Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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In Rosen’s thinking, talking about it, writing about it – it all helps. (Expel the ping-pong ball and regain agency!) Though in some ways his mother’s approach lingers in him. Eddie is buried in Highgate Cemetery, but Rosen doesn’t visit the grave. And he finds it troubling to watch videos of his son. “He did drama in the sixth form,” Rosen says near the end of our conversation, “and he’s in a video of one of the plays he wrote. I’ve never looked at it. I don’t think I can. He was wearing a helmet. It’s in that box.” Please register for the livestream via the link below. If you are planning on attending in-person, there is no need to register. I wonder aloud why he has never previously told the story of Eddie’s death. Given what I’ve been through, I’ve done OK. If you were to mark it in terms of difficulty, I’m about a five Since Covid, the vision in Rosen’s left eye has been impaired. His left ear is what he describes as “a dead loss”. Every now and then he will experience a sudden shooting pain that chases itself around his body – one moment it’s in the knee, then the shoulder, then the hip. (“Boing!” he says, “and it’s moved on.”) It has taken Rosen until recently to feel accepting of this new physical state. The body changes, he says, and the brain must catch up. Still, he seems sanguine about it all, particularly the eye. “I could wear a patch and it would be much better,” he says. “But do I want to walk around wearing a patch?” He shakes his head, thinking of the schoolchildren he sometimes reads his poems to. “I don’t fancy it.” It’s more than two years since he left hospital after a near-lethal battle with Covid It has now been 23 years since Eddie’s death. For the most part, Rosen has succeeded in escaping incapacitation. “I’ve tried not to be burdened by it,” he says. “I talk in the book about ‘carrying the elephant’.” Rosen hands me a postcard replica of an engraving of a man struggling to carry an elephant up a hill. “I bought that in Paris,” he goes on, “and it’s a great reminder. You know, I’m not carrying an elephant. At the time I thought I was. Eddie’s dead and I’m carrying all this grief and it’s bigger than me – it’s as big as an elephant. But not any more. Even with this Covid thing, or with any of that other stuff, I’m still not carrying an elephant. So this picture, it inspires me.”

I’ll give myself a mark, shall I?” he says. “Right, fair enough. No, I think this is quite a good thing to do actually. Like they did at the Beeb. Every now and then you have to do a little…” In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. When he asked his father who the boy was, Rosen or his older brother, Brian, his father said neither – that it was a third son, Alan, who had died as an infant, before Rosen was born. Rosen was 10 at the time. Nobody in his family had spoken of Alan previously, there were no photographs of him in the house. And though Rosen’s father, Harold, mentioned Alan from time to time over the course of his life, Rosen never spoke about him with his mother, Connie. Michael said how this reflects the sacrifice it took to write the diary, and reaffirms that nursing is a human business, that requires a human touch. Michael Rosen is one of the best-known figures in the children’s book world. He is renowned for his work as a poet, performer, broadcaster and scriptwriter. In Getting Better, Rosen implies that coping is an everyday practice – we are coping even when we are unaware we are coping, and perhaps especially in those moments. Partway through our conversation I ask Rosen, “How have you coped?” hoping he might share some strategies, though he misunderstands the question.As documented in this book, he’s been through a lot: a chronic illness, the loss of a child, and his own brush with death, and whilst that has had a huge effect on him, this book shows that, whilst it may not be easy, these things don’t have to define your life, and you can find the positives amongst them. One entry mentions how they couldn’t write the diary on specific days due to a lot of nursing interventions, but that they were so happy and pleased for him in his recovery so far. I did at first assume it would be a follow up from this book, documenting more about his recovery from COVID-19, and it is to a point, but it’s also about his life, the difficult things he’s had to go through and what lessons he has learned through them.

All this love and care was shown to him at a time when nursing staff were strained, and suffering trauma from seeing so many people die while within their care, he added. Care and devotion For step-free access from the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road off Belvedere Road to the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium seating (excluding rows A to C) and wheelchair spaces in the Rear Stalls, plus Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer and the Purcell Room, please use the Queen Elizabeth Hall main entrance. Getting Better is written in an unusual stream-of-consciousness style which can be a bit rambling and goes off on all sorts of tangents and parenthetical detours. Rosen reveals in the final chapter that this style in itself is part of his method for Getting Better.One nurse wrote how lovely it was to see all the photos his family had sent in of them together smiling, showing how much he’s loved. Another mentions how she got a facial response from him when she joked about the performance of his favourite football team. No,” he says. “It’s different. Sometimes he’s wearing clothes I’ve forgotten about, so I wake up and go, ‘Oh my God, I remember that shirt!’” They talk about the talking cure. Well, there is a sort of doing cure, too.’ The photo of Rosen’s son Eddie, who died unexpectedly in 1999, at the age of just 18. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer When I ask Rosen if he would have written this book had he not almost lost his life to Covid, he says, “Probably not. No.” Becoming perilously unwell – “poorly,” as the doctors described it, as though he had a mild cold – has brought to the surface several other troubling periods in his life. “Freud’s got a word for it,” he says. “What does he call it – condensation? When one thing happens and you pour into it all your feelings from other places?” As Rosen was feeling “sad about being ill and being feeble it sort of drew in, like a vacuum cleaner, all this other stuff.”

Michael recounted how a nurse created a playlist of songs curated by his family and would play it to him while in his coma. He said: “I can’t explain how kind and lovely that is.” Michael said he couldn’t “fathom the devotion” that the nursing staff had. He told the audience: “Your profession saved my life and the lives of thousands of other people. Thank you.” To reach this entrance, enter the Royal Festival Hall via the Southbank Centre Square Doors. Take the JCB Glass Lift to Level 2 and exit to the Riverside Terrace. Turn right to find the Queen Elizabeth Hall main entrance.

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We will all go through hardships in our lives, whether it’s a job loss, money worries, a bereavement, a relationship ending, an illness etc. And this book instils such hope that I think it would do the world some good if everyone had a copy. Because I’m not him!” Rosen says. “So you try not to be burdened?” I ask. “Or not to be a burden?” “Both, actually,” he says. “I guess I have sad thoughts every day. But I try not to be overcome by them.”

There is no fix, but he details the slow process of finding a voice that allows him to talk about Eddie, aided by a child asking him a question about his son at a talk. He subsequently wrote about the experience in Sad Book (2004), illustrated by Quentin Blake. More than 20 years on, he finds that Eddie is “there, he’s in me, he’s around me … Is he ‘at rest’ in me and with me? Yes, I think it’s something like that.” He opened his speech by remarking that it was a great honour to be speaking to nursing staff and thanked them for saving his life. He read some of the diary entries. Dear diary What followed was months on the wards. He was put into an induced coma for 40 days, and then underwent weeks of rehab and recovery.

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In our lives, terrible things may happen. Michael Rosen has grieved the loss of a child, lived with debilitating chronic illness, and faced death itself when seriously unwell in hospital. In spite of this he has survived, and has even learned to find joy in life in the aftermath of tragedy. We welcome national treasure Michael Rosen onto the podcast this week to share some beautiful, witty and thoughtful reflections from his new memoir, Getting Better. Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Michael investigates the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after—or even during—the darkest times of our lives. Moving and insightful, Getting Better is an essential companion for anyone who has loved and lost, or struggled and survived. In Getting Better, he shares his story and the lessons he has learned along the way. Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Michael investigates the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after – or even during – the darkest times of our lives. Moving and insightful, Getting Better is an essential companion for anyone who has loved and lost, or struggled and survived.