​Written for When Christmas Hurts, St Stephen’s Fylingdales, Sunday 14 December 2025.
 
I loved Christmas when I was a child. My dad's beautiful voice reading us The Night before Christmas on Christmas Eve. Stockings in front of the gas fire before breakfast – a Christmas annual in the top and a satsuma, nuts and shiny coins in the bottom. Church and then home, a homemade mince pie, hot ginger wine and presents. It was a good year if I got something to make, something to play with and something to read.
 
As I grew up and got married, my parents encouraged us to build our own Christmas traditions, and these evolved over the years, but we always kept elements of those childhood Christmases.
 
My first marriage crumbled and my dear friend Tim, the sweet, witty, gentle man I had known since we were both in our early twenties became a rock and a shoulder to cry on. Our friendship grew into love, and despite me saying I would never marry again, we got married. We moved to a beautiful and ancient house in Tideswell where Tim opened a second-hand bookshop on the ground floor that became a quiet hub of the village. We built a life new life together. Became part of an amazing group of friends. Acted together. Celebrated birthdays and weddings and Christmases and New Years together.
 
Christmas was a special time for us. We would catch up with family beforehand, and then after sherry and homemade mince pies in the shop with friends and customers on Christmas eve morning, he shut the shop and I closed my office door. We might spend Christmas eve at the pub, or have Christmas lunch with friends, but the rest of the time it was just us. We hunkered down, ate wonderful food, played board games and watched films. And then headed away for New Year to see some of our oldest friends.
 
Tim had type 2 diabetes. Early one February morning, a few months after his 50th birthday, and half a year shy of ten years of marriage, his heart stopped. He was gone in just a moment. In a beautiful moment of quiet and love, Gillian and Simon, the village vicars, anointed him on his way and my friend Fiona swept me into the warmth of her wonderful home.
 
Breaking the news to his parents and to our friends and my family was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. They surrounded me with love and care.
 
At first, I was numb, unbelieving. Hearing the door downstairs rattle in the draft and thinking it was him coming upstairs. Waking up in the night and reaching for him. Dreaming that it was all a mistake and then waking up to remember that it was real. Then the reality sank in and I understood how lonely grief could be, even surrounded by people who loved both of us.
 
As the end of the year approached I started to get all the kind invitations from people not wanting me to be alone at Christmas. But I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything and I declined them as kindly as I could. I had a quiet lunch with friends in the village. I spent time with wonderful online friends from WAY Widowed and Young who understood. I took it gently – there were times I wanted to be with people, and times I wanted to be alone.
 
The second Christmas I knew I needed to do something completely different. I announced it early, before anyone invited me anywhere, and I booked a shepherd's hut in the Lake District. I loaded my Kindle full of books, took a box of simple food, snacks and drinks and a sack of wood for the woodburner, and slept, walked, read, slept some more and took time to heal.
 
Eight years on from Tim's sudden and unexpected death, I struggle with winter. It starts with his birthday on 1 December, and runs through Christmas and New Year until the anniversary of his death on 24 February. Trauma changes us. I am a different person now – not necessarily better or worse, just different.
 
But I have found love again and built new Christmas traditions, threaded through with the old ones, in the beauty and welcome of the North Yorkshire coast. In a house full of dogs and words and art and music and the sound of the sea. There are still elements of Christmas that hurt, but it's no longer raw – it's more of a bittersweet wistfulness wrapped around many happy memories.

This is what I have been working on during 2025 - Dancing in Heaven is my first solo collection of monologues. It celebrates the strength, grief, anger, love and loss of the women who were there during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

There will be launches in London on 1 December (World AIDS Day) and Scarborough on 6 December. 

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by the wonderful Dilys Morgan for her podcast Living with Dying, about grief, widowhood and The Widows Handbook.

“Most people who are widowed will talk afterwards about how they flailed around, went numb, didn't know what they were doing or how they were feeling in the early stages of grief.  And yet it's at that time when decisions have to be made, action taken. Suzanne Elvidge drew on her own experience to set up the Widows Handbook and talks about it here.”
​
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2BDSV1po2SNOK1wgVMl1Xd
​

I was honoured to be part of Felix Rackow’s documentary, Grief in the Shadows, which explored the ways in which being LGBTQ+ can complicate the process of grief and bereavement. Other voices included people from Cruse Bereavement Support and Widowed and Young, as well as the Reverend Richard Coles and activist Jonathan Blake.
​
https://shows.acast.com/virgin-radio-pridecast/episodes/grief-in-the-shadows

​I have been stepping outside of my comfort zone a fair bit lately in the creative part of my life. I went on a drama course because I’ve lost confidence on stage, and that is pushing me into improvising and devising, rather than relying on words on a page. I joined a group for writers and theatremakers and read some new work there, and I’ve been discussing how that work could perhaps become a performance piece. I’m coming towards the editing stage of a writing project, and that will go to an editor next, which is setting off my imposter syndrome.
 
The reason that I can do this is because I know that my comfort zone is there for me to go back to. A bit like a pet rat exploring a new room – she can step outside of her nest, because she knows that her nest is still there for her to go back to, and she will step out and run back repeatedly until she knows the whole room.
 
This reminded me of how I felt in the early stages of grief. Tim was my comfort zone, my safe space – I described him as the centre of my turning world – and when he died suddenly it was gone in a moment.
 
I had to rebuild my confidence and comfort zone piece by piece, and some days it felt like I would add a brick, and two bricks would fall off. Seven years on and it’s there. That awful loss means I know that nothing is guaranteed. But for the moment, I will go out, play with words, and come back to safety. 

The title for this blog post comes from the eponymous podcast by the wonderful Laura McInerny (Laura’s TED Talk is the reason that, as a widow, I talk about moving forward, not moving on). Terrible, Thanks for Asking is a place where people can get honest about how they really feel.

As widows, we’re not always honest about how we feel. Sometimes it’s because we don’t want to upset the people we are talking to. Sometimes we want to protect ourselves. Sometimes we just want to get on with our day. This is your reminder that sometimes we need to be honest and be authentic, and let people know what grief actually feels like.

​We often celebrate the big things – birthdays, graduations, holidays, new jobs – and these are all good things. When you are widowed, though, the big things can seem too big to achieve, or they remind us of what we have lost.
 
Today, I want us to celebrate the small things – showering, cleaning teeth, emptying the cat litter tray, cooking a meal from scratch, going for a walk, buying a new shirt. Because while those things seem little, they are actually huge.

I was in an odd mood last night. I’d had a great weekend – the weather was good on Saturday, and I’d been for my first run in five months, seen a friend and done some gardening. Then on Sunday, when it rained, my wife and I did chatted to a friend on line, did some sorting and got delivery of a gorgeous dresser for the sitting room. But Sunday night I was in a horrid mood. Scritchy. Irritable. Slept badly.
 
I’ve been aware of the approach of Tim’s anniversary all month. The beginning of February. The changes in the weather. The snowdrops. The ‘this time that year’. It all builds into the run up to the 24th. Somehow, last night, I’d forgotten it. But it appears that my body hadn’t.
 
It's seven years today that Tim died suddenly and unexpectedly in bed next to me, and as often happens for me, the run up has been harder than the day itself.
 
I'm a very different person now. More health anxiety for others. Fewer fucks to give. I understand how strong I can be, and I know how scarred I am.
 
My life now is a life I love. One so very different from the life I expected, planned for.
 
But I will always miss him.

There hasn’t always been support for LGBTQIA+ people who are bereaved – until same sex marriage was legalised in 2014, some people didn’t always even recognise us as widows. But as these stories show, queer widowhood has been with us as long as queer relationships.
 
Ann Walker – widowed in 1840
Ann Walker met Anne Lister, known as Gentleman Jack (jack was a 19th century term for a lesbian) and described as the first modern lesbian, in 1815, and they began a relationship in 1832. They exchanged vows and rings in February 1834, and took communion together in York, an act that meant they considered themselves married. Anne Lister died in 1840, leaving Ann Walker a widow at just 37.
 
Cardinal John Henry Newman – widowed(?) in 1875
Cardinal John Henry Newman was a scholar, theologian, philosopher, historian, writer and poet. He was an Anglican priest and met Ambrose St John, another priest, in 1841. They converted to Catholicism together, were ordained at the same time, and lived together for 32 years. St John died in 1875, and Newman grieved deeply. John Henry Newman died in 1890, and the two men share the same grave. Different people have different perspectives on their story, with some saying that it was simply a deep and intense friendship, and others celebrating it as a loving gay relationship.
 
Julian Clary – widowed 1991
Julian Clary’s partner, Christopher, died of AIDS in 1991. Clary nursed Christopher for nine months before he died.
 
Dudley Cave – widowed in 1994
Dudley Cave was one of the original members of the London Gay Switchboard, now Switchboard LGBT+, and he created the Lesbian and Gay Bereavement Project to support people in the community who had lost partners. Cave met his partner Bernard Williams in 1954, and they remained together until Williams’ death in 1994.
 
Tam O’Shaughnessy – widowed in 2012
Tam O’Shaughnessy is a former professional tennis player. She was a science teacher, an associate professor or school psychology and a science educator, and she and her astronaut partner Sally Ride wrote science books for children together. O’Shaughnessy co-founded Sally Ride Science, a project to promote science to girls, with Ride and three friends.
 
Andy Bell – widowed 2012
​Andy Bell of Erasure lost his former partner Paul M Hickey, who was also his manager, in 2012. Paul and Andy were together for 25 years and were both HIV-positive.
 
For more on widows and LGBT+ History Month, read my piece on queer widowhood then and now written for WAY Widowed and Young, along with Joanna’s story and Andrew’s story.