© Provided by The i The Rev Richard Coles and David Oldham (Photo: Press)
The Reverend Richard Coles is just telling me about the intensity of his grief, when his Dachshunds start barking at the arrival of Ozzie the postman. “He wears shorts all year round,” Coles says. “The dogs like the sight of his tantalising legs.” What Coles has found, in the year since his partner David Oldham’s death aged 42, is that the profundity of loss hasn’t stopped the mundanity of everyday life.
The latest tweets from @revrichardcoles.
- D eath is par for the course for the Rev Richard Coles. Whether it’s pastoral care for the bereaved, discussions about the afterlife with parishioners or being called out to perform the last.
- Rev Richard Coles has confirmed his husband David tragically died following a battle with alcoholism. The 59-year-old broadcaster, who married his partner in a civil ceremony in 2010, was left.
- Reverend Richard Coles has shared some heartbreaking news with his fans. Taking to Twitter on Wednesday evening, the 58-year-old sadly announced the death of a beloved family member.
- Rev David Coles was the partner of celeb vicar Richard Coles. The couple lived in a celibate relationship. In his Twitter bio, David described himself as a 'carer to FIVE delinquent yet delightful.
When David was in the intensive care unit, Coles noticed his stomach spilling over his trousers and it occurred to him he should go on a diet. Just after David’s death, Coles went into Tesco and emerged with three kinds of Parmesan. “You’ve got to park the car,” he says, “you’ve got to worm the dog, and there’s all sorts of ‘sadmin’, as I call it, that you have to do.”
Coles threw himself into the mountain of bureaucracy and sorting out that comes with death, but at some point in the first lockdown he stopped. “I sat in the garden for three months with the dogs, in the beautiful spring, doing nothing. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t even watch box sets, which for me is a significant failure of normal functioning. I watched the garden that David had planted just come in, every day. It was like he bought me a bunch of flowers, which was lovely. I just let grief happen. Because it’s not something you control, it controls you.”
Coles, who is speaking from the vicarage he shared with David – also a reverend – in the small town of Finedon, Northamptonshire, has lived an unusual life for a vicar. A pop star with the Communards in the mid-80s, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, and competitor on Strictly Come Dancing are just some of the things on his CV.
© Provided by The i The Rev Richard Coles and dance partner Dianne Buswell in Strictly Come Dancing (Photo: BBC/PA/Ray Burmiston)While grief is an invisible suffering, Coles’ high-profile career, and prolific Twitter usage, meant lots of strangers, from a woman at the supermarket checkout to a teenager on the street, knew that the love of his life had died.
“That was lovely, actually,” he says, “strangers coming up and saying, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ And they still do. It’s very touching and I appreciate it. There are people who can’t cope with it, there are people who cross the street and there are people who say clumsily well-intentioned words that are not very thoughtful, but it’s OK. The one thing that I find really hard to forgive is indifference. That’s the tough one.”
There were, in among the compassionate letters and tweets, a few abusive messages, too, which said David deserved to be in hell because he was gay, and they wished Coles the same fate. He says, however, that although the police came round to investigate one of the letters, those words didn’t affect him much because he was already feeling such acute pain.
It is those caring humans, particularly his family and friends, who have helped Coles cope. “Believe it or not,” he says, “I still think of myself if I’m not careful – and this perhaps involves a mental leap that might be too much for many – as Clint Eastwood in a poncho chewing a cheroot, some kind of lone ranger. But I have no time for all that now because I think we are what we are by virtue of our relationships, not as some kind of mystical individual.”
Coles has written a memoir about loving and losing David called The Madness of Grief, but it also reads like an ode to the colourful characters who played a part in David and Coles’ shared life, and who were there at the deathbed as it ended.
“There was a wonderful moment,” says Coles, “when around his bed, there was a female body-builder, a scaffolder, and the Earl and Countess Spencer, all, at that moment, equal around David’s deathbed, because we all love David, and it was just a very David thing, and he did have this extraordinary capacity for love. Also as vicars we tend to go everywhere, so we found ourselves in extraordinary, unlikely places, with extraordinary, unlikely people, and formed friendships.
© Provided by The i Richard Coles and Jimmy Somerville in The Communards (Photo: Getty/Hulton Archive/Tim Roney)“One of the greatest gifts I got from David was being loved, and me loving in return, and that changed my relationship with the world. He was very good for me, in all sorts of ways, and made it impossible for me to indulge my worst and most self-centred aspects.”
Back home at the vicarage, with David gone, Coles began writing down what had happened, from David’s slow decline in the intensive care unit, to the heart-wrenching moment after the funeral when he gave away three of their dogs to close friends and family, unable to cope with five Dachshunds alone. He has kept the two eldest, Daisy and Pongo.
“I think in a way I was feeling like a war correspondent, that I was standing on the street corner. And these bombs were going off. And the world was shattered and shaking and I was kind of blown up. But I wanted to capture it. And I’ve since come to realise that what I want from other widows is for them to tell me what it’s like. So that’s really what I’ve tried to do is just… to say what it’s like.”
The memoir is being published as the nation is suffering a collective grief, and untold numbers of people are suffering individual grief, too. Coles lost his sister-in-law to coronavirus during lockdown a year ago. He hopes the book might help all kinds of people, but also help break what he calls “the deadly conspiracy of silence” around addiction. David died of internal bleeding, which was the result of his alcoholism.
© Provided by The i Rev. Richard Coles Provided by Virginia.Woolstencroft@orionbooks.co.ukColes says he was reluctant to write about David’s addiction because he was conscious that he was sharing with the world something deeply personal and private, that David would have “hated” people to know.
“But David’s family said it was OK. David’s not here anymore, and it can’t hurt him. And we loved him, loved him knowing full well that his life was full of struggle and darkness sometimes, and that he could be really, really tough. But that’s the reality. And I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, you know, nothing. Nothing in our life together for a second threatened my love for him or his, for me.”
Grieving a love like this is perhaps especially complex as a vicar, when some people may assume Coles has nothing much to be sad about, because he must believe David has gone to have a lovely time in heaven.
“There’s a terrible expectation of some, that Christians should go, ‘oh, the person who has died has just gone into the next room,’ says Coles. “Well, if he has just gone into the next room, it’s separated from me by an unbridgeable chasm. And what I really want him to do is to come out of that room and come back into this room, and that’s not going to happen. And there’s no way of glossing that, or making that softer or easier, even if you believe, as I do, that this isn’t all there is and that David and I will endure for ever in some way. And that’s the comfort but it doesn’t take any of the death away.”
© Provided by The i Rev Richard Coles and David Oldham (Photo: Kevin Jackson)One of the toughest things about David’s death, says Coles, was suddenly looking at an unknown future. The couple, who became civil partners in 2011, had been looking into buying a house somewhere new. “Now there was just this blank,” he says. However, he has begun to fill in this blank by planning a move to a village in Sussex, near a selection of close friends including his former flatmate, Lorna.
“If you can imagine someone were writing a book about where a retired gay vicar would live, it’s absolutely there,” he says. “I felt very torn about it, because David’s mum said to me, ‘Richard, you’ve got to live your life, you don’t want to just stop, you’ve got to look forward and live a new life. It’s what David would want in this scenario.’ And then I think, ‘David would have hated that, he’d love the idea of me stirring polenta in a black shawl’ – but she’s right.
“I know I’ve got to lead a new life, and I know it’s not going to be here. I’m 60 next year, and that might be a time to start thinking about where the rest of my life is going to happen.” He says he will keep a foothold in Northamptonshire because he loves it, it’s where David is buried and where he’ll be buried, too.
© Provided by The i The Rev Richard Coles (Photo: Tim Anderson)As Easter approaches, Coles says his attempts to give something up for Lent have been patchy. Ordinarily he gives up social media, but in lockdown he hasn’t been able to do that, craving the connection it gives him to the world. Instead he gave up whisky, although he’s moved the goalposts so that it’s now just certain makes of whisky.
“Normally at my church we do some kind of Lent together, we still do, and we check in with each other about what we’re giving up. I do a session on it at the school. But actually, people have gone without quite enough, I think, this past year.” Daisy, the elder dog, has now made herself comfortable on Coles’ lap and is having a sleep.
“Lent,” he adds, “is actually about looking forward, looking forward to emerging out of darkness and confinement, and into light.”
The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss is published on Thursday (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £16.99)
© @Copyright HELLO! Hello! Magazine
Reverend Richard Coles has reflected on his grief as he marks the six-month anniversary of the death of his partner. Taking to Twitter, the 58 year-old shared a candid post as he considered the time he has spent without David by his side. 'Six months since David died,' he told fans. 'Someone, kindly, asked me if I'm getting over it. No. It's not that sort of thing. It's more like losing a limb. You adapt, rather than recover. And limp.'
Rev Richard Coles Twitter Post
MORE: Rev Richard Coles reveals he is being trolled following partner's death
© Provided by Hello! richard-coles-davidRichard Coles has marked the six-month anniversary of the death of partner David
Richard and David entered into a civil partnership in 2005 and remained together until his passing last year. David was just 42 at the time. Announcing the news of his death on Twitter, devastated Richard shared: 'I'm very sorry to say that @RevDavidColes has died. He had been ill for a while. Thanks to the brilliant teams who looked after him at @KettGeneral. Funeral details to follow. 'The Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.'
MORE: Reverend Richard Coles hilariously pranked by his mum on April Fool's Day!
WATCH: Will Mellor Talks About The Death Of His Father On Loose Women
Rev Richard Coles Twitter News
Earlier this year, Richard spoke about how he has dealt with his grief in an interview with the Guardian. He explained: 'After David died, there was a woman at the hospital who had been widowed, too. She said, 'You're going to be mad, for a while. People will never be as nice to you again as they are now, so milk it for all you can.'
MORE: Strictly tragedies: from Emma Weymouth to Sir Bruce Forsyth
© Provided by Hello! rev-david-2David was just 42 at the time of his death
Rev Richard Coles Twitter
He added: 'I've had to subtract David from the future and that has taken all the future with it. It’s a bit blank. I think: ‘What the [expletive] am I going to do? Play the accordion and go to bed at ten past six, I guess.’ Of course, it’s not the end of my life. But it feels like it’s over sometimes.'
MORE: Match of the Day 2 presenter Mark Chapman devastated as wife Sara dies aged 44
In David's Twitter bio, he had described himself as 'a dilettante potter, designer, gardener & narrow boat enthusiast'. He also enjoyed cooking, and often opened up about meals he had cooked up in the kitchen. In his pinned tweet, he wrote: 'Had to do the big shop today. @RevRichardColes is out tonight so I thought a simple supper. Fresh oysters with a gin and tonic and I bought myself some flowers too. It’s important to reward yourself once in a while, don’t you think?!'
Comments are closed.