Good Grief: A Tribute to Anne Mayer Bird by Catherine Mayer

In 2021, we welcomed mother and daughter Anne Mayer Bird and Catherine Mayer to Good Grief Festival to talk about the deaths of their husbands at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Catherine recently wrote to tell us that her mother had died, offering to share some reflections and the beautiful eulogy that she wrote for her funeral. You can read Catherine’s words below. Their Good Grief Festival event is available to rewatch on our YouTube channel.

Catherine and Anne sat on a sofa in front of a wall of art. Photo credit: Leo Cackett Studios

Grief ambushed my mother and me suddenly and repeatedly and at the strangest of times. Weeks after the death of my stepfather, John, my own beloved husband Andy took us by surprise by dying too. Pneumonia, said the hospital. Only later, during the first lockdown, did doctors revisit his case.

By then, my mother and I were navigating widowhood in a world without human contact but for a few hours every Sunday when I would bring her food for the week and perform any household tasks that defeated her. There weren’t many. At 86, she had never before lived alone, but she was vibrant and resourceful. At the end of each visit, sitting at opposite sides of her largest room, we would talk. These conversations and the letters she began writing to John became the basis for our joint memoir, Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death.

Catherine and Anne sat an outdoor table discussing their book during lockdown. Photo credit: Ian Mackenzie

Writing gave her a new lease of life—and she was an extraordinarily gifted storyteller, as attendees of the Good Grief Festival discovered in March 2021 when we joined psychotherapist and educator Liz Gleeson to discuss our shared understanding of grief as part of life, not only the price of love, but love itself.

The string of lockdowns ended, but still I came to my mother every Sunday. Then, one Sunday this April, our usual routines were disrupted. She had fallen and needed medical care. A week later, she died.

The following is a letter I wrote to her and that our publisher read out at her memorial on 7 June 2025.

An old photograph of Anne with her three young daughters in Colorado

Dear…what?

Here, already, I encounter a problem. I want to write to you just as you wrote to John after he died, beautiful letters of love and loss that just poured out of you, but I don’t know how to begin.

I don’t know what to call you.

Dear Mommy? That was how my sisters and I knew you. Then we moved to England, and you discovered how uncomfortable it felt to be foreign, to be an outsider. This was an identity you would come to embrace. To begin with, however, you tried to conform, rechristened Mummy and not only that: for the first and last time in your life you counselled us not to lift our voices but to lower them. You can see the after-effects even now in three daughters who speak quietly in hybrid accents that nobody can place.

Anne and her second husband, John, smiling with their arms around each other

Mummy, we called you, softly, through teenaged years as you enthralled our friends and scandalised our stuffier teachers.

Mummy we called you, softly, into adulthood as you continued to blaze a trail for us, refusing to be typecast or hemmed in, collecting all those friends and the wonderful John and finding intense joy in the work that you did so brilliantly.

It was when I sought to benefit from your expertise that the question of what to call you reared its head again. As elected president of the Foreign Press Association in London, I was part of a team organising the annual media awards ceremony and roped you in to assist us with PR. You were, of course, magnificent, drumming up press interest and entertaining my colleagues on the FPA committee, all veteran journalists, with an endless supply of stories more vivid than their own.

At some point though, I pulled you aside. “Do you think,” I asked, “that you could stop signing your emails to the committee “Mummy”? Of course, you assured me. The next email duly arrived with a different sign off: “Anne/Mummy”. I laughed, shook my head and appreciated you for what you were—a woman who wouldn’t be told.

Catherine and Anne wearing infection masks as they sign copies of their book Good Grief.

So, although I am halfway through this letter—and I must be brief because so many people who adore you want to speak about you today—let me start again.

Dear Anne/Mummy,

I miss you so very much. We always had a close relationship, but never more so than during the period you termed our “twin widowhood”.

When I began to visit you every Sunday during lockdown as your carer, masked and keeping my distance, I thought I was looking after you. At some point I realised we were sustaining each other but it is only now, with my Sundays stretching out flat and empty, that I recognise the extent to which you were caring for me.

We laughed in disbelief at something a radio show host said to me, live on air, during one of the interviews I gave during the pandemic. How lucky you are, she remarked, that you and your mother were widowed within weeks of each other and could navigate grief together. I politely pointed out to her that this so-called luck involved both of us losing two people central to our lives, our beloved husbands and in my case, a stepfather of many years, in yours, your son-in-law.

How much did you love Andy? Well let me remind you that when you sent us an invitation to your 70th birthday party, it arrived addressed to “Andy Gill +1”. Yes, your own daughter relegated to “+1”. You always did have a soft spot for charming men. He loved you right back, of course.

And I never doubted that you loved Andy’s +1. You and I always had a strong relationship and much though it pains to me to say it, there may have been a grain of truth to the radio host’s tone-deaf remark. In widowhood, you and I developed an even richer bond that meant the world to me, and I think brought light to your last years, though to be honest, you always had that, so many friends, all those interests.

Catherine and Anne embracing and beaming at the camera. Photo credit: Habie Schwarz

I have asked our publisher Lisa Milton to read this letter to you at your memorial. This is partly cowardice. At your request, I read your tribute to John at his funeral. I wanted to do that for you and for him, but there was a tough trade-off, leaving Andy’s hospital bedside, missing one of the last days of his life. Of course I choked, and I don’t want to do that today.

But I have a much happier reason for asking Lisa to do this. Both she and I want to celebrate the closing phase of your life, when you became, to use your term, a “published author”.

Our joint memoir, Good Grief, would never have happened without the power of your writing. Those letters you wrote to John are the backbone of the book and, as Cassie recently pointed out to me, material future historians will find riveting, documenting the day-to-day experience of living through the pandemic and rebuilding a shattered life, even as politicians and the media told you that people your age didn’t matter, that you were expendable.

Nobody is expendable but you leave such a huge gap in so many lives. I feel it every day. We were planning our next book for Lisa, and also you wanted to turn our joint experience to helping others through bereavement. You had ideas about hosting advice sessions, writing pamphlets, doing joint interviews. You thoroughly enjoyed giving interviews. For me the process was a white-knuckle ride because you had no filter, yet it was all the more exhilarating for that. So many times interviewers thought we were crying when it was laughter we were suppressing.

Dearest Anne/Mummy, dearest twin widow, dearest Mommy, dearest Published Author, your appetite to write more, do more, be more, seize life never diminished. What better way for us to celebrate you than to follow your blazing, hilarious, high-watt lead?

Anne smiling broadly as she sits at Andy Gill's complicated looking sound desk

Anne leaves three daughters, Cassie, Lise and Catherine; a stepdaughter, Catherine; a grandson, Isaac; and four step-grandchildren: Becky, Elli, Florence and Tom.

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