Catherine Mayer
Chapter 1: Introduction
Elaine Kasket: These days, it feels like everyone’s got a story about this.
[Music: Lucky Charm by Mimi Olesen, under licence from Epidemic Sound]
Someone close to you dies, and then you have some kind of experience related to that loss in the online world, the world of social media and digital footprints. These technologically mediated events and encounters, both with other people and with the persistent data of the person who’s died, become strands of your multifaceted, ongoing relationship with those who’ve gone before.
Maybe a photo pops up on social media when you least expect it. Perhaps a stranger – a troll, even – makes horrible comments about the person you loved. Sometimes, people who barely knew the person express a surprising amount of grief publicly, claiming a closer connection than you believe they had.
Now, imagine how all these experiences can be amplified and extended if the person who died was someone in the public eye, or whose death somehow put them in the public eye through a tragedy that catches the attention of the media and the Internet. What can the digital environment mean for losses like that?
I’m Elaine Kasket, and this is Still Spoken, a podcast about how the dead live on - through us, through our stories, and through technology.
My conversation partner today has had not just one, but many experiences of friends dying, friends who were well known to the public, celebrities whom we might have felt we knew, but who didn’t know us. Catherine Mayer and her husband were close friends with Michael Hutchence of INXS and the well-known British television presenter Paula Yates, both of whom died young and whose losses were endlessly dissected by the media. And Catherine’s husband was Andy Gill, of the English post-punk band Gang of Four. Andy and Catherine were together until his death in early 2020, at the very start of the global Covid pandemic.
Catherine Mayer is a writer, journalist, activist, speaker and the co-founder and President of the Women's Equality Party. She co-founded the Primadonna Festival, and she writes and consults on the impact of data-driven technologies, which is hugely relevant to the conversation we’re about to have.
Amongst her books is a recent one: Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death. It was published in 2022 and is co-authored with her mother, Anne Mayer Bird. The two women lost their husbands within 41 days of one another, and their book is an account of two lives well lived - Anne’s husband John, and Andy Gill.
At Andy’s memorial, the surviving members of the Gang of Four played his song, The Dying Rays, which I’ve kindly been given permission to feature in this episode of Still Spoken.
[Music: The Dying Rays, used with permission of Catherine Mayer and the Republic of Music/BMG Rights Management]
This conversation delves into the complexity of the digital legacy Andy left behind, as well as the psychological, emotional, and practical dimensions of digital legacy when someone who is a public figure dies. The difficulties Catherine describes are things almost none of us think about, but which are increasingly important in modern loss. So please know that even if you and yours are not celebrities, these issues could someday be relevant to you, too.
My dialogue with Catherine Mayer took place in the middle of 2022, 2-1/2 years after Andy Gill’s death.
Chapter 2: Catherine and Andy
Elaine Kasket: I tend to guest on a lot of PO podcasts having to do with death in the digital, and they have all sorts of different audiences, a crazy range of audiences actually. And on one of the recent ones, uh, the audience was people in the business of estate planning, I want to say, or some kind of sort of legal or estate sort of space.
And on that podcast I was sharing the virtual stage, as it were, with Catherine Mayer. I didn't know Catherine before, but she was telling about her experience of recently losing her husband, Andy Gill, who was a well-known figure in a band called Gang of Four. And as I listened to her, I realised that the experiences that she was having encompassed the whole range of things that bereaved people go through that people know about, and a fair handful of things that people don't realise, or it doesn't dawn on them, that all of the things that Catherine has had to confront are possible and things that one might need to think about when thinking about the digital legacies that we leave behind.
So I thought Catherine, immediately, you are a really, really good person to talk to first or spoken because it's kind of all happening and still happening for you as you confront the various complexities that's thrown up by Andy's legacy. So first of all, tell me. Tell me about Andy and you and Andy. Give me, give us a sense of who Andy was and what he was all about.
Catherine Mayer: With pleasure. Because I was actually thinking, I've been in a very busy work period and that work period hasn't been for once focused on Andy and Andy's legacy. And so it's been interesting because I've been actually trying to find time every day to focus on precisely that. I don't want, I don't want memories to lose their freshness or for him in some way not to be part of my daily life, if you see what I mean.
He was part of my life for pretty close to 30 years. I think we met at exactly the right age to enjoy each other's company and find a kind of equilibrium that would not have been possible if we'd met even a few years before them. I was 30, and he was mid thirties and he had already gone through a significant period of success as a musician, but he had also gone through all sorts of experiences in his life that had made him lose some of that arrogance that, that you see in a lot of, kind of, young and successful, particularly, you know, male musicians. There's, there's a type. Andy was also extraordinarily handsome. And I was, I think, somebody who was always intellectually confident but not confident in other ways. But by the time I met him, I had sort of acquired enough of that to be able to match him and deal with it, and know and to set boundaries in a relationship.
And so we had this very long and happy relationship. We eventually married in 1999. We did that because we lost a couple of very close friends in quick succession. And so the unromantic reason that we married was seeing what happens to people when they aren't married, when a partner dies.
And we built this, we built this life that involved both of us travelling. You know, I'm a writer and a journalist and always had a lot of projects on the go that would take me to quite a lot of different parts of the world. And I was very busy and he would travel and tour and so we would, you know, we were living together, but we quite often would have, you know, a month apart or three months apart or whatever, and then reconvene and it just worked.
We did have rough patches. I don't think any couple can be together for that long without it, but we were in a very good place and had just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary in2019, and then we actually spent that wedding anniversary in Athens because his Band Gang of Four was touring.
And after that we both came home, but then he went off on a far-Eastern part of the tour, and that was at the end of 2019, and it took him to, well, it also took him to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and when he came home from China, which was the last stop, he was clearly not well, but didn't take it very seriously.
By February he had died and it now seems very likely - and indeed the hospital, instituted an investigation – as the details and understanding of Covid emerged, it seems likely that he was one of the very first victims of Covid in this country.
Elaine Kasket: Mm. With one of the primary reasons for your actual marriage being pragmatic, like you said, seeing what happens to people when they're not married and they're unable to - there's various things, you know, legally that can be complicated if people aren't married. But here you'd married for this pragmatic reason. And yet I'm guessing that both the Covid context and then all of the kind of like digital stuff that we're about to talk about was something that, married or unmarried, it was difficult to anticipate or prepare for all that, all that that threw your way in terms of complexity.
Chapter 3: Death Anxiety
Catherine Mayer: I think, I mean there's so many different things here. One of them is that Andy, he was, I mean, what I didn't say is anything really about who he was, what he was like, and, and being - that's harder to express in condensed form because he was such a funny person. He was such a creative person, but he would have me and other people crying with laughter all the time.
He was funny enough to be a comic. He was very, very clever. He was quite mercurial in some ways as well. He was capable of, of um, you know, sort of going into sloughs of despond and that kind of thing. I'm much more even- tempered than him.
But he was, he was in denial about death. There's no two ways about it. So he wasn't just in denial about death, he was in denial about aging. So we used to have conversations…we made a point when we were together, I mean, when I say when we were together, I mean, when I say we were together, we were in the same country, you know, we would walk every weekend, both Saturday and Sunday.
We would go on long walks together, and that was when we would talk about all the things that we felt were important or needed kind of a special airing. We never had difficult conversations at night, for example, ‘cause we didn't ever want to go to sleep being disturbed by anything we'd been discussing. So we'd go on these long walks, and in latter years, I would try and raise with him kind of questions like, well, you know, we're getting on a bit now, you know, we're in our fifties or whatever, it's obvious that we, the lifestyle we currently have isn't sustainable. And he'd just go, why? Um, or he…
Elaine Kasket: Why can't it just go on forever? Just like this? Yeah.
Catherine Mayer: So, exactly. Yeah. And he, and he, he didn't like, um, If, if, um, I would refer to anything about either of us sort of getting older in terms of our physical appearance or whatever. He hated that. So they, they were sort of taboo subjects for him. Mm-hmm. and it was only when he was really ill that I, that I think I, I started understanding quite how profound his aversion to confronting any of this was because at the point where he was in hospital and the, he was in intensive care unit, um, and they had said initially, oh, he'll be out of here in no time.
And then they were, um, at that stage they still didn't know what was wrong with him, but they could seal this terrible damage that was happening to his lungs. So they started saying to me, you know, this is going to be a very long convalescence and you…something's going to shift. And meanwhile he was getting me to keep booking him. He had brought his computer in and he was getting all these emails about booking tour dates for his band and he was like wanting to book them for two months, hence. And I was saying, um, really I think you need to actually start cancelling things rather than start booking them. He was implacable on that, he needed to believe in this future and he needed to believe in this future that wasn't going to change, and where he and I wouldn't change.
Chapter 4: No Plans, No Prep
Elaine Kasket: Hmm. So, I mean, I forget what the exact statistics are, but I mean, the sort of thing like making a will or making those kinds of arrangements, or the very small percentage of people who think about what might be left behind on that computer, you know, digitally, this is a very, that's a vanishingly small number still. Um, but. Sometimes when illness comes around or something's really thrust in your face like that, that's the point at which people think, right, okay, let's get these things taken care of. But was his resistance such that he didn't want to go there with any of that? He didn't want to…did he ever come to the point where he was open to making those practical preparations, or did he resist it to the end?
Catherine Mayer: Well, um, there were several things. One is there, there is somewhere a document, though I never managed to find it, that was a will of sorts written on a piece of paper and witnessed by two of our friends, um, that was, would have been made in 1996 or 1997, so before we were married, and it was just us saying that we gave everything we had to each other.
Elaine Kasket: Mm-hmm. A mirror will. Yeah.
Catherine Mayer: But the two people who witnessed it were, when I was referring to people who died, both of them would be dead within a few years of that moment. But one of them was the person whose death actually did the most to prompt us to getting married. And that was a singer called Michael Hutchence, who was with the band, INXS, who was found dead in his hotel room in 1997. And the other person who signed the, signed our will was Paula Yates, who was his partner. And it was, um, their, their tortured relationship that was part of what happened that precipitated in some ways both deaths, but also when Michael died, um, none of his assets went to Paula. Even the house she was living in wasn't hers.
And we, we had seen what happened to her, and that was part of what decided us that we should get married. So we got married, but we didn't take the second part of that advice, that we, that we, you know, or not advice, but that learning, um, which was to draw up any kind of will. And when Andy got sick, um, I very quickly found, I got recommendations for a lawyer, I realised that, um, it, we needed somebody who was an entertainment specialist rather than just a, a specialist in probate. And, um, so I, I first of all made an appointment. With him where he was going to come, uh, to the house. Um, ‘cause this was the point where Andy, another part of his denial was he wouldn't go to hospital for quite a few weeks, where I could see he was really ill, but he wouldn't go.
Um, then he was, then Andy was too ill for him to come, and then he ended up in hospital and then he was gonna come to Andy's bedside. And the day that before that, a, he was supposed to come to Andy's bedside to draw up the will, the hospital put Andy in a coma and he never came back out of the coma. So Andy died intestate.
Um, The only good part of that story is that the lawyer I had found is an absolutely wonderful person. And so instead of helping me with probate, ended up helping me with intestacy. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. and, and doing so very well. Mm-hmm. , but, but there was no, there was no preparation at all. Um, and the estate is massively complicated because there's a music estate, um, and you know, there, there's the accretion of a life well lived, but, um…and well lived and internationally lived.
So, it's really, really complicated. And Andy was also, uh, working on an album when he died. Um, and that wasn't finished. So I, I was left with an, an awful lot to try and sort out.
Chapter 5: The Pandemic, and Online Fraud
Catherine Mayer: Um, and then of course, It was the beginning of the pandemic. So no sooner had, no sooner had Andy died than, um, than we were thrust into lockdown. And all the, you know, I could no longer see people in person, but also the institutions I was dealing with, um, in, really, really struggled to do what they should do.
Elaine Kasket: Hmm. Some of what you spoke about on the programme that we were joint guests on, [see show notes], I remember one of the things that you brought up, something that, again, associated with Andy's having been a public figure and his death having been known and details of his death having been known and published and all of that in the Gazette, um… think you said. In the weeks, correct me if I'm wrong, after the, uh, applications for lines of credit, et cetera, in his, his name.
And when I think about these areas of ignorance or just people thinking, oh, I never realised something like that would happen, this is one of the consequences of living in a time when this information is so easily accessible that these kinds of opportunistic. Uh, things that, you know, criminals do. Um, this is one of the things that can happen in the aftermath of somebody's death that massively complicates the situation for those left behind.
T me about that experience, some of the things that you encountered in the online or digital sphere in the weeks and months after he died.
Catherine Mayer: Well, it's not stopped yet.
Elaine Kasket: Oh my gosh.
Catherine Mayer: It's been crazy. And, um, what I didn't mention and I should explain is that my stepfather also died, um, just before Andy. Um, and probab, uh, quite possibly, um, you know, we, what we think may have happened is that Andy came back from China with Covid, went to visit my stepfather and my mother, my stepfather then died of what the hospital thought was pneumonia. My mother, my mother was at the time 86 and left, left on her own.
And, you know, at least I'm a digital native as it were. Um, my, my mother hadn't used a smartphone before and she certainly hadn't navigated online forms or anything. And the fraud, the reason I mention this in the context of the fraud is ,she actually did get got by a fraudster, whereas so far, I've managed to avoid it.
But, um, what happened was, the Gazette, which is the journal of record in the UK, insists on publishing the full details of the person who has died, including their date of birth, their date of death, their full names, and their full home address. Um, which is kind of like a charter for fraud.
Elaine Kasket: It's a, yeah, that's what you need! That's pretty much, you know, do they include mother's maiden name in that as well? You know, which of course. Easy enough to find out in publicly searchable records, so Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's very conveniently laid out in the Gazette, shall we say.
Catherine Mayer: It’s basically like a kind of, um, catalog, a shopping catalog for fraudsters. Um, and so in combination with what happened with Andy, which is of course that his death was very high profile, it meant that I had…I mean, the other thing I didn't mention is that, uh, while Andy. in his final days of dying, one of my, um, very close friends and mentors was dying in a hospice somewhere else, and I went to visit her.
Um, in her final days, uh, just after Andy had died, oh, you know that there's that phase after when you're in that sort of shock of death where actually you have a kind of demonic fizzing energy and you, you don't realise, you think you are being completely normal. So I thought it was a perfectly normal thing to do the day after my husband died to go and visit a dying friend.
And, but the reason I'm, I'm telling you the sequence of events is because it means, I know that the first fraud attempt actually happened the day after Andy died. Um, he'd been, his death, had had led the news, um, back the night of his death, and had, was all over the papers and everything. And I got a call from American Express while I was at my friend's bedside to say that they, that, um, somebody was trying to open an account. And the funny thing is, I was switched on enough to the danger of fraud that I thought the American Express people were fraudsters and I kept refusing their calls. And it took several days to actually work out that that was a real one.
Um, I mean that they were for real, but the, the fraud, and that was somebody trying to open an AMEX account for Andy, you know, within 24 hours of him dying. But, um, there were all sorts of frauds and, um, the one my mother got got by was, um, one of those sort of boiler-room operations where they had several different people involved. Um, the first one ringing her saying that somebody had taken money out of her account and pretending to be some kind of fraud prevention agency. and then, um, putting her through, supposedly to other people who could back up the story. Um, but by the end of that call, which was only halted because I managed to get her to answer her hated, um, smartphone, uh, during the call because she'd been on the, I noticed she'd been on her landline for way too long. Um, because she doesn't like long calls and so I'd been trying to reach her and I got worried because she was old and on her own and in lockdown.
Elaine Kasket: Mm-hmm.
Catherine Mayer: And, um, I realized she was being defrauded. Um, uh, but by then she'd given them account details for at least two bank accounts, plus that she'd given them her password, sort of, details for, um, telecommunications. And I mean, they had so much by then.
Elaine Kasket: And one’s got to wonder, you know, was one element of the decision to target her, the fact that by this time your stepfather had died. Is that correct?
Catherine Mayer: He recently, he, yeah.
Elaine Kasket: So, so, you know, it's, you know, uh, Exceptionally ripe time to not just take out, for example, or try to take out a line of credit in somebody's name because the fam, you know, is after a death because the family's going to be busied with whatever they're going to be busied with. Um, they will, it'll take some doing to get the digital portions of the estate business sorted, you know, accounts even identified - with everything locked behind password-protected devices, family members, unless they've all got themselves organised, they might not even know where various accounts are held or what it is they need to attend.
So there's this window of time where people can exploit the fact that the family's not gonna have it together, and your mum, I have to wonder, you know, did they also realise that, okay, here's an elderly woman whose husband has recently died, and that's going to increase her vulnerability. She's not able to check it out with him. There's not gonna be perhaps somebody there who's able to advise. So yeah, thank goodness you were there. And working it out. But yeah, this is, this, these windows of time after a death, I feel like this is just an exploding area of potential fraud and identity impersonation using all the material, you know, that's, that's available
Catherine Mayer: and that, and as I say that, Is not only available, but is made available by order of the way that the probate law works. And that's just a nonsense. And um, she is still suffering from, I think, after effects of this first scam, because although they didn't manage to take anything out, she is still getting daily, multiple calls a day, on her landline, um, from people who are, who either ring and hang up or are trying to scam her.
And, and it definitely was related to my stepfather's death. They knew that she was a widow, um, that that was one of the things they were playing on. Um, but, um, the, one of the ones with me, I mean, I've had all sorts of. Ones like that, um, including I've had something else that I think is very common with better known people, which is, I've heard a lot of people pretending that they're old friends of his, um, and sort of he, and the problem with that is some of, there are real old friends.
Um, but I actually, the good thing about having been with him for as long as I was, is that I pretty much, we had a shared friendship group, so I'm less vulnerable to that than other people would be. But they, but they try and do it. Um, uh, I had somebody writing - I mean, they misspelled pretty much every second word, um, but saying they were an old friend and he owed them money, which is a, I think a pretty standard one.
Um, And, uh, the one that, the one that I found the most really distressing wasn't a fraud in that direct transactional way, but it absolutely was a fraud, which was on Facebook. Um, there was a T-shirt manufacturer that, again, within only a couple of days of Andy dying, had mocked up a photograph of, um, the bass player, the very lovely bass player, uh, Thomas McNeice, who was in the last lineup of Gang of Four with Andy and was one of Andy's best friends and had slept on the window sill in the hospital while Andy was dying. And you know, Andy, it, he was, he had lost so much with Andy's death and they mocked up a photograph of Thomas, uh, wearing a t-shirt that had the slogan, RIP, and the 'I' of the RIP was Andy with his guitar.
Um, and it looked like Thomas was selling these t-shirts, these, these commemorative Andy Gill T-shirts. And it even had some sort of slogan, you know, goodbye my old friend, you know, and then a thing. And they of course, not only did they use this photograph of Thomas and pretend this was official merchandise, but they then used the Facebook algorithms to target all of us and anyone who had any interest in Andy and Gang of Four.
Elaine Kasket So that's how you became aware of it?
Catherine Mayer: Yeah. And then Facebo ok wouldn't take it down. It didn't, it didn't breach their community guidelines. So I got really obsessed with getting, getting that taken down.
Elaine Kasket: How did you manage it? In the end? I.
Catherine Mayer: I didn’t.
Elaine Kasket: Oh, you got, oh, so, so it is a continuing obsession ? Uh, well, well, no, I mean, it was, it was something where they, I don't suppose the person doing those t-shirts would be still trying to sell them now.
Catherine Mayer: Cuz that's the sort of thing where you are trying to make a quick buck. But there was a load of, there was a load of, um, fake merchandise that was sold to piggyback on Andy's death. Mm-hmm. . But that, that one was, I mean, there was another one I found really distasteful, given that Andy had almost certainly died of Covid and given he fact that we were in lockdown and the virus was rampaging. Somebody came out with Gang of Four facemasks.
Elaine Kasket: Um, oh wow. . So, so I mean, you see this pe people, this memorial merchandise. Um, in the wake of any celebrity death, you can go straight on to eBay or straight on to any sort of site like that and almost immediately locate the kind of merchandise that you're talking about.Very hastily slapped up kind of stuff. Almost certainly in violation of, you know, kind of intellectual property or sort of use of images that people shouldn't be making use of. Uh, but yeah, you'll see it. And then that’s why I suppose websites like Tom Petty or Prince or whatever, there's so much emphasis on the official, you know, merchandise, the sort of memorial merchandise on those websites.
But yeah, the he speed is extraordinary, the speed of trying to commodify deaths in various ways, whether it's through the T-shirt route or the fraud route or whatever it is. It's, um, all facilitated by the digital milieu in which we live. And the fact that it was all then flogged to you because the algorithms are like, oh, you're interested in Gan of Four, have this rip-off, you know, sort of merchandise. It's, um, and then you, how hard was it by the way, to, uh, get hold of anybody at Facebook? Did you ever get hold of a person? Was it a matter of filling out forms? What was that like?
Catherine Mayer: Um, to be honest, because I've written, um, I actually have done a lot of work in the data space myself, you know, and, and so I knew people at Facebook, so I, I didn't even really try very much via the official routes. But, um, there's been somebody who's been helping me right from the very beginning who was Andy's former manager, and he issued takedown notices via Facebook. And even that didn't work. So, um, you know, we did, we did try the official channels as well as the unofficial.
Um, but I mean, the the problem of phony merchandise is a perennial one, whether people are alive or dead. But there, but there is a, it, it just was so offensive, um, in ways that – I was really angry on Thomas's behalf. You know, I just kept thinking of Thomas curled up on the windowsill the night…
Elaine Kasket: Oh God.
Catherine Mayer: The night before, Andy. You know, because we knew, we knew when Andy was going to die because they told us that they, they were going to remove life support. We knew what time of day he was going to die and we, that we all kept vigil at the hospital overnight. Uh, because it was just before, of course, people, people were still allowed into hospital wards at that point. It was just before everyone was banned and, um, the, the idea of Thomas seeing himself being used that way was the thing that really upset me more than anything else.
Elaine Kasket: Yeah, because somebody's taken this and they've sort of constructed a kind of narrative or story. You know, here's Thomas and here's the thing and here's the picture. And so, you know, they were friends and they were close. And so let's make it the, you know, it's, you know, here's some complete stranger constructing this narrative and then imposing it and flogging it online, and that is, there's something really upsetting and distasteful about that. I completely, I completely get that.
Chapter 6: Grief Police and Public Grieving
Elaine Kasket: Um, and then I suppose thinking about the, um, obviously there's a lot of talk about the ways in which celebrity deaths are not just portrayed online, but, uh, there's a lot of grief policing, shall we say, around people's kind of responses to hearing that somebody that they really loved and admired and followed, you know, has died.
And they talk about their grief, uh, you know, online or they respond to things on Twitter, on Facebook, or whatever. I'm presuming that Andy's death was no different and that, you know, whenever there were stories about it on whatever social media or the news, uh, there'd be commentary, there'd be responses, there'd be, you know, memory groups set up and so forth.
Tell me a little bit about the public kind of response and the public grieving in the wake of the death and what that was like for you and if there was anything complex for you in that.
Catherine Mayer: Well, you know, I mentioned Michael and Paula before and I think it's actually the, it's worth re going back to that because I had gone through such an intense period of time ex such an intense experience of what this can be because they were so famous. Both of them and their deaths were such huge news stories, and it meant that people disassociated what they were seeing from, from any kind of basic humanity. So even people who I knew and liked misunderstood the nature of what had happened to react as if I was at the centre of some very exciting story, and that by failing to share information with them, I was depriving them of the chance to share in that story instead of understanding that I was absolutely shattered. Andy and I were both devastated by their deaths. And the fact, the fact of how they died made it even worse.
Um, but so we actually had to, had to retreat at that point because people were so unintentionally avid for information in ways that dehumanised our friends. And obviously media were, I mean, I still remember getting a bunch of flowers the day Paula died and in the bunch of flowers was a letter from a tabloid newspaper, and the tabloid newspaper said, oh, we're so sorry about your friend Paula, and we, because you were so close to her, we'd love to hear from you.
And then it went on to say, and if you don't speak to us and we end up speaking to people who are not as well versed in who she was and are not nice about her, then it'll be your fault. [laughs] Um, you know, and I paraphrase, but that, that was the meaning of it.
Elaine Kasket: I'm sure.
Catherine Mayer: What was, what was much more shocking than, you know, you kind of know that journalism acts like that, but what you don't realise is how much people can take their cues from it in terms of seeing people who are in the public eye as somehow less than human, and therefore assuming the grief that the people around them feel for them is not real because there's some kind of excitement in the news story.
So when, when, with Andy, there was less of that, but, but it was definitely there. And there was another complicating factor, which was, um, when I began to speak publicly about Covid, um, because when he first died, um, I didn't think that he'd died of Covid because at that point we believed Covid hadn't come outside, you know, had, had only reached Europe, um, in late January. And then, um, people, you know, hospitals started finding evidence of live virus in blood samples they'd taken in December and all of that, so that, that timeline began to dissolve. And I got in touch with St. Thomas's where Andy died, and I said, you may, you'll think I'm mad, but do you think you might have died of Covid? And they said, yes. Not only do we think that, but we've been investigating. But we weren't going to tell you that until we had some proofs and they showed me all these other reasons why they thought he had died of Covid, including the patterns in h patterning in his lungs, which was very much a Covid pattern, et cetera.
Um, they never, the reason I have sort of hedged about whether he died of it is he's like 98% certain he did, but they didn't find the right kind of tissue samples to test. And so, You know, there will always be that 2%. Well it could have been something else, but Wow. That would be quite a coincidence. Um, because also his tour manager ended up in hospital with respiratory failure and uh, you know, there, there's a whole group of people around who did get Covid and, um, anyway.
Uh, the reason I'm saying that is I then decided for public health reasons it was important to actually go public with what had happened, even though I didn't want to associate him with covid. As soon as I did that, I put myself in the position that a lot of the Covid bereaved have experienced, which is because there is a well-funded set of kind of bots and campaigns to describe Covid as a, as a hoax. And, um, it sort of intersects with the whole anti-vaxxer movement. And so what then happens is you get a huge amount of abuse online. So I, anyway, because, as you know, I'm also active in politics. I'm the co-founder of the Women's Equality Party, so as a public feminist, as it were, I was used to getting death and rape threats. So I've been getting those for years, and I'm kind of a, a little bit blasé about it, but I, I was not so blase about getting the abuse from people who were telling me that, um, things like, oh, they say things like, you know, he's lucky he died because, you know, you, nobody would want to spend time with you.
Um, I can't, you know, it's, it's just that, it's… it's more the fact that, that there are people or, or bots controlled by people, that want to say things like that.
Elaine Kasket: Because it is both people and bots, you know, it is, there was an extraordinary story that I read, I believe in the New York Times, [see show notes] describing some of the instances of, um, people who'd, um, died of covid and the, uh, amount of very human to human kind of abuse for targeting the profiles of people who had died of Covid. And it was, it was, it was incredibly sobering. I mean, I'm just, you know, I'm sitting here partly reeling from, uh, what you said about, uh, having grown blasé or accustomed over the years to all the rape and death threats that you get as a political person and a feminist in the public eye.
Um, but yeah, um, you know, again, here you are experiencing the loss of your husband and there all of these different layers of, of things happening and people, as you're saying, treating him, treating you, treating his narrative, his story, his life, his persona. as being somehow up for grabs, you know, kind of utilised in some sort of way for their purposes, you know? So it's kind of, yeah, so it's not just commodification in the financial sentence that seems to happen.
There's this kind of like, oh, well this person has died and he was in the public eye, and so therefore it's open season on all of these things.
Chapter 7: What is ‘the Truth’?
Catherine Mayer Yeah, , and that's why I mentioned Michael and Paula as well, because, um, I remember. One of the things that was so striking to me. Um, and there's, there's a group of us that were their closest friends, but we're a small and very tight-lipped group. I mean, I only ever wrote publicly about Paula and Michael 20 years after they died [see show notes]. And then in very, very specific and careful terms because I'm very aware that they have living family.
Elaine Kasket: Yeah.
Catherine Mayer: Um, which is kind of the point about this. And, um, you would see a parade of people on television right after they died, or in the newspapers talking about them as if they knew them. And I would know with absolute certitude that, that they had parlayed, like, one meeting into, into some ridiculous fake relationship. And I, I don't really, I, I still don't really understand what drives people to do that, but there is a kind of excitement around celebrity deaths, as I say, that's dehumanising and that is a part of it.
And so with Andy, I had to watch myself because, you know, I feel like I, I can pretty much safely say I knew Andy better than anyone else did, but that doesn't mean I owned him. And although I quite literally own parts of his legacy and I'm trying to honour it, I don't want to stop valid points of view and other people's experience that you know…the whole beauty of somebody who is alive is that they change and they challenge, and they do stuff that isn't under your control.
And so for me there is also an impulse both as the widow or as the bereaved person, not only to try and over-claim somebody, but also to sanitise their memory. And so I've been trying to resist all of these different things. So I am aware, I mean, there were some pretty shoddy obits, there were a lot of obituaries and a lot of them were very good, and nearly all of them were very nice. But even the nice ones were, you know, I'm a journalist and I'd look at these things and they'd be so littered with errors, and you know, part of it was just me as aas editor going, oh my God, couldn't you have checked that? Um, but, but most of, a lot of them were very, very good. And then some of them had things in them that were surprising to me, and I would find myself starting to react against it, going, that's not how it was.
And then actually, no, actually that's, that has complete validity. Just because, just because it's not my memory doesn't mean it's not true.
Elaine Kasket: Mm-hm.
Catherine Mayer: Sohere was that going on as well. Mm-hmm. , it is, it is an immensely weird and complicated thing when the person you love most in the world is being described back to you all the time and he's not there to kind of, you know. And even the person themselves. I mean, I, I've also written biography, well, I've written one very big biography [see show notes] and one of the things about being a biographer is the person who you describe may deny truths about themselves.
Elaine Kasket: Mm-hmm.
Catherine Mayer: You know, you don't. You don't necessarily know everything about yourself.
Elaine Kasket: Mm-hmm. .
Catherine Mayer: So it's, it's complicated.
Elaine Kasket: Yeah. You know, and all of that is large online where you see all of these different narratives and different truths and different perspectives. And as you say, sometimes bereaved people get preoccupied with correcting the record or sanitising the record or sort of bending it to their will or to their memory. And sometimes the impossibility of doing that it becomes a source of huge frustration or sadness or anger, and the extent to which that can be let go of is something that, you know is, uh, is, is, is gonna map onto the extent to which you, uh, feel better I think…because grasping after that control as though you did or could kind of own that narrative of someone's life…it’s a doomed, it's a doomed venture.
Catherine Mayer: Yeah. It really, it really is. It really, really is.
Chapter 8: Creating Legacy
Elaine Kasket: Catherine, thank you so, so much for talking to me about these things. Is there any final word that feels important to you to, to say, or anything that you'd really like to highlight?
Catherine Mayer: Well, I suppose what I would say is that I've been lucky in the sense that I had avenues open to me that other people don't in terms of memorialising.
So first of all, as soon as Andy had died, I was talking to the then-band members and to his ex-manager about getting out, finishing the album that was underway, but also we released a single, literally two weeks after he died, it was a re-recording of, of a wonderful song that he'd done and we did it to raise money for the NHS which I felt very strongly I wanted to do. So that was the very first part of memorialising.
Um, and we then released an ep and then I worked for more than a year on getting the album finished and getting that out. So I had this way of like, creating, you know, both digital and physical legacy, if you like. Um, that, that was, that was his legacy, but to make, to ensure it was there and to tell his story.
Um, and then I also wrote a memoir, um, which was, I hadn’t actually intended to do, but my publisher came to me and asked me to do it, and I said, oh. I, I think it's way too early, but have a look at these amazing letters my mother's writing, because my mother had responded to being a new widow in lockdown by writing long letters to my stepfather to tell him about everything that was happening in the world. And they were amazing letters. So I showed those to my publisher, and my publisher said, well, I'd actually really love to publish these, but you need to write the book that goes around it. And then when I started writing it, I realised that I was glad to do it, for again that reason.
I think, you know, in terms of what we've been discussing today, one of the hardest things for people is to understand ways in which they can keep having that conversation with the person who's died and how they can honour that person who's died. And, um, I, I didn't really have to think very hard for me. For me, the, the big, the bigger issue is, is, you know, keeping, keeping, keeping it all in balance going forward, because I still have the, the music estate and, and I deal with it every single day.
Elaine Kasket: Thank you so much, Catherine. It's been a real pleasure.
Catherine Mayer: Thank you.
Elaine Kasket: You’ve been listening to Still Spoken. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please spread the word - recommend, share, and review, it helps a lot for a one-woman operation, a self-produced podcaster like myself. Huge thanks go out to the inimitable Catherine Mayer for sharing her experience and her beautiful memories of an amazing man and their relationship, as well as drawing our attention to things we all need to be thinking about.
We’ll close with more of The Dying Rays, performed by the Gang of Four. It’s a song about mortality, and what does – and does not – live on.
[Music: The Dying Rays, used with permission of Catherine Mayer and the Republic of Music/BMG Rights Management]
What I wanted disappears in the haze
A speck of dust held forever in the dying rays
Until next time.
