Actor Jill Halfpenny on the ‘barrage’ of ‘guilt and shame’ after the death of her partner
The EastEnders and Coronation Street star had to grieve for her boyfriend and dad at the same time.
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Your support makes all the difference.Actor Jill Halfpenny says that her partner’s sudden death felt like “losing a version” of her life too.
The Holiday star’s boyfriend, Matt, had a cardiac arrest at the gym two years into their relationship in 2017 – four decades after her dad had a heart attack during a five-a-side football match.
The 48-year-old says: “I would like to think that myself and Matt would have been together forever, so along with losing someone you lose all these hopes and dreams that were attached to them. It’s like losing your life as well. You’re losing a version of your life that was with them.”
Halfpenny had to help two paramedics carry her partner up a staircase from the gym, not knowing if he would live, because the stretcher wouldn’t fit in the lift, calling the journey to hospital “a horror show”. The 43-year-old was pronounced dead the next day.
In the immediate aftermath, “along with the grief, you’re dealing with PTSD, like a trauma, a shock. It’s like watching a magic trick that goes wrong. Your brain can’t quite compute what’s happened, even though, on a cerebral level, I know exactly what’s happened”, says the mum-of-one, who made her name in Byker Grove in 1989.
“If you lose a sister of a brother, those people can never be replaced, but with a partner there is obviously the option to meet someone else, so that in itself brings a whole barrage of complex feelings of guilt and shame.”
Halfpenny, who has starred in Coronation Street and EastEnders, and won Strictly Come Dancing in 2004, lost her dad, Colin, when he was just 36. Halfpenny was four at the time, and, as she explains in her autobiography, A Life Reimagined, My Journey of Hope in the Midst of Loss, he was rarely mentioned in the family and almost all evidence of him was removed from the house she shared with her mum, Maureen, and two older sisters.
‘It was as if he was erased,’ she writes. ‘The truth was my mam was completely lost, she was heartbroken and she had no idea how she was going to cope.’ Two years later, Maureen married her late husband’s brother, Derek.
But it meant the children weren’t given the time or space to process his death, and it wasn’t until Matt died that Halfpenny finally grieved for her dad too.
“I felt like all of the emotions that I hadn’t been able to feel for my dad, they all came back. It was like a double whammy. I felt like my body was saying, OK, if you’re going to grieve Matt, you’re going to have to grieve your dad as well. Because I never really did it, I was never given the tools to do it.”
Growing up she struggled with depression and found escapism in alcohol. Amid all the tragedy she’s faced, Halfpenny questioned whether bad things were happening because she was a bad person.
“I’ve had that ever since I was a kid – and that definitely comes from losing Dad. [Psychotherapist] Julia Samuel says that unless children are sat down and it’s made very, very clear that losing someone close to them is not their fault, they will naturally think it’s their fault.
“Even now, I’m about to turn 49 and I can think, did I do something wrong? I’m being punished?”
The grief made her “want to kick and scream and shout” and feeling “as if was being unfairly treated or that nothing was ever going work out. And that’s a really scary headspace to fall into”.
Halfpenny sought therapy and attended a grief retreat, and because of her own experience as a child, says she wanted to do things differently for her son Harvey, now 16 (who she had with actor and producer ex Craig Conway).
While her own mother’s pain was internal and private, Halfpenny says: “It was important for me for him to understand that you could be completely bereft and really sad and also know that it was going to be OK. I didn’t want him to have this strange mum who had a weird, stressed look on her face because she was holding it in all the time.
“When [a child] says to a parent, are you OK? And they say, ‘Yeah I’m fine’, but they’re not. I think that can lead to not trusting yourself later on in life. [Now] he’s very, very good at being able to read my face, and thankfully, I don’t try and pretend that what he’s seeing is not real.”
Seeking help through Alcoholics Anonymous helped too. During the early days of her career, Halfpenny says she was “putting alcohol on top of uncomfortable feelings” and taking booze away ‘made room for grief’. Today she doesn’t drink at all.
Delving inwards in therapy has been both terrifying and “really empowering” and she’s learned to be self compassionate. “[Anger] is actually pain and the minute I feel like that then I go, that’s not who I am or who I want to be, that’s just a sign to go and do more work, go and cry some more, go for some more walks, because what it means is you aren’t being compassionate to yourself. You need to do the opposite, you need to be really, really kind.”
She hopes her book, which feels half autobiographical and half self help, gives other people a tool box to deal with loss. “People can feel so lost and scared when they’re grieving and feel like it’s insurmountable.”
Now, as she writes in the book, ‘I can allow myself to be happy and in love without feeling any guilt’, and she wrote a letter to Matt to tell him. “I think I wrote, ‘I met someone and I’ve got a feeling this is going to be quite special’.
I've found a sense of freedom and a sense of bravery perhaps that wasn't there before
Now, daily exercise, meditation and gratitude lists keep her balanced but happiness means something different to her these days. “After Matt died I said what I’d really love more than anything in the world is to wake up with a feeling of contentment every day. For me, it’s the zenith.”
And when it comes to her TV career, “I’ve found a sense of freedom and a sense of bravery perhaps that wasn’t there before. I just say, I’m going to do that, what’s the worst that could happen? I think I’ve dropped the perfectionist streak,” she says.
“I was so worried about not being not doing it right, you know, being a good girl. So now I’m a bit freer, bit messier.”
Ultimately though, “Both Matt and Dad sort of dying in the way that they did, it really hits home to me that we don’t know what’s going to happen to us in the next hour. So there’s something about staying as present as possible, so you can enjoy what’s happening right in front of you.”
A Life Reimagined: My Journey of Hope in the Midst of Loss by Jill Halfpenny (£22, Macmillan) is available now.