How Freud helps me to mourn my husband’s death

Augusta Ford was used to dealing with grief and loss in her work as a psychotherapist. Then her husband died. Would her years of experience help in her own grieving process?

He died, and I watched, at 5.35am on 8 February this year. It took perhaps 27 minutes, the irreversible slide that moved him from life into death, me beside him, mute with acceptance and resignation. He said: "Get the nurse." And I realised that he was in the grip of something greater and more potent than himself. Something else was in the room with him, and it felt discomfortingly familiar.

My husband was 52, and an unusually determined man. His working life had been consumed by business, deals each one more ambitious than the last. Soon after we met I remember him telling me that he began any deal expecting a 5% chance of it succeeding. To me, a psychotherapist not an entrepreneur, this seemed incomprehensible. But when he was offered a drug trial in America, his own odds of survival were 30%. This was not fine, he said, but it was better than 5%. This 30% possibility was one I understood.

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