Beloved actor Richard E. Grant has spoken about how the words his late wife Joan spoke in the days before her death have shaped how he deals with his grief.
The actor was married to Joan Washington, a dialect coach, for 35 years. They tied the knot in 1986 and had been a couple for a total of 38 years when Joan died of lung cancer in 2021.
Speaking on Davina McCall's Begin Again podcast, Richard shares that he first met his wife when he needed a dialect coach to perfect a Northern Irish accent for a role he was hoping to secure as an unknown actor.
He couldn't afford to pay her full hourly coaching rate at the time, and she accepted a reduced rate on the condition he pay her back if he was ever successful.
On their first wedding anniversary, which is symbolised by paper, he gave her "one thousand pounds in pink paper notes" to repay his debt.
After so many years together, Joan was given her cancer diagnosis at the age of 73. Richard shares that two weeks before she died, she said, "I know the end is very near now, please let me go."
Giving her his "blessing" to leave, Richard recalls, "You don't want them to go, but you don't want that way of life to be extended any further because it's intolerable."
Four days before Joan passed away, she offered the words that have become ones Richard lives by to help with his grief.
Joan said, "I know you're going to be sad, but try and find a pocket full of happiness in each day, don't have any guilt about feeling joy after I'm gone."
Richard says that these words have been "an amazing thing," allowing him to continue enjoying little things and not "walk around in a quagmire of grief for the rest of my life."
To continue helping him with his grief, the actor says, "I write to Joan every night." He adds, "I have no woolly spiritual delusion that she's hearing this or I'm going to get a response, but I know in writing to her, it keeps the connection going."
He reveals that he doesn't feel his wife is "still there," explaining, "she's inside me and in my daughter, and in the memory of our friends," but he struggles with the ideas of heaven and an afterlife being "human concepts," and can't get on board with Joan still existing in a realm where he can't see her.
Richard says that Joan had "completed her life," and although he would like to think he would one day see all the pets and people he's lost once again, he doesn't believe this will happen. "And I find that reassuring," he concludes.
