Jess Mills: The ‘exquisite beauty’ and ‘exquisite pain’ of the last year of mum Tessa Jowell’s life

Jess Mills says she was “searingly awake to life” in the months prior to her mother Tessa Jowell’s death.

Former Labour cabinet minister Jowell was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumour in 2017, 10 weeks after Mills had given birth to her first child, Ottie. Jowell died the following year, aged 70.

“I really felt as if the cycle of life was spinning between us in the most beautiful but completely devastating way,” says Mills, 44.

“There was an exquisite agony to the whole thing. It was exquisite beauty, exquisite pain, sadness, devastation, and something mysteriously life-affirming about the whole thing – how it deepens your connection to life and to living, when you’re living on the threshold of life and death with somebody so central to your sense of place in the world.

“You are searingly awake to life, you are searingly present to everything that is most precious and beautiful in front of you. There were many kinds of unexpected and extraordinary gifts that, honestly, you would never choose. But nonetheless, when you’re going through an experience like that, there is just this complete full-spectrum intensification of how you experience life and love and sadness and presence and gratitude at the same time – and joy.

“You learn that joy and devastation can emotionally coexist somehow. Actually, I think the joy is felt even more intensely because of the sadness that surrounds it.”

London-based Mills’ new memoir, We Are Each Other, tracks the last months of Jowell’s life – beginning with the joy of Ottie’s birth, and Jowell having multiple seizures – leading to the discovery of a rare type of brain tumour. Jowell then dedicated herself to campaigning for more cancer treatments to be available through the NHS, but her condition deteriorated rapidly, and she died following a haemorrhage in May 2018.

Jowell was a successful politician, playing a major role in securing the 2012 Olympics for London when she served as Culture Secretary, but Mills says there was no difference between her public and private persona.

“She was not somebody who had a split personality – she wasn’t one thing in one place, and another thing in another place,” says Mills, who is the founder and chief executive of the Tessa Jowell Foundation, which works to transform brain cancer care, and recently started work on fighting childhood inequality – something Jowell also focused on throughout her career.

“She was authentic to the core – ‘authenticity’ is a word which is bandied around a lot in a platitudinal way. But when I use that word, I mean she was completely and utterly honestly and consistently herself, in every kind of context and environment she was in.

“Her capacity to create a sense of real and immediate intimacy with a person, to demonstrate love and care, was character-defining of her – it was what made her such an outstanding politician and such an outstanding constituency MP, because she cared about people one by one, in a very real way. But take that and multiply it by infinity, and that’s what it was like to be her child.”

We Are Each Other is a searing look at what it means to lose someone so close to you, and the shockwaves are felt through Mills’ family – particularly by her father, lawyer David, and brother, Matthew, husband to Deliciously Ella entrepreneur Ella.

Despite being the kind of family where “really nothing was off-limits – we were incredibly close, and would talk about anything and everything”, Mills reflects on those final months, saying: “It’s striking to me that we did not talk explicitly about the very real inevitability of her death”, because it was “too painful”.

Mills suggests she became frustrated with the cliches around death when her mother passed.

“One of the things I found so hard about death was just how completely ‘unmagical’ it was. People used to say to me, ‘Don’t you feel that she’s with you?’ And, ‘Can’t you feel her around?’”

“I was like, I don’t feel that. I just feel she is completely and utterly gone from everything and everywhere, and it’s as plain and as stark as day – and it’s horrendous.”

Mills, who has had a career as a musician but now focuses on charity work, started writing the book as soon as Jowell died, taking five years to complete it.

“The writing of the book has been the single most important and cathartic thing for me in metabolising that year,” she says.

“Of course, it was mum’s very sudden terminal diagnosis. It was also the complete mind, body and soul transformation that you go through giving birth and becoming a mother yourself, and the overlaying of those two very seminal experiences.

“Everything happened so fast and in such an intense and brutal way that I think for most of that year, and I know this is very common for anyone who’s going through a big, traumatic experience, I just felt like I was living on mainline electricity.

“I literally felt like I had electricity coursing through my system a lot of the time, from the adrenaline and just how intense the emotion and sadness of the whole thing was.”

Nearly eight years on from Jowell’s death, Mills suggests her relationship with grief has changed.

“For a long time, after the death of someone at the centre of your sense of being and place in the world, I certainly felt like there was this infinite hole at the centre of my life,” she notes.

But on the day of Jowell’s birthday last September, the whole extended family had a picnic on Tessa Jowell Boulevard – a promenade named after the politician in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in tribute to the work she did on bringing the 2012 Olympics to London.

Mills was joined by her husband, Finn Vine, and their two daughters – Ottie, nine, and Hero, six – who were playing with their cousins.

“Seeing them now as little schoolchildren, so happy and alive, I realised that grief – even though it feels like it separates you from everything for a really long time – grief happens at the very core of life,” she reflects.

“I could see, with all the children running around, how much beautiful life has managed to grow – even with this hole at the centre of our lives.”

Now, Mills says she’s finally “fully occupying the world” without her mother – but her impact is still felt every day.

“The greatest gift she’s given me, in her life and in her death, is how I feel I can love my children and how I can be a mother to them – which is entirely because of how I was mothered by her.”

We Are Each Other by Jess Mills is published in hardback by Leap, priced £18.99. Available now.