Monty Python star Michael Palin has said he feels a lot less grief now, two years after the death of his wife Helen Gibbins.
Palin who was married to Helen Gibbins for 57 years, announced her death in May 2023, after she died from chronic pain and kidney failure. The pair met while on holidays in the seaside town of Southwold, Suffolk, while Gibbons was still a teenager. He later fictionalised the meeting in a TV drama for the BBC, East of Ipswich in 1987.
"I can see why people say it takes two years or so before your response gradually changes", Palin told Saga magazine. "It becomes less about loss and more about the spirit of that person being around, so that's very nice".
He continued: "I feel less grief now, and more that I’ve got to keep on doing things, looking after the children we made together.
"I talk to myself as if she’s there. I’ll show some spectacular bit of incompetence that I know she would have found funny, then I’ll hear myself saying something in the way she would have said it and I’ll laugh, even though I’m the only one there.
"Imagining her being there makes me laugh".
Palin and Gibbons went on to have three children and four grandchildren. They also celebrated their wedding anniversary just two and a half weeks prior to Gibbons' death.
On whether he will find love again, Michael Palin explained: "We were a unit for so long. You can never begin to replace a relationship which lasted 60 years".
"I’m OK living on my own, then I go off to Venezuela or somewhere. I’m not moping".
