As the months went on, Tony joined online Covid support groups. It helped talking to others who understood how it felt to have lost someone. There was the family of a 19-year-old boy. A woman who was mourning both her mum and her dad. Another woman whose husband had died in the car as she drove him to hospital.
He thought of these stories each time he switched on the news and watched the Covid mortality figures climb higher and higher. Behind these cold statistics were human lives. And each was as unique as Ann, with a personality and backstory entirely of their own.
It would have been Ann and Tony’s 41st wedding anniversary on 6 October, the day before the six-month anniversary of her death. The following month, a few days after the UK’s Covid death toll reached 50,000, Tony once again felt Ann’s absence bitterly on what would have been her 66th birthday.
“Christmas was a nightmare for me,” he says. Under the rules for the festive season, Gary and Rachel and their partners were able to be there with him, and cooking lunch kept him busy most of the day. But afterwards, when he was on his own again, the reality hit that another celebration had gone by without Ann beside him, and Tony sat down and sobbed.
For millions the arrival of the Covid vaccines has brought hope, but it is a cold comfort for those who have lost someone. If every one of the 100,000 were loved by a dozen people, “that’s a million people in Britain who have been bereaved”, says the bioethicist and sociologist Prof Sir Tom Shakespeare. “We need a national monument, some form of remembering.”
Tony is not one of those who will find it hard to grasp the significance of this bleak milestone.
“To me it’s 100,000 poor souls fighting for breath, and they’ve not had a hug from anyone in their family,” he says. “There’s a name – there’s a person behind that number. And then they’ve passed away, and the family goes through the grief that I’ve been through – the numbness, the shock, the anguish and the pain to come.”
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Picture editor: Emma Lynch. Additional reporting by Oliver Barnes
