Episode 19 Transcript:

THE GOOD GRIEF PROJECT

Host: Debbie Enever

Guest: Jane Harris

[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 will 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] 

It’s my privilege today to be joined by Jane Harris from the Good Grief Project, and I’ve pinched this introduction from their website. The Good Grief Project is the brainchild of bereaved parents Jane Harris and Jimmy Edmonds, whose 22-year-old son, Josh, died in a road accident in Vietnam in 2011. Jane is a psychotherapist and Jimmy is a filmmaker.

Their mission is to support families grieving after the untimely death of a loved one, particularly the death of a son or daughter of any age. And to promote an understanding of what it means to grieve in a society that often has difficulty talking openly about death, dying and bereavement. Their own response to Josh’s death has been to use both the still and the moving image to articulate our grief.

Jane and Jimmy now want to help others to help find their own way of expressing their grief. [00:02:00] Jane, thank you for joining us. There’s so much to talk about because the Good Grief Project is just constantly bursting with activity. But before we get into those details, could I ask you to tell us a little bit more about yourself, about Josh and your story?

Debbie, it’s so special to be talking with you. Um, and, and I’m very much thinking of Josh and today as we have this conversation. Yeah, Josh, well, You know, it doesn’t matter how long ago it was, it’s still hard, isn’t it? It’s always hard. Josh died very suddenly. In a road crash in Vietnam, when he was 22, he was in the happiest place.

He was so well, he was, he realized his dream. Actually, he’d become a young producer at the ministry of sound and he was really happy. And so he’d taken some time out and. You know, as I say that, I think of the younger Josh, who was very self conscious, lacking in confidence, [00:03:00] really didn’t believe in himself.

And for him to have got to that place, I was so proud. As a mum, I think it was roots and wings, you know, I thought, yeah, yeah. Roots and wings. He’s, he’s got it. He’s out there. Let him go. Let him fly. And then, you know, that unbelievable thing that we, we talk about, like, the knock on the door, the shock, your world collapses.

We heard that he’d been killed instantly in a road crash in Vietnam. And, you know, our world’s kind of crumbled. Jimmy crumbled. He fell on the floor. his sister and brother, we all collapsed as a family and we kind of thought, there’s nowhere to go with this, we can’t get through this, but we somehow knew we had to, that we didn’t know what that meant then.

And we were aware of grief, but not in the way that you are when you live it. The lived experience is utterly different. And so, you know, our boy was dead and I use that word because I can’t bear lost. I struggle with [00:04:00] it. You know, I think of little children looking on the tops of wardrobes and looking behind cupboards, trying to find people and I suppose a deep level.

I just, I forced myself, we forced ourselves from the very word go to step up to this, what I can only call nightmare scenario. And I remember Debbie in those early days, we just huddled together. We sort of had to, we were like little animals. We huddled together. We didn’t know what to do and food appeared at the door and it disappeared and food appeared. I don’t even know if we ate it. 

And then we realized that we were going to have to plan a funeral and it’s like, back to front, wrong order of things. No parent, no parent ever wants to have to organize their child’s funeral. And it felt inconceivable. But being who we were, we gathered our friends around us, we gathered the kids, we carried on huddling, but we began to talk [00:05:00] about what it meant and that because Josh had died so far from home and we hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye, his funeral and celebration of life was going to have to be our ritual, our way of saying goodbye, to help us to actually begin our grieving process and to make it real. 

And I remember we’re all sitting around the kitchen table just in tatters and Jimmy said, I’m going to make his coffin. I’m going to make his coffin.

And I remember looking at him and saying, ‘Jimmy’, and then just thinking, yeah, well, yeah, and he gathered his friends around him and they made Josh’s coffin, a beautiful work of creativity. and therapeutic process. And I, I saw some photos, Jimmy took photos and his friends took photos of them building this coffin, and as they were doing this, they were listening to music, they were talking, they were [00:06:00] crying. 

It was actually all men funnily enough who did it, Jimmy’s men friends. And that was really important to see the men gathering together because so often, and Jimmy will testify to this, he’s always saying it’s so lonely being a dad, a bereaved man, but somehow in the doing of making this coffin, it gave people a focus and it got over the terrible terror that we all have of what grief is really about and it gave people permission to be alongside Jimmy without thinking ‘I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to do’. They were already doing and they were already creating.

And as you probably know, you know, everything we’ve done in the, in the 13 years since our son died has been about just that. And I didn’t realize at the time, but that was the beginning of, in a way, our active and creative and intentional relationship with grief that’s probably saved our lives and put us back onto some kind of even keel.

[00:07:00] But let me just say – in the beginning, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re trying to survive, you want to keep going, part of you doesn’t want to keep going, part of you wants to be dead too, and that is normal, it’s okay as long as you talk about that, but in those early stages, I think we just knew that we had to do what we’d always done, and me and Jimmy met at film school, we’d always been active, the kids are active, we thought, well, we’ll just have to do what we know how to do. 

Well, that’s really beautifully told, Jane.

Thank you. 

I think you’re right. Dads being able to do something together is a wonderful thing. Talking in the doing, so that you’re not always just sitting around and wondering what to say. I think that was a wonderful thing that, that Jimmy did. 

Jane, can you tell us a bit about any support that you received at that time?

Yes, yes. Well, you know, in the early stages, um, in the, in fact in the first year after Josh died, I actually contacted the amazing peer-to-peer support group, the [00:08:00] Compassionate Friends, and decided to go on one of their retreats. And I remember when I arrived, the first thing somebody said to me was, who are you here to remember? And I remember thinking, ‘wow, that’s the first time somebody’s asked me to say my son’s name’ and I said, I’m here to remember Josh and I suddenly felt this sense of huge relief and it led to me becoming really involved with Compassionate Friends for quite a few years. 

I became a trustee and before the first year was out, myself and Jimmy had made a film for the Compassionate Friends called Say Their Name – and the clues in the title of the film, and if you ask any bereaved parent, that’s all they want you to do, ask them the name of their child, who they’re missing. 

And I can really recommend their helpline to anyone who’s looking for support and feels very alone. It’s a great, fantastic charity. 

And from there then, how did the Good Grief Project evolve? [00:09:00] 

Once we were into the second year and the funeral was over, everyone went back to their lives and we kind of, they kind of thought we would too. People would say, ‘you seem your old self, you’re back to how you were’, and I didn’t know how to say to them, ‘please don’t say that, I’ll never be my old self, I’m happier to be my new self’. 

It wasn’t possible, you have to be kind of careful how you express yourself, because it’s really, you lose a lot of friends when you’re bereaved. Well, let’s say your address book changes. 

But we kind of knew that we were going to have to do something to get away. And it was something about breaking the silence that we were experiencing and the isolation. So, we decided to go on a road trip and we decided to go to America, which was the last place we’d been with Josh.

The year before he died, we’d had Christmas together in New York with Josh and we’d done a house swap. And it was incredible. Our whole family, Joe and Rosa and Josh and me and Jimmy, we spent Christmas and New Year in New York and we had the best time ever. [00:10:00] 

So we thought, why don’t we go back? To America, do a road trip and interview bereaved parents and siblings. We need to find other people who can talk to us and it seems just so lonely being in the place we’re in now. And so we planned what I guess on hindsight was a crazy plan. To travel from one side of America to the other, from New York to San Francisco, interviewing bereaved parents, and we put out a call, and we had so many people replying and wanting to take part, which I guess on hindsight as well isn’t surprising, because everyone we came across just was desperate to talk about their child, and wanted permission, and they trusted us.

So we had to narrow it down. We narrowed it down and we planned the road trip. And on that road trip, it was very therapeutic for us. It was unbelievably hard work though. But we decided it was to make a film. And that film, um, was called A Love That Never Dies. And the clue’s in the title of the film, you know, already we [00:11:00] were getting a sense that this love is so powerful.

But we didn’t know how we were going to hang on to our relationship with Josh at that point. We didn’t know what we know now. And that road trip and the making of that film was the beginning of our thinking about ‘how can we find a way to help other people who are experiencing this same level of absolute abject isolation and loneliness? How can we find a way to express grief in a more comfortable language? It’s not okay that people, on top of losing their child or sibling, feel this dreadful sense of having to self censor and self, you know, silence themselves in a conversation. And we thought, well, it’s got to be about language. And for us, language is about film and photography.

So the making of that film took us a long, long time. We travelled across America, we filmed, we came back, and the editing took a year, and then we [00:12:00] released the film. People were saying, well, look, to be honest, who’s going to want to come and see a film like that? 

We launched our film in the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, and it sold out. I mean, unbelievable in the West End, you know, It was crazy. Um, it was a lot of hard work to promote it. We got so much support from people like us who just felt like there’s got to be a connection. There is a connection. We all know about the wonderful peer to peer support that’s out there, but how do you access it?

And that film then went on tour, we toured the country. We took part in Q and A’s and interviews on the radio. I was on Woman’s Hour. It was really hard, but it was incredibly therapeutic and the feedback was ‘keep doing it, Jane and Jimmy, keep doing it because you’re helping others’. And we thought, well, much as we want to run for the hills and much as we want to just lock ourselves away, this is probably better [00:13:00] to actually share our story rather than burying it.

But it’s never been easy and it’ll never be easy and every interview has a price, but that’s okay. Because the learning is so great, but the realization came, Debbie, that we needed to possibly find another structure, another format, and that was where the Good Grief Project came into being. We thought if we can maybe find a way of setting up a charity where we can offer people safe space to be creative and to be active and to feel they could take off their mask and be themselves, that would be great, a really constructive thing to do. 

So we got some funds, we’d had some funding from the Winston Churchill Fellowship for, to make the film. And we carried on looking at ways of funding this idea and the Good Grief Project charity was born. And it’s, it’s basically our way of offering bursaries for people to [00:14:00] attend a retreat. 

People who can afford it pay for it. In fact, people who can afford it often pay more to help people who can’t. But either way, everyone can have a place. on our retreats. Nobody’s excluded. Um, and those retreats are about people finding breathing space to take off their mask and just be together with other people who’ve gone through something similar, um, and to learn from each other’s lived experience and to find hope and meaning again. 

Yeah, I mean, I can hold my hand up here and say, you know, I’ve been on a retreat, and it gave me exactly that, the space to just be without judgment, without expectation. Everybody there understood exactly who I was in the context of being a bereaved parent, and I could be with people or not be with people, and it was fine as well. So it was a wonderful space, um, and I am forever grateful for that. 

But you’ll know Debbie how terrifying it was probably coming on that retreat and this is the thing it’s like the [00:15:00] grieving process it’s so terrifying you think you can’t do it and nearly every parent or sibling who comes on the retreat says ‘I can’t do this’. And yet it’s a bit like grief, you know when you’re when you’re in the early stages of your grief –  and you’ll know this from your own lived experience and tragic loss – you think in the beginning ‘no, no’, everything rails against it and yet, I don’t know how you feel, but I feel that grief is work. It’s hard, hard work. And we have choices. And I really understand if people don’t want to take the same choices I’ve taken. I really do. But on the other hand, I think I would have broken. I couldn’t have continued. without the sort of safe space, um, without that kind of opportunity, that peer to peer support.

So we were sort of giving it back in a way, but the fear is paralyzing. And I think there’s no point in saying to people, ‘Oh, it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be [00:16:00] okay’. Nobody knows it’s going to be okay. You have to live that. All we would do is say, there’s a space here. Just, just dip your toe in. You don’t have to do anything. Just try it out. Just see what you think. We’re here. We’re listening. We can’t fix it. It’s not for fixing. But we’re alongside you. Together. 

Absolutely. Will you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by active grief, because I know that’s a phrase you use quite a lot. So if you could just kind of explain that for listeners, that’d be great. Thank you, Jane. 

Yeah. And from the word go, I guess our grieving process was intentional and active as in we kind of knew that we needed to step up to it. We knew that we had a sense that if we didn’t embrace what was happening, we would become either ill physically or mentally. To bury your grief is understandable, but [00:17:00] actually, I know as a therapist, that burying grief brings up a lot of physical and psychological symptoms. It’s a bit like, you know, what are panic attacks? If you pack things away, they have a way of emerging through physical or psychological symptoms. And it’s a bit like a suitcase that’s so full up and you’re sitting on top of it, desperately trying to shut it, and all that’s happening is everything’s bursting out. So what you have to do is go into a room quietly, open the suitcase, and try and take out maybe the odd t shirt, the odd item, throw it away, put it to one side, then try and put the lid back on again. And keep coming back and forth. This is a process of, I suppose, acclimatization and adjustment.

And we realized that with the retreats, it was, it was, it was our way, our family’s way, because it’s [00:18:00] very much the, the uniqueness of our retreat is it’s run by Josh’s brother and sister and myself and Jimmy and a team of bereaved people, all of whom have experienced untimely loss. And it’s something about, modelling how families can survive because a lot of people who come on our retreats will say, ‘well, my mom won’t talk to me’ or ‘my dad won’t talk to me’ or ‘my partner can’t talk to me’ and they somehow whether, I don’t know, it’s something about seeing that despite the catastrophic impact that Josh’s death has had on our family, somehow we’ve managed to keep talking, somehow Josh’s brother and sister have been able to come on board and do what feels right to them to honour their brother. Um, and it’s very different. 

So Rosa is a film producer in London. She basically twice a year takes time out and she cooks for everyone who comes on the retreats and that is her very quiet and rather dignified way of honouring her brother. She’s not [00:19:00] very open, well she’s not as open but she doesn’t talk about her grief as much as we do and I’ve said to her in the past, ‘oh Rosa do you think we’re too open?’ and she says, ‘mum it’s a bit late for that now’. You know I think having lived with me and Jimmy I’m having experienced our level of openness, Joe and Rosa have been able to internalize a much more comfortable model of living their grief and actually.

They do things that just blow me away, things like, you know, on Josh’s birthday, they have gatherings, or on his deathday, they’ve organized walks that we’re invited to, and everyone gets together to remember Josh, and actually have a bit of a laugh too, which in the early stages you think will never happen, it’s impossible.

But the retreats then basically run twice a year, and they’re all about photography, creative writing, mindfulness, breathworks, nature, good food, nice [00:20:00] accommodation, um, being cared for safely, no pressure, but at the heart of it is this idea of active, intentional, conscious approach to creating something new, which I suppose we can sum up with the idea, you know, continuing bonds, which it’s a bit of an un, wieldy phrase, isn’t it? But it is actually what it says. 

It’s, it’s how do you continue the relationship with your person, your loved one, after they’ve gone. And the retreats are all about carrying that love, learning to carry that love more comfortably as you create new images, share experiences and remember how they lived rather than what happens in the initial stages after your child dies, when it’s all about how they died. Then creating these new memories together is what the retreats about and I think we now call it, you know, sort of we’re carriers of their unfinished stories. That’s how [00:21:00] we kind of like to describe it. 

You know, we want to honour Josh, people who come on the retreats want to honour their child and they worry they might forget. And of course, you can’t tell someone ‘you won’t forget’. You have to live it. So there’s so much experiential learning in the very safe hands of people who understand. 

Yeah, it’s a wonderful experience. And like you say, whatever trepidation you might have at the start is quickly melted away. You know, I think I walked in and just started crying straight away because it felt immediately that like, I can let go now. So, um, yeah, I would, I would highly recommend it. But then that’s, that’s me. I really enjoyed it. And I’m not one for going to groups, you know, I’m not a kind of group joiner, I find peer to peer groups quite intense and quite difficult. But because there was enough space to wander in and out of a room and just go and grab a cup of tea if things felt a bit overwhelming or, or just kind of stand outside and look at the beautiful scenery, that all made it much [00:22:00] more easy for me to be there and be with the grief and be with other people and dip in and out as I needed and so that was wonderful to me. 

That’s really good. I mean, one of the feedbacks that we had about the retreats was, you know, afterwards people would say, well, you know, we get amazing feedback, but people would always say we want more. And so we’d always signpost people to the wonderful Compassionate Friends as well, and to other groups and organisations. 

But what we decided as well was our recent development is to set up these online groups run by Josh’s brother Joe called Grief Fit. And basically, these sorts of things work really well because it gives people a sense of connection after the retreats are over. And it’s a sort of model of continuing that process, that bond with the people you’ve met on the retreat, so it kind of mirrors everything about what the retreats are about, but it’s a way of dealing with that sense of the retreat’s over now.

So as well as, you know, running the [00:23:00] retreats as well as the films that you made is also a book. Do you want to tell us a bit about that, Jane, please? 

Yes, the book, the book has been an incredible milestone. I mean, it’s, it’s our handbook. It’s a really strange thing, Debbie, because actually it took us 10 years to kind of write it. I mean, we didn’t spend 10 years writing it, but we produced it around the 10th year after Josh died.

And it’s 10 years, it’s sharing 10 years of our learning, actually. And it’s the stories of 13 other people who are all talking about their grief and their loss and how they’ve used creative and active ways of surviving. Um, so the book’s called When Words Are Not Enough, Creative Responses to Grief. Can I just read a little bit of it now? Would that be okay? 

That would be lovely. 

I was just thinking actually, there’s a little, there’s a little chapter in it called Continuing Bonds and it’s about choices, and I [00:24:00] think it kind of sums up what the book’s about and how we, we can actually find ways of being proactive, um, given the space. 

“We have choices when someone we love dies. We can bow to the pain of their loss and try to forget. We can tidy away their photos, their letters and drawings. Put them in the attic along with the shoes and socks and the clothes they once wore. We can file all the memories and stories that these represent in a box called archive and decide to move on.

Or we can honour those stories, bring them into the light of day, recount them again and again, embellish them if necessary, embedding them securely into the narrative of the lives we live now. For us, the cost of forgetting would be too hard to bear. We made Joshua, and we gave him life. We were his parents then, and we are [00:25:00] his parents now.

Our love has turned to grief, and to deny it would be to deny the reality of his and our existence. It is, in fact, an essential part of who we have become, of who we are now.”

I was right. That is lovely. 

And I think that, for me, sums up what the book’s about. You know, we didn’t know what to do. We wanted to create something that was helpful, but also creative. So it’s a photographic book. It’s our way. Photos, film, images. And it’s got a self-help section at the back, you know, what helps, what doesn’t help. But we wanted it to be a book that people could, people with grief brain – we’ve all, I think we know what that means, grief brain’s a thing, it’s real – Um, who could pick it up at any point in the book, in the middle, at the end, beginning, read a page, look at a picture, put it away. And, it does seem to have done that but I think for myself and [00:26:00] Jimmy, the book represents us drawing some kind of line under some elements of our grieving process. You know, I felt contained. Something about the book, and you’ll know about this yourself, there’s something about putting your deepest most important thoughts in one place.

It’s a bit like that suitcase, isn’t it? Sort it out. I mean, it’s terrible. It’s hard. I just, I take my hat off to people who write books and books. I don’t know how they do it. We’ve, this is our book. I don’t know that we’ll be writing many more books. I really don’t. But that book is the container of what we’ve learned from other people, and their wisdom and what we’ve learned ourselves. 

Yeah, and it’s a wonderful resource. Again, it’s a great book for precisely what you say, because it is something that I can pull off the shelf, I can read a little bit of, and I can put back. And I feel like I’ve got what I need that day. And that’s, that’s great because, as you mentioned earlier, grief comes in, in different [00:27:00] ways to you.

And sometimes you’ll just have a moment where you’re like completely overwhelmed, and you just need something instant. And that’s great because you pick the book off the shelf, feel like you’ve engaged with your grief, with someone else’s grief, with a story that resonates with you, and put it back and then carry on. And that can, that can deal with that moment. And that’s really, really helpful. 

Yes, yes. And all the participants in the book are using the same sort of ideas of continuing bonds through creativity. But there’s another book that you might have come across. It’s called The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O’Connor. And it’s actually about, it’s very, it’s a good book companion to our book because it’s talking about what actually happens in your brain. And, you know, there’s so much to learn about the grieving process, but that’s a whole other conversation. 

But, you know, it just illustrates the complexity of grief. We can’t be expected to get over this. We can’t expect it to become who we were again. We’re learning all the time in our own way and everyone does it differently, don’t they? 

Yes, and I think what you [00:28:00] said about the book drawing that line under a certain time, I think for me writing my own book acted as a repository for everything in that first year up to that point, and that allowed me to go, ‘well, that is there now, and now I can look at other ways to continue my bonds with Dan’. And here I am, producing a podcast. 

I think that’s so, so nicely put, Debbie. And the point is, it’s such a lovely way to honour your son, my son, our children. It’s a nice way to honour other people because I feel so much respect for bereaved parents and siblings.

I mean, unless you’ve been through this, it’s you know, you can’t really describe what it’s like, and you don’t really want people to understand it. You want people to respect it, you want people to have the courage to get alongside, but you don’t want people to live this. But we have no choice, and I’m constantly saying to people, because we also give talks to companies and [00:29:00] organisations and the police and other people, one of the most important things about helping bereaved people is to remember, you can’t fix it, and the other thing is, to know that you have to get comfortable with your own discomfort.

And until you’re comfortable with your own discomfort, you can’t really help anyone, and if people who aren’t bereaved say to me, or aren’t bereaved of a child, because most people are bereaved of something, if they say to me, ‘how can I help?’ I’ll say, ‘why don’t you try to do some reading and research? You can do that. Why can’t you try to get more comfortable, maybe, with being with bereaved people? Why can’t you try sitting silently, listening’, rather than coming up with the awful, you know, not intentional, but awful cliches like, ‘well, maybe they’re in a better place’, you know, people put their foot in it all the time, or ‘everything happens for a reason’. I could reel off hundreds of things.

But, basically, people do that because they’re [00:30:00] panicking, they’re frightened, and I think they owe it to their loved ones to actually take on board the responsibility of doing some work. Don’t expect the bereaved people to do all the work. People do expect you to do all the work, but when you actually hand it back, you’re enabling people to go away and actually do something constructive.

And I think that’s a choice. People can either step up to really supporting bereaved people or not. 

Yeah, that’s very true. And it leads me actually to ask about any general words of advice and support that you might have for listeners who are wanting to do something right now, something active to honour their loved one?

Well, there’s so many things that you can do, but I think what I’d say to bereaved people is creating rituals really helps, you know, it’s not some airy fairy thing, a ritual can be the simplest thing in the world, but for us, rituals were amazing, I mean, not long after Josh died, his friends set up something called Postcards to Josh, [00:31:00] and wherever they were travelling in the world, they sent him a postcard.

Back then, it was a proper postcard that came through, and we have hundreds of postcards, all sent to Josh, and they’re written in the present tense. And they came from all over the world. And that was really comforting, not just for us, but for his friends, who were also trying to make his death real. The funeral was the, the celebration of his life was a ritual.

It was all about people singing songs, writing poetry, performing, doing whatever they felt they could. And initially, they said they couldn’t, they wouldn’t, it would make them cry. And of course, we know that. That’s okay. And what was astonishing was how much people laughed. There was so much laughter. 

And there’s something about a ritual that gives you permission. For us planting a tree, having a toast at birthdays or at Christmas, you know, finding ways of modelling that, particularly where maybe the grief isn’t comfortably expressed, you know, somebody has to take [00:32:00] the lead and that’s difficult because everyone’s stepping on eggshells. This elephant has invaded our world and it’s plonked right in the middle of the living room and everyone’s wandering around it, tripping over. Somebody’s got to say, ‘look, I’m thinking of Josh right now. You know, he’s just not in the room. I’m thinking of Dan right now. He’s just not here. Let’s raise a glass’.

It’s okay. If anyone cries, it’s okay. You’re not making me cry. I was going to cry anyway, it’s just that you know, it’s nice to remember. It’s lovely to hear his name or her name. So, rituals are good. 

I think also remembering that there’s no right or wrong way. It’s like the stages of grief. You know, they’re really helpful, but if you apply them in linear narrative way, it’s not helpful.

Find your own comfortable model. Do not let people tell you how to grieve. I suppose do not find yourself feeling inadequate or not grieving well enough. The number of people who say to me, my clients, ‘Oh, it’s been six months [00:33:00] and I’m not feeling better’. It’s like six months? ‘It’s been two years and I’m not over it.’ What?! 

People are so vulnerable to the pressure from other people. I think you need to choose who you surround yourself with. And you don’t know that when you’re newly bereaved, you’ll take anything that comes your way, but often it’s not necessarily helpful. So, make choices. If you need to stay home, stay home. If you need help or if you’re feeling suicidal, find the right support. Do not ever suffer in silence. It’s really important because, you know, the pain is, is, is beyond words. It really is. Um, there’s so many things you can do. And what I’d say to people who want to support their friends is do the work, read the books, find out how to listen, find out how to manage your discomfort.

If you want to help your friend or [00:34:00] person who’s grieving for a son or daughter or brother or sister, don’t expect them to tell you how to help. Go away and do the research, listen to podcasts like yours, read the books. My goodness, there’s a lot of books out there. Speak to people, ask, say, ‘I want to help, but I don’t know how to help. I really do want to help. I’m gonna, I’m gonna step up to this.’ There’s so much you can do. There’s so much. 

We kind of, alluded then to our own rituals, um, to the idea of Christmas and I know that this episode is going to be going out in December, so it might be a little opportunity just to talk about Christmas, um, and so for those of you who are listening in July for next year, you can skip this bit if you want to, but, um, I think it’s quite nice for us to just have a little moment to just think about people who might be struggling, um, at Christmas.

I think Christmas is really hard. I think any kind of, you know, special day, [00:35:00] you know, birthdays, death days, Christmas. For me, it’s my birthday, oddly, that’s the worst. But Christmas is hard, especially the first Christmas. My, my brother died this year and it’s going to be my first Christmas without him. And it’s not about how often you see the person, it’s not, it’s not about the actual relationship you had with him. It’s about how do you honour the fact that they’re not here. So, what I will be doing this Christmas and what we do every Christmas is we raise a glass to our absent friends and to Josh. And we do it and we remember what they liked, and we have a bit of a laugh if we can because they’re still with us.

And I think it’s once again trying to avoid the elephant in the room at Christmas, you know, it’s so hard, it’s unimaginable. The first Christmas, we just didn’t function. The very first Christmas, that’s okay too. Some people just want to go away, they can’t bear to be at home. It’s whatever feels right to you but try really hard not to feel the pressure to be what people, who people want [00:36:00] you to be.

You need to honour your values, your mental health, and it’s unbearable. You know, I remember the first Christmas is trying to go and do some Christmas shopping and going into shops and hearing that music, which I hate anyway, I’ve always hated that Christmas music. It does my head in. But when you’re grieving, it’s like unbearable.

But don’t go in those shops. You don’t have to. And this is really important. The first Christmas after Josh died, we got Christmas cards from people who didn’t mention him. I would suggest just writing the card and remembering Josh or thinking of you this Christmas. On birthdays, don’t put happy birthday, It’s not happy. The first birthdays are not happy. Try to just imagine. I know it’s counterintuitive but try just to imagine what it’d be like if you were in the shoes of that person. 

So, and we had a really bad experience the first Christmas. Somebody had written to [00:37:00] Jane, Jimmy, Josh, Joe and Rosa and scored Josh out. I could laugh about it now, but I remember when I opened the card, I kind of looked at it. And I looked again, and of course what I did was, like, I tore it into hundreds of pieces. I think I probably shrieked. But that person didn’t mean, I guess, to offend. It’s, like, fear driven. It’s defensive, it’s fear driven. It’s not okay, is it? 

No, it’s not. It’s like they’re trying to erase Josh. 

Yeah, so, so, that’s right, at Christmas time, and of course that wasn’t their intention, but for me it was so destructive, and I think Christmases and birthdays and deathdays, anniversaries, you know, just do what feels right for you. 

Try to avoid being pressurised into doing things that you know aren’t gonna work. Just say, do you know, I’m just feeling too vulnerable. I’m just feeling too, I might just have to leave. I remember in the early years, me and Jimmy often left events early, or didn’t go, and people would get offended. For goodness sake, [00:38:00] just come round.

You know, I know this isn’t quite in response to what you just asked me, but grief can be angry and ugly and messy, and I did lose quite a few friends in those first few years. I made a lot of really good new ones, but I was badly behaved at times. It’s okay. Forgive those people who are badly behaved, for goodness sake. Their world has been fragmented and Christmas time can be a place when, a time and place when everything just crumbles. 

I think it’s very amplified, um, emotionally, that at that time of year there’s a huge weight of expectation to be jolly. And, um, jolly is often the last thing that you’ll be feeling. I really like that idea of carving out a little moment to honour that person, out loud. I think that can be a release in a day when you might be feeling or at times when you might be feeling sort of pressure to contain around others, actually actively speaking and carving out that little moment to let everybody have that [00:39:00] moment, which might involve laughter then or tears or whatever.

I like your use of the word carving because actually you could do a carving, you could make a spoon, you could do a painting, you could paint a pebble, anything. You know, a lot of people might find themselves knitting, anything to sort of avoid eye contact, walking side by side rather than having to have intense interaction. Whatever works for you is okay, but I think don’t bow to the pressure. 

So, let’s have a think about what’s going on with the Good Grief Project now and for the future. So, Jane, where are things up to and where are you off to next? 

Well, the Good Grief Project, we’re developing the Active Grief program and that’s working really well. Joe is running those and getting a lot of people signing up and we’re supporting that. The charity is supporting that. We need to continue to raise funds so we’re always asking people to support the charity. Um, but basically the charity is in a good place and we’re just looking to kind of continue to [00:40:00] offer that support.

We’re running two retreats a year. They’re always fully booked and they’re in May and September. We’re trying to promote the book because all the proceeds from the book goes back into the charity too. And we’re doing a walk in July, which is the Three Peaks Challenge to raise funds for the charity. And we’re asking people, it has to be bereaved parents or siblings to sign up for that.

Last year, Jimmy climbed Kilimanjaro with Joe. They did that together, and that was no mean feat. That raised a lot of funds, but we’re constantly having to balance raising funds with running the charity. And we’re a very small charity with a massive reach. We have no overheads, because people are not salaried, we all volunteer our time, and basically everything that we make out of our books and films goes back in too. running the charity and offering people the support that we offer them. 

So, it’s kind of more of the same. We carry on doing talks for companies and the payment for [00:41:00] that, a percentage of that goes back into the charity as well.

Um, raising awareness around language and uses language, networking with other organizations and working with other people to share our story and learn from other people. It’s a two-way thing, isn’t it? It’s a constant dialogue and interaction and learning process. 

So where can people see the films these days and where can people buy the book?

Yeah, so basically the, the website, The Good Grief Project is www.thegoodgriefproject.co.uk. The books and films are all listed on the website. The film, A Love That Never Dies is available on Amazon Prime, and our other films are, some of them are freely available via the website, and our book is available from your local bookshop, preferably, and from the biggie publisher, too, Amazon, and there’s a Kindle.

It’s also available now worldwide in the [00:42:00] States, um, well, it’s available everywhere. And any problems with getting hold of it? You know, our publisher is fantastic, proactive, offers discount to people who buy directly through them. That’s Quickthorn Books. And we send out newsletters quarterly to people. We’ve got about 3,000 people who receive our newsletter. And we have a really good interaction with, with people. We look to share their stories and our, our content, learning, um, you know, in an ongoing way. 

Thank you. Jane, if you listen to any of our podcasts, you will know that at the end, we, we ask people to just kind of bring a bit of light back into the room by, by thinking about our thing that we’re grateful for. And so Jane, today, can I ask you what you’re grateful for? 

Goodness, you know, it’s really funny because I kind of pushed that to the back of my mind and I hadn’t thought about it. I think, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, the thing I’m grateful for probably is that, odd as it sounds, Josh has taught me how to live in the moment and be adventurous when actually [00:43:00] the trauma that comes with the death of your child or sibling can paralyze you in the early stages and I find that through all the work that we’ve done as a family and with other people and through therapy that I’ve reached a point where what Josh has taught me is ‘Be in the moment’. If you want to do something, do it, because frankly, and with the experience of the death of my brother this year, too, you know, it’s like seizing the moment, seizing the day, if you can. And I feel like Josh has taught me how to do that, and I’m so grateful for that. Yes, it was 22 years, but it could have been less. I just wish it had been more. Nothing, nothing will ever make that okay, but he’s taught me how to live. 

And as Jimmy says, Jimmy says he’s taught him how to die. It’s complex thought that, but actually, Josh has taught us so much and Jimmy as his dad and Joe as his brother and Rosa his sister, our [00:44:00] family have come together and Joe, not long after Josh died, fell in love with Josh’s best friend.

And that is a learning curve because they now have two children who are our grandchildren and they talk about Uncle Josh. They never met him, but the little one says, ‘Uma, I miss Uncle Josh’ and I know she never met him, but she knows him. And why does she know him, Debbie? Because we talk about him and Joe and Holly, Josh’s pal, who Joe married, they have a Mexican family ritual, um, Los Muertos Ritual, every year they celebrate his birthday and his death day and it’s fun and they do drawings and, and, and Martha and Elsie talk about their uncle Josh. Josh taught us how to do that. My goodness, you know, if, if, if he hadn’t died, I would, and if I was listening to this, I’d be thinking, what?

But as bereaved people know, it takes you out of your [00:45:00] comfort zone, you find ways of surviving, and survival is all about love, because Josh’s death, we love him so much, our love has grown, it hasn’t diminished, you never forget, you always find ways to remember, but it takes time and hard work, and it’s okay to falter on the way and have moments when you can’t do the process, when you can’t do it, but for me, it’s about recognizing that in the limited time I have available to me, you know, none of us know what’s going to happen next. Try to manage your fears and anxieties in a way that make, I suppose, the quality of your life okay enough, if you can. You never stop missing them. You never stop loving them. That pain is always there. Fact. But it’s okay. He’s taught me it’s okay. 

Oh, isn’t that amazing? I often find that Dan is spurring me on and that his energy helps me to seize the day. 

That’s, uh, you’re an inspiration because, [00:46:00] you know, I’m aware, if I’m correct, he’s your only child. And I know what that means from listening to other people who’ve lost their only child or who have no surviving children. And I absolutely want to flag up what that means and how hard that is and the respect I have for you and what you’re doing is huge and immeasurable because the courage it takes, you know, to do this is enormous. None of it’s easy. So I salute you, Debbie and Dan and Josh and everyone whose child has died in an untimely way – well, it is always untimely. It’s always back to front in the wrong order and just keep on going. Tiny steps, whatever works for you. And thank you for inviting me to talk to you. It’s been an honour. 

It’s been an absolute pleasure, Jane. Thank you so much for coming along today and doing this because I think anyone [00:47:00] listening will be able to find something, if not lots of things, that they can think, ‘oh, well, that might work for me’ or, ‘oh, I need to find out a bit more about that’. So, as you mentioned, we’ll put all the links to everything that we’ve referenced on the episode listing and on our web page so that people can find what they need quite quickly and find out about the Good Grief Project and hopefully get their names down on a waiting list for a retreat. 

Absolutely. Yeah. Please do encourage people and tell them not to be anxious about, you know, whatever their financial situation is. We, we continue to raise funds to support people. 

Thank you, Jane. 

That was my chat with Jane Harris from the Good Grief Project. 

If you’re having a tough day today and need to speak with someone who will lend a friendly and supportive ear, you can call the Compassionate Friends on 0345 123 2304 every day of the year between 10am and [00:48:00] 4pm and 7pm and 10pm.

You can also call the Child Death Helpline on 0800 282 986, Monday to Friday between 10 and 1, and Monday to Sunday between 7 and 10 p. m. Or you can visit our website for details of other helplines and support agencies. 

This episode is dedicated to Josh.