It has been a cold, bleak month, and Jenny is still dead, and The Archers has officially been too sad, as it trudges along at the pace of life itself, and the Aldridge family falls apart and together again after the matriarch’s death.
Anyone who has lost someone close, especially a mother, can recognise the weird limbo that a family enters between a death and a funeral. Grief isn’t just sadness, it’s a mix of emptiness and guilt and anger and forlornness and loneliness. Everyone in a family has the cocktail made up in different proportions, and no one can quite recognise the signals their emotions are giving them. Lilian felt furious and betrayed: Jenny didn’t tell her, but did tell Tony and Brian, about her fatal heart problem. But really, Lilian was suffering from the shock and terror of watching her sister die, and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
