When Love Doesn't End: Richard E. Grant and Radical Honesty Grieving the Death of a Spouse

How do you navigate a world that feels empty after a 38-year conversation ends? In this episode of Everyone Dies, we dive into the "radical honesty" of actor Richard E. Grant as he navigates the profound grief of losing his wife, Joan Washington. We explore why he rejects the idea that "time heals" and instead advocates for an unfiltered, open approach to bereavement.

We also tackle the complex realities of spousal loss through a listener's story of grieving a partner lost twice—first to addiction and finally to illness. From the unexpected relief that can follow years of chronic caregiving stress, to the heartwarming story of NFL players are joining the ranks of the most trusted profession, this episode is a safe space for the raw, honest, and often unspoken truths about death and dying.   https://bit.ly/4sWAJrl

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The Most Trusted Profession: Why nurses have topped Gallup’s honesty and ethics poll for 24 consecutive years and how former NFL stars are now joining the ranks.
• Richard E. Grant on Love & Death: A look at the actor’s journey through spousal grief and why he continues his 38-year "conversation" with his late wife through nightly letters.
• Challenging Grief Platitudes: Why "time heals" might be the wrong way to look at loss and how to navigate around the "hole" left behind instead of trying to fill it.
• The Power of Radical Honesty: How laying bare your life and secrets can become a therapeutic act of protection during bereavement.
• Grieving a Complex Partner: A raw account of losing a spouse to addiction and the "messy" administrative and emotional reality of cleaning up a life left behind.
• The Taboo of Relief: Understanding the sense of peace that can occur when the chronic stress of a partner’s terminal illness or struggle finally ends.
• Safe Spaces for Death Talk: Why having a community to discuss the "unfiltered" side of death is essential for healing.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro; Saks 5th Avenue Closure and the Rising Thrift Store Trend
• 03:48 - The Most Trusted Profession: Nurses and NFL Players that Transitioned to Nursing
• 07:32 - British Actor Richard E. Grant on Love, Grieving his Wife, and Learning Openness from His Traumatic Upbringing
• 17:03 - The Importance of Safe Places for Talking About Death and Grief
• 19:38 - The Raw Reality of Death: Widowed Twice, the Complex Loss to Alcoholism, and Cleaning a Messy Life
• 22:46 - Outro; Every Day is a Gift

#EveryoneDies #GriefSupport #EndofLife #DeathEducation #Podcast #S6E51  #Grief #Widow #Nursing #DeathAndDying #MentalHealth  #RichardEGrant #SpousalLoss #GriefRecovery #HonestConversations #Widowed

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Everyone Dies, a podcast focused on public education about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement, because even though everyone dies, no one must face it unprepared. In this episode of Everyone Dies, we explore grief, bereavement, and long-term marriage through the lived experience of actor Richard E. Grant. This conversation addresses how love, connection, and identity continue after death, offering insight for caregivers, widowed partners, and anyone navigating grief following a serious illness.

Thank you for joining us today. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarrette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast.

We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you will be to make tough decisions. Please remember, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording.

In the first half, I have a report about nurses and their future and our recipe of the week. In the second half, Charlie discusses Richard E. Grant's reflections on loving his wife through illness, grieving her death, and why love doesn't end when someone dies. In our third half, I have one woman's answer to the question, widows and widowers, what are some things that you weren't prepared for after your spouse died? So Charles, still living the dream? I'm going to say yes, but I may need to check back with you later in the day.

Oh, actually, you know, I was going to say Saks closed, the big one in 5th Avenue. So how's your Saks life? That's cute. That's clever.

Hang on. I need to write that down. I don't know what's happening now, but Marianne, I don't know, a few weeks ago, Saks closed, the big one in 5th.

Come on. Yes. Come on.

The big one in 5th Avenue. They're millions of dollars into debt. And you know, it might even go back to December.

I just avoid that area entirely around Christmas time. It's possible, you know, I need to look this up. I know listeners are on the edge of their seats, but it's possible Saks was closed over Christmas.

No. Oh, yeah. I need to look this up, but I know it's, yeah, it was closed for a while.

It actually just might be completely closed still. I forgot about that. I was just reading that the secondary market for, you know, like thrift stores and things like that for clothes.

Oh, yes. Yeah. I don't know.

I don't remember what the number was, but it was an impressive number. It was saying that people are, you know, enjoying thrifting and including their clothes. Yeah.

Well, sadly, it's nice. We started that back in the 70s. Yeah.

With a lot of folks, that's all they can afford is secondhand clothing. Well, what I was reading was that despite what people can afford, is that the whole idea of, you know, why spend money on new things when there's all these clothes that are just going to end up in a landfill or something. Right.

Right. You know? So, for our first half, nurses have once again been ranked as the most trusted professionals in the 2026 Gallup Annual Most Honest and Ethical Professions Poll for the 24th, Charles, 24th consecutive year. Absolutely.

The poll continues to show that the public places more confidence in nurses' honesty and ethical standards than in any other profession survey. For nearly a quarter of a century, nurses have topped Gallup's National Measurement of Honesty and Ethics, reflecting sustained public recognition of the compassion, expertise, and integrity nurses bring to patient care and community health. In the most recent poll, 75% of Americans rated nurses' honesty and ethical standards as very high or high, outpacing all other professions.

Nursing has been predominantly a female profession, but that's been changing in the last 20 years. And some people you might not think about as nurses are joining the profession. For example, a few years ago, DeBrakshaw Ferguson, a former offensive tackle with the New York Jets, faced a question that often challenges retired athletes, what should I do with my life? One day, Ferguson, 41, was discussing his career with his mother, Rouenette.

She offered a seemingly random suggestion, why not give nursing a try? She was a nurse herself, and Ferguson's grandmother was also a nurse. Nursing, she told her son, had a wide array of career paths and specialties. In 2025, Ferguson graduated from Thomas Jefferson University College of Nursing in Philadelphia and now works as an RN.

Although there aren't available statistics on how many NFL players have nursing as a second career, some are still playing football and plan to pursue nursing when they leave the league, while others make the shift after retirement. Men make up about 13% of registered nurses, up from 8% a decade ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The path from a bone-crunching contact sport to nursing might seem odd at first.

Patrick Hill, a former fullback and running back for the Tennessee Titans, says that he thinks the football career is a solid preparation for nursing, because both required mental toughness and resiliency. Both nurses and football players must act quickly and perform under pressure, he said. Who knows, maybe the next six-foot, six-inch nurse you encounter just might be a former NFL player.

Our funeral lunch recipe is Million Dollar Dip. Why not bring a game day dip that tastes like a million bucks to a repast? This popular dip combines two of our favorite ingredients, bacon and cheese. It's delicious with crunchy corn chips, buttery crackers, bagel chips, or the healthy way, with celery sticks.

Bon Appetit. Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe and additional resources for this program. This is the part where we ask you for your financial support.

Did you know that your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our nonprofit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone? You can donate at www.everyonedies.org, that's E-V-E-R-Y, the number one, dies.org, or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies. Charlie? Thanks, Marianne. For our second half, does time heal? I don't think so.

Actor Richard E. Grant on love, loss, and bonking. And to translate, bonking is British for boinking. Ask your kids.

If I say Richard E. Grant, most of you won't know who I'm talking about. When you see his face, you will say, oh yeah, that guy. He has acted in everything from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films for close to 40 years.

The Guardian newspaper reports that the British actor and diarist still grieves the loss of his wife, talks openly about heartache, ambition, and his traumatic upbringing. A month before Grant's wife, Joan Washington, died, she was an acclaimed dialect coach. She recorded a poem to be played on her daughter's wedding day.

Washington died on September 2, 2021, from lung cancer. Their daughter, Olivia, was married in September 2023. Grant explains that the family couldn't bring themselves to play Washington's recording, stating, it would have wiped everybody out.

The event, with Washington absent, was bittersweet. That's the brutal bit, Grant goes on. You so want to share that with her.

Grant and Washington were married for 38 years. In the end, a close family member read Washington's poem. Three women in the congregation, all good friends of Grant's, appointed themselves Olivia's fairy godmothers, like something from Sleeping Beauty.

They took her to buy her wedding dress. They took her to lunch. They offered themselves up as mother mentors.

Richard E. Grant has been one of the United Kingdom's best-loved actors since 1987, when he appeared as a relentless, drunk, out-of-work actor in the film With Nail and I. But since Washington's death, he has become almost as well-known for sharing, with tremendous openness, through Instagram and his diaries, his experience of bereavement and grief. Last year, he published A Pocketful of Happiness, a memoir that details his wife's illness. The book is named for an instruction Washington gave to Grant while she was sick.

Look for moments of joy in the everyday. A sudden downpour, the changing of the seasons, the ability to run gleefully alongside a river. Additionally, both the difficult and the ordinary details of terminal illness.

Scans, diagnoses, sharing those diagnoses with friends, and the slow descent into loss. Mixed with the bad was Grant's life of an active Hollywood actor, taking meetings, having dinner with well-known friends, etc. When asked how his grief has changed over the past three years, he responded, I suppose you get used to the unreality of not having that person there.

What I found so difficult is not having her to download to, to download everything that has happened in my day. When his wife was becoming ill and beginning to prefer solitude over parties, Grant began to feel increasingly isolated. A psychotherapist suggested he was suffering withdrawal symptoms.

The illness was slowly extracting Joan from his life. Quote, this platitude that time heals, I don't think it does. I think you navigate your way around it.

You never get over it. And I'm not actively trying to get over it either. What helps him is that he writes to her every night, leaving nothing out.

A reporter asked, what do you write? Grant responded, everything. Stuff I know would amuse her. I'll describe what you look like, what you're wearing, how old you are.

Do you have kids? All of that. She would want to know what your accent is because that was her specialty. She would ask, what did Alex, the reporter, sound like? What is the shape of his mouth? Does it open when he talks? Grant adds, after 38 years of marriage, I can hear what her response would be.

It feels as close a connection as I can have. And I've found it very hopeful that at the end of the day, I'm having a conversation. He has written that his marriage is the story of my adult life and that we began a conversation in 1983 and we never stopped.

Well, it officially ended. The ongoing conversation is now in written form. Grant believes discussion was a bedrock of his marriage, saying, the physical intimacy, even if you're in five hours of tantric sex with someone, it's relative to the amount of time in your day.

It's a very small amount of time. Most of your life with somebody is spent in the intimacy of conversation. When you share absolutely everything with another human being who sees you completely for who you are, to me, that is unquantifiable.

What a thing to have. Washington sometimes described Grant's later career as the condimentary years. If a film was a roast, he would be the mustard, meant to complement the dish.

When asked if his approach to work has changed since his wife's death, he says the approach has not changed. Quote, there's always one person on a job who drives everybody crazy. I would come home and have a rant about what this person was doing.

But now, because I don't have somebody to rant to, it's forced me to, I suppose, to take a step back. I think it really doesn't matter in the scheme of things, which I know is a terrible cliche. When Grant was 10, he woke up from a nap to find his mother having sex with his father's best friend.

They were all together in a car. Saw my mother bonking is how he put it. Grant kept a secret to himself.

The following year, his parents divorced. He stuck with his father and became estranged from his mother, who eventually moved to South Africa. Grant's father became an alcoholic.

A bottle of Johnny Walker scotch daily until he died, and became verbally and physically abusive. Grant feels his childhood ended at 11 when his parents divorced. He says, I was having to parent my parent on a nightly basis.

In his diaries, Grant writes with great affection about his father. I was loved and adored him, he says. Who he became when he was drunk was not who he was.

If he'd been like that all day long, I would have run away. Eventually, an analyst convinced Grant to reconcile with his mother. It took 18 months, he said.

But we had a conversation in which he finally said three magic words. Please forgive me. It was the first time Grant had revealed to his mother what he had witnessed in the car.

And she cried, which I'd never seen her do before. Grant referred to the conversation as the greatest epiphany of his life. Quote, I went from holding on to resentment and anger towards someone to forgiving them.

And all of that pain shifted instantly. Grant came to the conclusion that all secrets are toxic, and that laying bare his life could become a therapeutic act. My thinking went, if you're open about everything, it can feel like protection.

What can somebody say to you? What's the worst that can happen? If somebody takes a pot shot at you, you think, well, okay, go ahead. I'm not hiding anything. He gives this as a reason for publishing his diaries and for sharing frank moments of happiness on Instagram, where he has amassed several hundred thousand followers.

When his wife first became sick, she asked Grant and their daughter not to share the news with friends. They argued about it, and she didn't speak to them for two days. Grant worried the lying would become too much.

I couldn't go back to being 11 years old having to say, oh, no, Dad's at work, or sorry, Joan's not available. When they did announce the news, Washington experienced an avalanche of generosity and love. She said, okay, I see the value in this.

Oh, Marianne, what do you think? What do you think about this? I think that he is bringing to light the things that people struggle with, and it's great to see this conversation happening in so many different places. Yeah, it's just more, I just see or hear people talk, and that people have these conversations more now. People are more open about it, which is nice.

When I get into conversations with people about what we do, there's literally only been two times someone was horrified that this was even a discussion in public. Everyone else has found this interesting, begins to ask questions, but the biggest thing, begin to talk about their experience with death. It's nice.

As we've discussed on the show many times, death is still a taboo subject. People are more open about talking about it, but it's just not part of the mainstream yet. But it's nice just to have these conversations with people.

Yeah, that it's out there, and people realize you live, you die. Well, and people can always come to us and know that we're, we don't care about social conventions. We don't.

We don't talk about anything. And there has to be safe places where people can get true, trustworthy information. Yes.

It's sort of like, you shouldn't have to go into a back alley to get good information about living and dying. And dying, yeah. Yeah.

So I was on social media, and someone posted this question, Charlie. Here's the question. Widows and widowers, what are some things you weren't prepared for after your spouse died? So I read some of the answers, and here's one of them that I thought y'all would appreciate.

My answer is not a standard or normal one to this question. I lost my husband twice, once to his alcohol addiction, and then to end-stage cirrhosis of the liver. We were separated for the last 10 years of his life, and in the process of divorce for those last seven years.

He didn't want a divorce, so he held up the process, thus making me an official widow. What I wasn't prepared for was having to clean up the messes he left behind. I did tidy up his affairs out of kindness and love.

I never stopped loving who he was before alcohol took him away from me. I wanted him to be buried in dignity and grace, and so I stepped up and did what needed to be done. I sleep very well knowing that I did the right thing for him and was able to honor his final wishes.

As anyone who has an addicted loved one knows, they tend to make terrible life decisions, and my husband was no exception. As I waded into his personal space through his emails and cell phones, I had to face his business arrangements with paid female companionship and other assorted inappropriate compulsions. Although I was vaguely aware of these things in the back of my mind, I wasn't ready to see these things with my own eyes.

This reopened wounds that had barely healed, and now I have to work through them again. I also wasn't prepared to see his text exchange with our daughter where he blew whatever may have been left of their relationship to smithereens. It killed me to see how horribly he treated her while he continued to blame me for his lack of relationship with her.

The only comfort I received was in seeing that my daughter stood her ground and tore him apart for being a complete and utter failure as a father to her. She was able to say what needed to be said before he passed away, and I'm glad she got the closure she needed. Even though I had been pretty much living alone for the last ten years of his life, I wasn't prepared to actually be alone once he passed.

And strangely, I was not prepared for the sense of relief and peace that I received after he passed away. I hadn't realized how much I worried about what damage he'd do financially next or what the next major medical issue would be. He was more in the hospital than he was out for the last several years of his life.

I didn't realize how much stress I was under from worrying about his well-being and safety until after he passed. I took a deep breath knowing that it was all over. Thus ends this week's episode.

Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening. You can find more episodes from our series about grief on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Follow and subscribe to the show.

Share it with someone who needs a little hope today. This is Charlie Navarette, and from an unnamed poem, dying is the last place love can go. And I'm Marianne Matzo, and we'll see you next week.

Remember, every day is a gift. This podcast does not provide medical advice. All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment.

Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately.

Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies or by other members is solely at your own risk.