Shane MacGowan’s widow speaks out on entering grief therapy: “It can hit you like a tornado”
Shane MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, has revealed that she is in grief counselling following the death of her husband.
The Irish musician and iconic frontman of The Pogues died “peacefully” in hospital from pneumonia on November 30. He was 65 years old. His funeral took place in Nenagh, County Tipperary on December 8.
Now, his widow has opened up about her struggle with the loss and revealed that she has entered grief therapy to help cope with his death.
She shared the update with a new post on her Instagram page, which included a photograph of the musician holding a record while at home. “Grief can hit you like a tornado when you are back to normal life and you are not running around doing stuff,” she began in the caption.
“Yesterday if someone had offered to shoot me I would have been delighted but today I did some grief counselling and I made pasta sauce and the idea of giving up seems mad,” she continued. “I think grief can drive people mad but if you let it out if you cry and wail and talk about it you can feel it moving and it brings you back to life.”
In a separate update, Clarke told fans that she was coming to terms with the loss by attending the church mass that MacGowan “loved”.
“Shane always loved to take Holy Communion and he could really get a buzz from it and I definitely found a level of peace that had been feeling out of reach,” she wrote. “Just the sound of the beautiful voices and the incense and the beauty of the Irish language being spoken was glorious and healing.”
Last month, Clarke – who is a journalist and writer – shared plans to one day release a book of “unpublished” songs by the late Pogues musician, and also expressed her gratitude to Johnny Depp after the actor attended MacGowan’s funeral, describing him as a “tower of strength”. Nick Cave, Glen Hansard and Irish President Michael D. Higgins were also among the guests in attendance at the service.
More recently, MacGowan’s wife helped lead a campaign to get The Pogues’ iconic song ‘Fairytale Of New York’ to the Number One spot in time for Christmas. It was Wham!’s festive hit ‘Last Christmas’ that took the top spot for 2023, however, and reacting to the news Clarke said: “I love Wham!!! We loved George.”
As well as ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘Fairytale of New York’, contenders for Number One included Sam Ryder’s ‘You’re Christmas To Me’ and Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas is You’.
In other Shane MacGowan news, Harry Hill recently re-shared the late Pogues frontman’s festive cameo from the 2010 Christmas special of TV Burp, in which the singer deadpans his way through a duet with a giant beluga whale.
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Liberty Dunworth
NME
