Good grief?

I’ve spent many hours this past three days online watching and participating in the  Good Grief Festival. https://goodgrieffest.com/ ‘Good Grief’ it seems is not an oxymoron – in fact one session explored the ‘gift of grief’.

This was an amazing, thoughtful, moving, emotional, honest series of talks, presentations and  conversations. For many sessions there were parallel chats where the listeners could  comment on what was being said and also have parallel conversations . So much input was lot to juggle at times,  – thankfully, for a mere £20 the whole festival programme is available on demand  for the next three years. Some things came up repeatedly – the taboos around talking about death, the fact that we are all living and dying simultaneously, that grief is never ‘over and done’, that triggers to the sorrow can happen forever, that grief is actually an expression of love.

The festival has made me think and inevitably cry. There was a very moving talk by three men about baby loss – men who are dads without children. They had started a football team for men in their position, which had created  safe space where they all understood and supported each other. So valuable to consider this from an entirely male point of view – a real insight into the different ways men and women cope with processing and expressing grief, and how support can be given.

Above all – what everyone said was that we have to TALK to SHARE, to be honest and authentic about our grief, that suppressing grief to create a superficial appearance of being ‘ok’ just doesn’t work, it causes ill health, both physical and mental. As panellist Sophie Sabbage said “We are designed for loss, but not prepared for it” After hearing her speak I had to go and watch her TedX talk https://www.ted.com/talks/sophie_sabbage_how_grief_can_help_us_win_jan_2019,  which was inspirational and full of joy.

There were calls for death, grief and loss to be built into the curriculum, in the way that sex ed is – to  make it something we can talk about as a part of life. So many people talked about how, for fear of saying the wrong thing, we say nothing, leaving the bereaved isolated and afraid of saying how they truly feel.

One talk about suicide, and how the stigma and judgement around it creates even more isolation moved me to pick up the phone to a very old friend whose father had  killed himself when she was a child. Over 40 years later I suddenly wondered about how she had coped as a child – we were both children when we met, so it had all been taken as a given, accepted at face value, I hadn’t really reconsidered it from an adult perspective. She said her family never spoke openly to each other about how he had died, they all were expected to ‘just get on with it…’ I think and hope that as a society we have a more informed and compassionate attitude now.

I urge anyone who’s life has been affected by loss and grief (so that’s all of us!) to be open, to share their sorrow, to offer a hand ,a smile, a kind word to others – we can’t ‘fix’ anyone else’s grief, but we can acknowledge and recognise it, validate it and support others.

As Dr Rachel Clarke said ‘We are all mortal, we’re all living and dying simultaneously’.