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Natascha McElhone was away filming in LA, with her two sons and pregnant with her third child when she received news that her beloved husband, Martin, had died suddenly of a heart attack. Unable to accept this devastating loss, she began writing letters to her husband, telling him how she felt, and how she and her children were adapting to life without him. The result is "After You", a triumphant testament to the resilience of the human spirit. It is a profoundly moving tribute to Natascha McElhone's three sons, whose appetite for life led the author through her darkest moments, and to their remarkable father. -- http://www.amazon.com/

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After You: Letters of Love, and Loss, to a Husband and Father by Natascha McElhone
by Elizabeth Day, The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/



Natascha McElhone and her husband Martin Kelly, pictured in 2003.
Photograph: Alan Davidson/WireImage


Death brings with it many horrible ironies. In the case of Natascha McElhone's husband, who died suddenly of a heart attack in May 2008, perhaps one of the most noticeable was timing. It was not simply that Martin Kelly, an eminent plastic surgeon, went too young – the father-of-two was only 43-years-old, fit and healthy with no known medical problems – it was also the fact that he died the day after the couple's 10th wedding anniversary.

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McElhone, a successful actress who starred in The Truman Show and Ronin, was filming in Los Angeles at the time of her husband's death. She was seven months pregnant with their third child. The couple's two other young boys, Theo and Otis, then eight and four, were playing in a gym near her trailer. The book opens with Neil's devastating phone call and the dawning realisation that McElhone will have to tell her sons what has happened. In a stream-of-consciousness passage of heightened, almost dream-like lucidity, McElhone manages at once to convey both the magnitude of her sudden loss and its dizzying, incomprehensible immediacy.

"I wipe some tears from my face – I don't want to scare them," she writes. "We sit in a tight circle, facing one another. 'I've got something horrible to tell you.'

"Theo: 'I know what it is – you've lost your job.'

"F***, I wish. Right now, I wish he was right and that was it. 'No, baby, I wish that was it … Dadu's died.'

"I hold it together for that statement, then the walls of my eyes come tumbling down again. He wails; the little one watches him like a hawk, scanning his big brother's reaction before deciding what his own should be."

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Her grief goes through different stages, by turns sad, angry, uncomprehending, bitter, philosophical and even, at points, ecstatic, almost joyful in the clarity it seems to lend her thoughts. She notes it all down unblinkingly, without lessening the potency of her feelings by attempting to explain them. The result is a brave and extraordinary testament of bereavement, as honest as any I have ever read. McElhone might not be as self-consciously erudite as Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, nor does she seek to anatomise the process of grieving, as CS Lewis did in A Grief Observed, but her greatest strength is her lack of style: she gets straight to the point; she tells us how it is.

Her lyrical, fluid prose hits the spot with such precision it can leave you wincing in pain. She writes with intelligence and insight, sometimes challenging her own preconceptions, her thoughts arguing with themselves on the page. "Death is final," she states at one point, only to contradict herself in the next sentence: "No it is not just final, it's worse than that, it's diminishing: the dead continue to decrease, to occupy less space."

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There is humour here too, when McElhone wryly recounts the "endless… time-consuming crap" that arises out of a premature death. There are life insurance policies and mortgages to be sorted out – at one point, she fears she might lose the family home – and then there is a tortuous toing-and-froing with BT over an erratic broadband connection that takes "17 days of my life" to smooth out. When she composes a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for the role of her new partner, she outlines a series of necessary qualifications in bulletpoint format. "The mother's an actress," she writes. "I know they are generally a f***** nightmare, but I think she's been fairly humbled by recent events."

After You is an extremely moving account of loss and loneliness. But in writing about the acuteness of her grief, McElhone also pays tribute to the power of survival. In the end, she is saved by the unstoppable force of her love: both for the husband who died too early and for the sons who live on in his memory.




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