“GRIEF is not elegant, and it is not well-mannered,” Cathy Rentzenbrink reminded us on Guide Book on Radio 4 last Tuesday. “And we do very silly things, I think, in grief. Often because we just want to escape our own pain.”

Tell me about it, I thought listening in the kitchen, while looking at a picture of my late wife.

The idea behind Guide Book is to bring together writers to talk about how books might help us navigate everyday life. Tuesday’s show saw Damian Barr talking to fellow authors Rentzenbrink and Stella Duffy about loss (both personal and collective in this age of coronavirus), the way it lives on in us and what part books might play in helping us grieve or even just ameliorate the pain.

As someone who is learning that grieving is an ongoing process (to paraphrase Gerry Adams– my father would be horrified – it hasn’t gone away, you know), much of what they all had to say hit home.

Radio is a better medium than TV for this kind of conversation. Pictures too often get in the way. It also helps when all three contributors are so open and honest when talking about their own losses and how they learned to live with them. Or didn’t.

They also asked how we could help each other at such times. “I think we should go back to wearing mourning,” Duffy suggested at one point. “Not imposed mourning … But an armband that says, ‘Be kind to me in the supermarket because my person just died.’

Read More: Grief in a time of pandemic

“If everyone was wearing armbands when they had lost somebody we would stop feeling so alone in our grief. Because death is really common it happens all the time and all around us.”

And that’s the case even more so in the last 18 months. Barr has had the experience of going to a Zoom family funeral. “And that was the most horrific thing I think I’ve ever had to do in my life. It’s not just the loss of the person … It’s the loss of all the ways of coping and the loss of ability to love.”

It all comes back to love, of course. “I no longer expect to live in a world where bad things don’t happen. I no longer expect not to suffer,” Rentzenbrink pointed out. “I need plenty of love. I need to give it. I need to receive it.”

Love and maybe books too. Well, they are all authors. Duffy described how she found Mary Oliver’s poetry helpful, while Barr chose Alice Walker for her ability to make him cry.

Rentzenbrink said that you didn’t always have to look tor words for solace or consolation, though. Sometimes it’s OK to read just for distraction from your suffering too. It’s better than drinking, she said. She knows because she’d tried that too. “I was drunk for a couple of decades, really.”

Books, she had realised, were a more helpful form of self-medication. “Reading is one of the few things that makes me feel better in the short term and doesn’t make me feel worse in the long term. Pretty much everything else I did to distract myself from grief made me feel better in the short term and then made me do much worse.

Read More: Jeanie is smoking a cigarette - on love and grief

“I will now say to myself firmly. ‘Right, we’re not going to try and think about this for the next few hours. What we’re going to do right now is we’re going to get in the bath with this Georgette Heyer we’ve read a million times before.’”

Maybe we should all be given Georgette Heyer on the NHS.

Listen Out For: Written in Scotland, Radio 4, Thursday, 11.30am. Kirsty Wark continues her series on the relationship between Scottish writers and the Scottish landscape.