People often ask how you get to be a television presenter. I always say that you only need one thing, and that is someone daft enough to give you a television programme to present. If you don’t chance upon that person, you might be the greatest television presenter in the world, but no one is going to know it.
In my case, the person was a brilliant man called Paul Gibbs. I loved him, even if, years later, he told me: “You know, sometimes I watch you on the telly and still wonder if I did the right thing.” Fair enough; he wasn’t the only one.
Paul died nine years ago in his desperately early 60s. Several months afterwards, on Christmas Day, I was with his family. His son said something to me about grief, something that I assume you can’t appreciate until it happens to you. He said it wasn’t so much the overwhelming sadness that troubled him; he’d been ready for that. What he hadn’t seen coming was the fear, the sheer, gnawing fear, that still gripped him every day.
I’d always feared death, obviously. I was appalled by the prospect of the loss of my loved ones. But I must have been working on the assumption that my fear of losing them died with them. In other words, at the moment they died, my fear of them dying would stop and the grieving would start. But no, it turns out that fear has an afterlife. How unfair. How terribly disappointing.
It wasn’t clear to me, or even him, perhaps, of what my friend’s son was now fearful. It didn’t seem right to ask. A fear of being alone, of the future, of his own mortality, or all of the above? Part of it may even have been fear of this strange, unexpected fear itself. Would it ever loosen its grip?
I shared all this with a brilliant priest I had at the time, who came out with something else to boggle my mind. “It’s important to understand that, in the Bible, the opposite of love isn’t hate,” he said. I looked at him. “The opposite of love is fear.” I’ve forgotten what his scriptural source was for this, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more right I think he was.
Paul’s widow, Eileen Fitt, died earlier this year. She was some woman. If you get a free moment, you could do a lot worse than read her obituary. Shortly after Eileen died, I went with two of her daughters to mass. I’d known them since they were little girls and it was awful to see their suffering.
Knowing their mum would have wanted a priest presiding at her funeral, they had come to ask the man at the pulpit if he would do it. As they were lapsed churchgoers themselves, my role was to provide some prompting with all the Catholic gymnastics: all the sitting, standing, kneeling, genuflecting and so on; trying to get it all happening in the right order. We must have been an odd-looking little trinity, a middle-aged bloke uncertainly choreographing two grief-stricken young women. Any prayers I offered up were for the priest to be nothing but helpful and sympathetic to them afterwards. He was.
As we bobbed haphazardly up and down, vaguely in unison, the words of Paul’s son and my priest came back to me. After mass was done, the three of us sat there a while, quite exhausted. I told my friends what was on my mind. The opposite of love is fear. “Yes,” whispered one of them with feeling. “I’m absolutely shitting myself.”
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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