Bereavement research and resources

Episode 07: Research and Resources: Grief Etiquette and Continuing Bonds

 

 

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This episode is dedicated to Betty ♥.

Episode Guest - Dr Jennie Dayes

 

Dr Jennie Dayes is a Counselling Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Psychology. She leads the ‘Etiquette’ research projects at Manchester Metropolitan University, exploring the ‘shoulds’ ‘musts’ ‘rights’ ‘wrongs’ ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ we often feel in death, dying, and bereavement contexts. Jennie is also founder of Legacy and Love Ltd, a company which created card sets to help bereaved individuals stay connected to their loved ones.

 

manchester metropolitan university

legacy and love

Summary:

Smothered with kindness or have friends seemingly abandoned you? What IS the right thing to do when a child dies? We’re heading off down a different path in this episode, taking a look into research around the ‘should and shouldn’ts’ of grief behaviours in our society, and what that might mean to us specifically as bereaved parents. Our guest s Dr Jennie Dayes, and as well as explaining her research she’s also taking us through how she came to produce some rather lovely continuing bonds resources.  

To read Jennie’s research about grief etiquette, click here.

To view the Continuing Bonds cards, click here.

continuing bonds cards

Resources:

Legacy and Love https://legacyandloveshop.etsy.com.

Further reading recommendations from Jennie: “I would recommend Grief Demystified by Caroline Lloyd. This book is a useful way of enhancing grief literacy and is written in an accessible style. Although I haven’t read this one yet, I would maybe point people in the direction of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. This was bought as a present for me by a Clinical Psychologist friend who explained that we still feel our loved ones are near after they die because neurologically, they still are. It felt like a really validating message to me.”

The psychology and archaeology project Jennie mentioned is this: https://continuingbonds.live/

Listeners may also want to further explore how we talk about death, and additional starting points are provided here:

Dying Matters Awareness Week https://www.hospiceuk.org/our-campaigns/dying-matters/dying-matters-awareness-week/events

Good Grief Festival https://www.goodgrieffest.com/

Death cafes https://deathcafe.com/

Further resources about active grief and continuing bonds:

The Good Grief Project https://thegoodgriefproject.co.uk/

Bereaved Parents and Their Continuing Bonds https://www.tcf.org.uk/store/product/6_books/75_bereaved-parents-and-their-continuing-bonds/

Midowed: a mother’s grief, by Debbie Enever



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Episode 7 Transcript:

Debbie Enever, Host

Dr Jennie Dayes, Guest

[00:00:00] Hello, this is the Bereaved Parents Club podcast. It’s the club none of us want to be members of, but here we are. My name is Debbie and I’m a bereaved parent. This podcast is for all of us to share and celebrate the stories of our children and offer support to each other. Each episode, we’ll explore topics that have relevance to us as we navigate the world as bereaved parents.

Whether your loss was last week, last month, last year, or even last century, you are welcome here. And whether your child was a baby, a youngster, a teenager, an adult, or even a parent themselves, you are welcome here. Please be aware that each episode will deal with themes of death and loss.[00:01:00] 

Research and resources: grief, etiquette, and continuing bonds. 

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Dr. Jennie Dayes, Registered Counselling Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Jennie is here to talk to us about some resources she’s developed to support bereaved people and the research she undertook that partly helped her to recognize that there was a need for these resources.

So bear with me through this lengthy introduction. Jennie is the lead author of Etiquette in the Context of Death and Dying, Communication and Conversation which was first published in Omega Journal of Death and Dying. Omega describes itself as the most advanced and internationally recognized forum on the subject of death and dying. It serves as a reliable guide for clinicians, social workers, and health professionals who must deal with problems in crisis management such as terminal illness, fatal accidents, catastrophe, suicide, and bereavement. [00:02:00] So it’s safe to say it packs a punch in terms of clinical and professional guidance.

Jennie has also developed some continuing bonds cards, very interesting for us as bereaved parents, and we’ll chat more about those later too. Now, unlike most of our guests, Jennie’s not a bereaved parent. But as the title of the research and the letters after her name would suggest, she has spent time exploring the topic of grief.

And I must also say at this point that despite what you will hear, Jennie wasn’t actually sitting in a bathroom during our discussion, even though it sounds like it, but hopefully you won’t find it too distracting. Jennie, hello, and thank you so much for agreeing to be part of the podcast. Would you mind just introducing yourself and telling us about how you became interested in grief as an academic topic?

Yeah, of course. So, in 2015, I qualified as a Counselling Psychologist, which is a psychologist that specializes in therapy, basically. So I was seeing quite a few clients in [00:03:00] the therapy room who were experiencing bereavement in different shapes and forms. And then, however many years later, I decided that I wanted to give research a go, and I was really lucky, I got a job on a research project that amalgamated archaeology and psychology.

And it was a really interesting project where they were using archaeological materials to see if they could encourage talk about death, and to see what happened when they did that. So that was my first foray into looking at bereavement academically, and in the workshops that we ran, people started talking about this thing that we’re going to talk about today, that myself and my research team have called etiquette.

And it was this thing that seemed to permeate individuals’ experiences. And it was linked to so many different things. It was linked to how people experienced grief. It was linked to continuing bonds. It was [00:04:00] linked to something called disenfranchised grief. And yet when I was looking in the literature to see if this existed, nobody seemed to have a term for it.

Nobody seemed to have picked up on it and said, ‘hey guys, this is a thing. I’m a Senior Lecturer now, and that means that you do teaching and you do research. And so when I got to that stage, in my career and in my life, I decided that etiquette was the thing that I really wanted to focus on. It was a good opportunity for me. This is what fascinates me. This seems to have such an important influence on people’s experiences and the opportunities that are opened up or closed down to them. And so yeah, I’m going to go and cast a really wide net with the research and basically say, where does this thing come up? And when we see it, what does it look like?

Just thinking of the word etiquette, as soon as I hear that word I kind of think about, oh you know, rituals around what to do when someone dies or dressing in black for funerals or that kind of thing, [00:05:00] but I know that’s not quite what you mean. 

Etiquette is not the best word for it, but we haven’t come up with a better one. So, I think the best way to explain it is to tell you a short story about one of the things that one of the participants told me in those original research workshops. 

So, I was chatting with this chap who was explaining that he was in the hospital with his brother and his sister-in-law when his sister in law died. And the brother came out of the room where the sister-in-law had died and said to the participant, ‘oh, she’s gone. Do you want to go in and say goodbye?’ And the participant said to me, ‘well, if I could have got out of it, I would have done’. And there was that sense there of obligation. There was that sense of should. That sense of what the right thing to do is. And when we’re talking about etiquette, this is what we’re talking about. It’s this felt sense of what we feel we should do or we must do. Or what we feel is right and wrong. [00:06:00] What we feel is appropriate and what we feel is inappropriate in death, bereavement and grief situations.

Brilliant. That’s really helpful so that we can kind of understand it. Like you say, that felt sense. And I think a lot of bereaved parents will recognize that from their experience. Who was the research aimed at? Who is it for? 

It’s quite a big question in the sense that, like, when we do research, who do we do it for? Often, we do it for other academics. Often, we do it for the people that we are researching, which is bereaved individuals and people supporting the bereaved. And for me, I find that when I’m doing research, because I’m, by practice, a clinician, there’s always that in my brain. I’m like, how can this translate into the therapy room?

I think in terms of when we look specifically at who the etiquette research is for, it would span those three areas. We’re not necessarily in the UK the best at talking about death. And what that means is that we just don’t have the language to talk about death, and therefore we don’t [00:07:00] talk about it, and therefore we don’t develop the language to talk about death, or dying, or bereavement.

And so, one of the things that we wanted to do is to actually just create a word and an understanding of something that seems to be there in people’s experiences that they can use to talk about death. Whether that be academics doing research in this area, whether this be bereaved people who are trying to make sense of their experiences, whether it be people who are supporting the bereaved that are trying to figure out what to do to help them or just how to be in that situation, or whether it’s for the therapy room.

Why does it have particular relevance to us as bereaved parents? Is that something you can address? 

There are certain bereavements that people feel more able to talk about than others and society feels really awkward about death, but I think more awkward when it comes to death we perceive to be really painful and really [00:08:00] really difficult for people.

So, etiquette is this sense of what feels right and what doesn’t feel right. And the death of a child is one of these ones that is suffused with this awkwardness, with this difficulty, imagining that people are in so much pain. It’s one of the ones where etiquette, I guess, is rife, and where people are going to feel it really, really keenly.

And I think one of the things that’s worth pulling out of the research in this sense is that this etiquette sense that people feel, we all seem to sort of have this idea in our heads that there is a right thing to do and there is a rule that we should do this right thing. And we feel that really deeply in lots of different situations, but specifically when we’re bereaved parents where they have had a child that has died. 

But the issue is that even though we have this idea that there is a right thing that we should do, that differs massively with different people, and the awkwardness for want [00:09:00] of a better term, is sort of higher when it’s more difficult, more emotionally laden deaths. And so what happens then is that people’s behaviours or feelings or thoughts heightened in those situations.

And so the etiquette is heightened. And the reason that there can be difficulty here is because people have got this idea that there is a right thing to do and that we should do it, but what that looks like is actually quite different for different people. So, I’ve talked to lots of bereaved people who say that after someone learns about their bereavement, they expect people to get in touch, they are struggling, it is a difficult thing for them. They expect their family and friends and the people that know them to like, open up, show up and to be there and to say whatever it is that they might be able to say in terms of ‘what do you need from me? You know, how can I help you? I’m really sorry that this has happened’ or just to acknowledge that something has happened.

But from the other side of it, I’ve talked to lots of people who have had a friend or a family member where they have [00:10:00] had a big bereavement, and they’re coming at it from ‘look, I know that I should really do the right thing But I don’t want to make anybody who’s bereaved cry, I don’t want to make anybody talk about anything that they might not want to talk about, I don’t want to impose myself on their life, they might want to be completely left alone.

And so, we get this mismatch where we get people who just really don’t know what to do to support the bereaved person, or to support that particular bereaved person. And so, they don’t say anything. They don’t know what to do. They really, unfortunately, cross the road when they see someone coming towards them who’s been bereaved, because they just, they just don’t know what to do.

And then we have this situation where there are people are like, ‘hang on a minute, I’ve had this massive, awful thing happen to me, where are my people?’ And then the people are saying, ‘I just don’t know how to best support this person, so I’m going to try not to make the situation worse’. 

I think a lot of [00:11:00] bereaved parents will recognise all of that in one way or another. I’m sure listeners will have lots of examples of times they’ve felt people have behaved unexpectedly because there’s a real lack of consensus around how we should behave around people in grief. And our British awkwardness really doesn’t help. And then all sorts of resentments and misunderstandings can build up. So I think listeners will understand that. 

There were a few things that came up about how to resolve those situations. One, really, was just to recognise that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, that we all feel that there is a right thing to do and we all really, really want to do that right thing, but what that looks like might look different for different people.

So just to recognise that, I think, creates a certain level of empathy that then sort of opens up doors to do things differently, rather than to just kind of stay in the, maybe the more sort of unhelpful patterns. And I think one of the things that came out of our research was that if you’re not sure what to do, maybe what you could try and do is [00:12:00] do what you would have done if that person had experienced something different but difficult.

Like if my friend had had a relationship breakdown or had a car crash or, you know, had something else difficult and horrible happen to them, I would be there, you know, I would be sending the messages. So kind of have a think about what you would do if somebody was experiencing something differently and offer that same level of support.

And somebody else said something really interesting as well from the research about how when that contact comes in – don’t make it all about you. People have said, you know, ‘this is such an awful thing, I can’t stop thinking about it’. But in that situation, it’s not about you as the supporter, it’s about you saying, ‘what can I do for you?’ Or even if you don’t know what to say, send a message and say, ‘I don’t know what to say, but I just feel like I need to acknowledge this and I need to say that I’m thinking of you’. So there were some [00:13:00] practical tips that came out of the research. I think that’s really useful.

I want to look in a bit more detail at the research. It’s very academic, obviously, and while some people will want to do a deep dive into the research, and we’ll put links to the paper on the episode listing, but I think most people will want a summary of the three key themes. So that’s what we’re going to home in on.

The first sub theme that I’ve noted was about the importance of early communication and resolution. And that covers things like the conversations we have to prepare for death, ensuring we understand the wishes of the dying and how we should celebrate or mourn them. Jennie, do you want to explain that a little bit further?

There were some things that came out from the research about particular conversations that were particularly awkward that people had experienced, so you gave a few examples there. Other examples would be talking around like property and talking about wills and things like that, talking about gravestones, do people have gravestones, what do they put on a gravestone, [00:14:00] and what our participants were telling us was that where these difficult topics were not brought up and were not talked about, there was no resolution and then that led to difficulty after death or at some point in the future. 

So, an example would be that one of our participants was talking about their parents’ property and the participant had various siblings and the participant themselves had put a certain amount of money into the property.

And so, when the parents died, it was in the will that the participant was given a bigger chunk of the money than the other siblings. But the other siblings were expecting it to be divided out equally. Yeah, I can see your face. Like, it’s an icky thing, isn’t it? It’s really uncomfortable. So, that leads to family conflict and like difficulties after death that actually, if they were so thought about and those really difficult conversations happened beforehand, then that emotional fallout might not have happened.

I think the [00:15:00] funeral one is a really good example because there’s loads of etiquettes around this. Like if somebody is dying it’s seen as really not okay to get them to talk about their death if they don’t want to talk about it. And when I say it’s seen as that, I mean this is what people tell us. They tell us that they feel really awkward bringing this stuff up and it doesn’t feel okay.

But then what happens is that if you have people that don’t bring that stuff up on their own, then it’s not okay. They might die, and then not give an indication about what they want for their funeral, and how they want to be remembered, and things like that. Which then leaves people in quite a difficult position, because there’s all sorts of etiquettes around, like, this, this sense of, we need to make sure that we have a funeral that accurately represents somebody who has died. We need to, you know, make sure that we’ve done like a good job for them and stuff. What music do we pick? What flowers do we pick? If they haven’t been given any guidance about that, it can be really, really difficult. Planning the funeral can feel for people almost burdensome because they’re [00:16:00] of the weight of those decisions that they have to make without prior guidance.

Yeah, I think that’s compounded when you’re talking about the death of a young child, particularly a child who’s been ill because as a parent, where do you even begin with that conversation? And parents might each have different ideas. Might be grieving differently, making it all more complicated and difficult for everyone to discuss.

There’s all sorts of etiquettes around grieving and what the right way to grieve is, which I mean, short answer, there isn’t one. Um, but our society sort of gives us this impression or this, this idea, doesn’t it, that if you are not really upset, if you’re not physically crying, if you’re, you know, if you’re not overly showing your grief to people, then you’re not doing it properly, which again, just comes with a whole host of really quite unhelpful baggage.

So let’s have a think about the second [00:17:00] theme that’s explored in the research, which is about the appropriateness of communication and support. This is about how we communicate the death of the person, the child, and how we expect other people to support us. But I think it can be incredibly fraught. 

Yeah, definitely. And even, even just the mode of communication. I’ve spoken to lots of people about what their experience was when they learned of a death. And for some people, they found out on social media, which for them felt really, really uncomfortable and not okay. But interestingly, one of the things that we kind of see come up in the research again, and this was such a huge thing that I actually didn’t put it in the paper because I want to write a separate paper on it because it needs its own space.

What we see is this idea of a hierarchy, that when someone dies there are people like higher up the hierarchy that we adhere to or we think about most and then the hierarchy sort of gets less and less and less. But [00:18:00] what that means is that if you’re someone that’s maybe further down the hierarchy, you maybe aren’t thought about as much, and then you end up learning about the death in a way that is completely different to how you would have ideally wanted it to.

But then, again, like, you get people who are bereaved who are higher up the hierarchy that think, I need to let people know about this, and I’ve only got a certain amount of strength, and it cannot go, actually, on ringing around hundreds and hundreds of people. Maybe I’ll just put something on social media.

So again, it’s fraught with difficulty, isn’t it? Because we have this sense of there’s a right thing to do, but it’s just not always possible for people. 

I remember when I lost Dan, there were some people that I had to tell face to face, others that I could phone, some that I could text, and others that I could sort of sub out. As in, like, you know that cohort of people, can you pass on the message to them? And because we hadn’t been in Sheffield very long, I also didn’t have any contacts for his friends or their mums. But there was [00:19:00] still an implied hierarchy of people that he knew better than others. And what I didn’t want was for one of his closer friends to find out on Snapchat from someone who he’d only sat next to once in maths, for example.

So, netiquette and etiquette were both very active for me at that time. And I’m sure that others will relate to the fact that you feel you have to react much more quickly than you’d like to to these social media pressures. Much more quickly than your brain’s capable of when you’re trying to do the right thing.

It’s also tricky because every situation is at least slightly different. So I guess it’s hard to have blanket rules about all this. 

I don’t think that in the research that we’ve done that we’ve ever found blanket rules other than we seem to think that there is a right thing to do, and we seem to think that we should do it.

That seems to be the thing that sort of everybody shares, but actually the doing of it, everybody has a different [00:20:00] sense of how to do that. There’s another thing that is really worth sharing, because I think it’s quite useful, but also it might be a bit of an unpopular opinion. From having a look at what people have said, and having a look at the data, it might be nice, if you are a bereaved person, to help other people help you.

If people are not sure what to say, they’re not sure what to do, they’re not sure what help you want from them, they’re not sure how long they should be offering this help for, then tell them. And there is this etiquette around, ‘well we really shouldn’t be expecting somebody that’s gone through a bereavement to be having to set out the social rules for people’.

When we look at the reality of it, and the reality of how these situations play out, people need a bit of a helping hand. And I guess it’s about really doing the people who love you a favour. 

It is controversial, but also really worth saying. And I would add that as the bereaved parent, if you don’t know what help you want or need, just say, ‘I don’t know what I want, but what can you do?’[00:21:00] 

And it might well be someone will say, ‘well, I’ll walk the dog or’, or ‘let me make tea’. And although it can be hard to advocate for yourself, whatever you say, others will follow your lead. 

The third aspect of the research is about social acceptance and values. And that might be things as a society that we generalize as being normal and also the way that we internalize these shared values.

So basically, what we do reflects what goes on in our culture and we internalize this. I guess an example would be, I shouldn’t grieve an ex partner or I can’t let my other children see how sad I am. And often these values might not be quite how we really feel or particularly healthy for us. I guess. All of these social rules, all of these felt sense of what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, what’s right, what’s wrong, etc. It happens in a context and it’s massively influenced by our society and our culture and where we live and the [00:22:00] people in our lives. 

And I think that that’s an important point or a useful point because we can question society and how that has fed into us. And I think that clinically, this is useful, and sometimes this stuff is so ingrained, and it’s suffused with so much pain, and so much difficulty, and so much what we should do, and our opinions, and our perspectives, that actually we have to take it away from the individual person, and go and look at society.

Because we can question society easier than we can question ourselves. And one of the reasons that this came out, and I thought was an interesting thing to pick up on, was because it’s not just what we do that’s influenced by society and that leads to certain reactions, but it’s the stuff that we don’t do as well.

So, if we don’t have a funeral, for example, in our society, because we expect a funeral, it’s almost an act of omission, because it’s not there, it means something. We’re not on a desert island experiencing this stuff. This stuff is suffused with our like [00:23:00] history and yeah, our culture and what we expect to happen and what we don’t.

And because of that, there are expectations there. And then when those expectations are not met, then that can cause difficulty and controversy. 

So that might be something like, ‘I couldn’t possibly start a new relationship within 12 months of losing somebody. And you’re like, OK, why that figure? Where’s that come from?’ Yeah, OK. Jennie, I think we’ve covered the three themes there. Do you feel the research met its aims? 

It did what it needed to do for me because the conversations that I’ve had around this topic has shown to me that this is a thing that really resonates with people. This is a thing that people want to talk about.

Whenever I talk about it with people, people say, oh that happened to me, like I’ve got this story where this fits. So the paper did that for me in terms of, it showed to me the quality of the concept and that felt really important. 

Okay, so that’s quite an intense conversation. [00:24:00] Jennie, what would you say for you? What are the kind of key messages for our listeners? 

For me, one of them is grief literacy. If we’ve got these words and we can educate ourselves about the concept, that’s only going to help us. Another takeaway I think is we all want to do the best by the people around us, we just don’t know how to do it, or the things that come to us as what feels like the best way to do it feels quite differently for other people.

And so, I think if we can understand that we’re all coming from this place of trying to do the right thing, it gives a level of empathy to individuals in a situation that again can only be helpful. My final one is that controversial one which is ‘help other people help you’. 

Yeah, I think that could be a helpful thing for lots of people involved in these situations.

One of the phrases that’s emerged from the slightly improved grief literacy that we’re seeing is continuing bonds. This is a phrase that when I mention it to other bereaved parents, they [00:25:00] understand immediately. That notion of taking some kind of action to extend and celebrate the connection with the child they’ve lost.

I know you’ve created a beautiful continuing bonds resource. So, Jennie, can you tell us how this came about? 

So, my lovely friend Betty died, and I just wanted to do something to commemorate her and to stay connected with her. And to take her values of being such a gumption go getter into my own life and then in terms of okay, what did I want to do with this?

Well, I wanted to create something, and I have created something that hopefully will help people remain connected with their loved ones after they have died. And it was really important to me that it was a beautiful thing because the people who have died, our people, are really important and I feel should be remembered and held and encountered in a gorgeous way, if that’s how we feel about them.

So, I wanted [00:26:00] to create something that was beautiful, but I also wanted to create something that wasn’t too overwhelming. So I had a baby and amazing, gorgeous people got me different presents and one of them bought me a book where you write down absolutely everything and all their milestones. And if I’m honest I’ve only written like a couple of things in it because it was just too huge, and I just felt really guilty about it. 

But somebody did buy me some, they call them milestone cards, and I did manage to do quite a few of those. And it’s lovely to have them to look back on and things, but yeah, so I wanted these cards, basically, I didn’t want them to be overwhelming, it couldn’t be like the book, where you felt guilty that you didn’t fill it out, and that it was too much, and I’m sure that there is a place for that, and some people would really engage with that, but for me, I wanted to create something that felt nice to engage with, that didn’t feel like you were doing it from a place of guilt.

Right, so those milestone cards inspired the creation of the Continuing Bonds cards, and I have them here with me. There’s a deck of [00:27:00] 30 cards, they’re around A5 in size, and they’re all presented in a sturdy little box for safekeeping. Each card is exquisitely illustrated. There’s a strawberry for summer, there’s snowfall, there are dandelion clocks.

I’ll put pictures of the cards on the website and links to the Etsy store on the episode listing so that you can all see them. Jennie, tell us more. 

Each card represents a moment or event that might happen where you might want your loved one near, or you might think about them, or you might miss them particularly.

So, we have like Christmas, for example, or winter, or the storm, or the first full moon, or just these things that happen in everyday life that are, I guess, an opportunity to stay connected with our people. And then on the other side, it says, ‘I remembered you by’. And then you write down what it is that you did to continue your connection with that person.

So, in the ‘how to’ cards at the beginning, there’s a big list of ways that people might [00:28:00] remain connected with their loved ones. Like, they might light a candle. They might talk to them. They might wear an item of their clothing. They might cook their favourite meal or something like that. And also the more unique to that person and the bond and the things that you did together, the better, in a way.

So that’s what they are. It’s about taking this moment or event and then connecting with your person and continuing that bond. So there are some ones that don’t have any writing on them at all, so you can kind of use them however you want to, but they are all ‘firsts’ at the moment, however, I’ve just got a little bit of funding in to create some packs that don’t have the first stuff on, and channelling Betsy, which is all about just go out there and you don’t have to do it perfectly, you just have to learn from your experiences, I created this pack that said first, this first, that first the other, and the idea that somebody might buy them for somebody who is bereaved and therefore show up for them in that way. and [00:29:00] provides something that might be helpful for them. 

However, obviously we know that grief lasts longer than a year, don’t we? And that we might want to remain connected with our people long after those firsts have happened. So, I’m looking into at the moment doing a pack where we’ve taken those firsts out. 

I know as a bereaved parent I definitely would have missed some of those firsts, just because I wouldn’t have registered them. And that might have led to a sense of guilt. So as somebody who is several years down the line, I look forward to the second iteration, as I think they’re a lovely way of remembering. And I really like that idea of them as a bereavement gift too. 

So not only is it a way of showing up for somebody, not only is it a way of maybe introducing them to Continuing Bonds if they’ve not come across that before, not only is it a way of recognising that that person was special to them and that it’s completely natural to want to continue that connection, it’s also a way of opening up a conversation.

Because it’s a ‘thing’, it’s almost [00:30:00] an invitation in a way for that person to, you know, if you give it as a gift, the bereaved person can either invite you to say more or invite you not to. They’ve got the opportunity there. So yeah, hopefully they do that too. 

Well, we’ve explored some fascinating stuff today, Jennie, so thank you.

All our guests are asked to tell us about something they’re grateful for. So, Jennie, today, what are you grateful for? 

You’re definitely gonna laugh at this. I am really grateful that last night I got two parking notices through. Let me tell you why. About two weeks ago, I got a parking notice through for my parking at work, right? And it says that I’ve got to pay, you know, 60 quid within however many days or 100 quid if I don’t do that. And I was like, I shouldn’t have this ticket. I’ve not done anything wrong here. I always buy a ticket when I get to work. I am authorised to park in this car park. Why have I got a ticket? This is, this is unacceptable.

Anyway, so I got [00:31:00] two through yesterday. For the same car park, same issue, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, now I know it’s a mistake. Now I’ve got three. Those three are definitely a mistake because I definitely, definitely know that when I, from when I first got that first one, I have been absolutely fastidious about putting a ticket on my car.

So I know that it was, it is a mistake! 

Jennie, I am sure you’ll be the only guest grateful for parking tickets! 

That was my conversation with Dr. Jennie Dayes, and you’ll find links to all the resources we discussed on the episode listing and the Bereaved Parents’ Club podcast web page. I hope you found some of the topics interesting, and maybe found a little inspiration too.

Thank you, as always, for listening. If you have any suggestions for any topics that you might wish us to explore in more detail in future episodes, Please contact us at hello@bereavedparentsclub.org.uk . [00:32:00] And please do share the podcast amongst your networks, so that we can reach everyone who might benefit.

Finally, if you want to know more about my grief journey, you can find a link to my book Midowed: A Mother’s Grief on our web page. 

This episode is dedicated to Betty.