You've been with them for so long and suddenly they're not there... it's an unreal world

Python says loss is still a struggle

- SANJEETA BAINS

Just a few weeks after their 57th wedding anniversary and three days before his 80th birthday, Michael Palin lost his beloved wife Helen Gibbons.

She had been his childhood sweetheart, the woman he described as "the bedrock of his life".

Now, nearly a year on, the Monty Python-star-turned travel host still cannot quite believe she is no longer with him. He confides that his world now feels "unreal", as he struggles with the "foreverness of it". 

As a bona-fide national treasure, it is hard to imagine he feels so alone.

Michael reflects on the loss: "It's not easy. It is an unreal world you enter.

Someone you have been with so long and every reference point in your life is connected with that person... and suddenly they are not there, [but] you kind of fool yourself that they are there."

Helen, the mother of Michael's three children, was 80 when she passed on May 2, 2023, having suffered from kidney failure and battling for many years.

She was on dialysis and in chronic pain before, as Michael previously admitted, she decided with her children and doctors to "give it up".

The couple first met aged 16 on holiday with their families on the Suffolk coast.

Announcing her death in a statement last year, Michael recalled that first day he saw her, saying: "We were both 16, and we married in our early 20s... Helen was the bedrock of my life. Her quietly-wise judgment informed all my decisions and her humour and practical good sense was at the heart of our life together."

Now, at least, he has the comfort of the knowing woman he loved is no longer suffering, even if he is.

"It is kind of dealing with the foreverness of it," he confesses, of how his life is now. "That it is forever."

Helen was by Michael's side throughout his career, which began with productions for Oxford Review, the theatre club at Oxford University where he studied with Terry Jones.