Michael Rosen: "This may sound extraordinary, but I'm not traumatised by the death of my son"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

"This may sound extraordinary,” says Michael Rosen, “but I’m not traumatised by the death of my son.” While I try to take that in, the broadcaster and writer continues. “And I’m not traumatised by having been in a coma for 40 days. I’m concerned, I’m worried, I’m saddened, I’m all those things. But that word ‘trauma’ means something else: it comes from German, the idea of a dream you can’t get out of – you’re stuck in it, and at a loss. And I can genuinely say: I think about it, but I’m not stuck. I can love my son who died, and live with it, and not feel traumatised by it.”

It’s perhaps the ultimate affidavit for Rosen’s new book, Good Days. There are plenty of self-appointed gurus out there telling us how to live our “best lives”, but Rosen is a man who’s faced some truly dark times – and if he can come out the other side untraumatised, his advice is probably worth listening to.

He’s written before about the sudden death of his son, Eddie, aged 18, in 1999, and about his own near-death experience with Covid, and that almost biblical-sounding 40-day coma. (He’s also, of course, written, some of Britain’s best-loved children’s poetry, including the classic We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.) But this is his most practical work yet, an ‘A-Z of Hope and Happiness’ as the publishers have subtitled it – complete with not just the author’s trademark profound-but-amusing observations on life, but also “hints, reminders, tips and suggestions” that readers might want to “imitate, adapt or adopt”.

Rosen is a natural pedagogue: his much-memed poetry readings are as popular with kids as his studies of language are on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, which returns for its 34th year this week. But the tone of Good Days is anything but lecturing. “It’s a little bit like a recipe book,” he agrees. “It’s saying, ‘If you want to try and make a cake this way, then this is how you can do it’. It doesn’t tell you that’s what you have to do. So, for instance, I say in one chapter, ‘You can listen to music any way you want, but one of the ways you can do it is…’”

In fact, it’s more in the fine old BBC tradition of public service than self-aggrandisement. “If you’ve had an experience like mine, people want to know what it was like. When I meet people, they ask me how I go on, day by day. I have the same curiosity myself. I listened to [musician] Nick Cave on Desert Island Discs, and he’s lost two of his sons, and it’s utterly compelling hearing him talk.

“I met Holocaust survivor Eva Clarke, who was born in a concentration camp, and when she tells her mother’s story you can’t believe how she actually went on living. People ask: if the human spirit is an elastic band, why didn’t it snap? And what did you do to get through it? Quite often the anwer is, ‘Well, I got up every morning and I made myself porridge.’

“It’s hard to explain to people who get fed up doing mundane things, but if you’ve had trauma then there’s something incredibly satisfying or distracting or absorbing about doing mundane things wholeheartedly. That’s obviously a less interesting answer than saying, ‘I drink an enormous amount, or I take these narcotic substances’, but finding those small points of contentment is often what seems to help people. So that’s how this book came about.”

If it sounds sententious, or like some cutesy little ‘book of cheer’, it’s certainly not. (Rosen’s daughter calls him an “optimistic nihilist”, he reveals.) He’s well aware that “plenty of people have plenty of things to be unhappy about”, but says “the aim of the book was to find routes out of that unhappiness”.

As an example, he returns to Eddie: “On the Holloway Road [in north London], there’s a lovely Turkish restaurant where my teenage sons and I would go for these crazy midnight meals. It was a lovely time, but I can ruin that reminiscence for myself by saying, ‘Oh yes, but Eddie died’. You don’t have to do that, though, and I’ve taught myself not to. So now I remember these funny, great moments without adding the sadness of, ‘That was one of the last times we did that’. I’ve learnt how not to let the bereavement spoil the happy memory.”

Most telling of all, perhaps, the book has a whole chapter on death (“which caused a little stir with the publishers, who weren’t sure they wanted that”). It’s there, says Rosen, because accepting death’s inevitability is important for getting the most out of your days. “And because you can’t live for ever. I mean, I’ve tried, but it’s not working.”

• Good Days by Michael Rosen is available now

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