if one of her partner’s sons might be responsible. “Then I realised. It was the bikini.”

It was the bikini she had worn in February 2011 as she stood on a Barbados beach watching in horror as her husband, John Sinfield, drowned after drifting in a rip current. And all the while a little voice in her head was repeating, “But I’m wearing a bikini … But I’m wearing a bikini … It was inconceivable,” she says, “that something so terrible could happen while I was wearing swimwear. It was the absurdity of it.”

She says she has always “seen the ridiculous in normal situations” – though this hardly counts as normal – and that’s why she called her memoir When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis.

Helen was wearing the bikini in the ambulance and when the hospital doctor told her John was dead. So how was it possible to find it again and not immediately know it? “Didn’t recognise it at all,” she says.

“I couldn’t have told you anything about it.”

Her thorough alienation from it shows how far Helen has travelled, how much she has changed.

Helen put the swimwear back in the bag and returned it to the loft. After being with John for 22 years, and married for 15 years, an emotional unpacking and repacking has occupied her for the four and a half years since his death. She has unpacked their marriage, examined it piece by piece, folded her late husband’s business, unloaded and uploaded her daily experience of lived loss on to her blog, Planet Grief.

But some things have never emerged from the bag. John’s suitcase from the holiday remains untouched: “I keep thinking if I open it, lizards will come out.” His glasses, taken from him on the beach, are still in the Virgin Airways vanity pack Helen stowed them in. Just the glasses “and the sand, and the sand,” she says sadly.

Helen’s book is a painful and companionable account of coming to terms with life without her husband. She was 46 when he died. Early on, she cites a friend, another widow, who “at six months … was exhausted and depressed” and at eight months “looked like she always used to: poised, fun and with light in her eyes”. Helen’s friend told her that one day “it was as if a page had turned and she felt an overwhelming sense of calm”.

But Helen never does turn that page. Instead, the book delivers a string of small moments that chart the long, slow accommodation of her changed life. While other widows of her acquaintance were climbing Kilimanjaro or building new houses, she plodded on with the blog. From buying a single scotch egg to wheeling out the household bin alone to surviving her first tearless day, Helen plots every small triumph and setback. Often, the triumphs are the setbacks – that old double-bind of grief that can make progress feel like a disservice to the deceased.

Her experience did not have a neat beginning, middle and end, and the restive structure of her account is faithful to the unchronological nature of her grief. Some events fall on the timeline as they happen, some when she remembers them or they feel most acute, some when she is ready to acknowledge them. For that reason, Helen’s relationship with Ian Stewart, 54, with whom she now shares a house in Royston, Hertfordshire, is revealed many pages after it began in October 2011.

In the book, Ian is known initially as Mac and later as GGHW (Gorgeous, Grey-Haired Widow, but don’t let the abbreviation put you off. Helen is a writer of young adult fiction; her style is chatty). A widower whose wife died suddenly in 2010, Ian has two sons, aged 23 and 20. “Now we’ve got two grieving families coming together,” Helen says. Marriage would be on the cards but only when “everybody who came to the wedding felt 100% comfortable”.

It is impossible to open Helen’s book without wondering whether it will end with her meeting someone else. Perhaps any loss begs the question of recovery. “That’s the happy ending people want,” she says. “Most of the people I’ve talked to about being bereaved, Ian included, will say that very early on, possibly within days, someone says, ‘You will meet someone else.’ The truth is that it’s very nice to find someone else, but it doesn’t wipe away … It actually holds up a magnifying glass to past relationships.”

This magnification has been a painful process. When Helen met her late husband – known in the book, as in life, as JS, to distinguish him from his uncle John – she was 23, and temping as his secretary. That working relationship informed the way they first related socially, although Helen thinks that even her youth, her inferiority in the workplace, does not explain some of the mysteries of their marriage, mysteries she was never aware of when they were together.

Her late husband had been married twice before; his first wife killed herself, something Helen and JS never discussed. In the book, JS is seen in glimpses – an elegant, generous man, tolerant of his wife’s profligate gym membership, willing to count out granules to make her the perfect cup of tea but never to cook. He is there and not there. A bit like in Helen’s dreams, where, she says, he is “always wanting to escape”, running, jumping out of speeding boats, climbing over walls.

So it is a shock to reach a chapter entitled A Rose-Tinted Life, in which she details some of her late husband’s intolerance of her depression and her own intolerance of his habit of refusing to share worries. This chapter came as a shock to Helen, too.

“It was awful,” she says. “It was one of those moments where I thought, shit! You know? He wasn’t this man on a pedestal that for those 20 years I thought he was.”

That sounds like disenchantment – but it really wasn’t. “He was a mostly wonderful man,” she says. She believes that if he had lived, their marriage would have lasted.

“But once he wasn’t there to charm me out of any funk I had about him, I could see these things.”

Helen’s gains seem to have changed the nature of her losses. All the qualities that have helped her to adapt have reshaped her in a way that has further alienated her from her memory of marriage. Now she finds herself looking back and re-examining not only her husband and their relationship, but also her accommodation of both.

“I wasn’t a little woman,” she says, “but I gave him a lot of excuses. ‘He’s very tired, he’s very stressed, he’s worried about the business.’ I look back and think, I wouldn’t put up with that now. “I suspect he wouldn’t be able to put up with me now either. That is painful,” she says. “Because if he came back, I am not the person I was. He would find the new me.”

When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis by Helen Bailey (Blink Publishing, £8.99). To order a copy for £7.19, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99

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