It’s not been absolutely confirmed yet but the Ministry of Sound are offering a four week placement for a final year student from the Media departments of Gloucestershire colleges. Â This is something that Jane has been trying to set up for sometime and has now brought the MOS together with Andy Freeman from Cirencester College. Â As many of you may know, Joshua spent the last two years of school at Cirencester College before moving to London where he began work for the ‘Ministry’. Â So we’re absolutely thrilled to see this collaboration come off. Â It’s still very early days, and we don’t know if the student will be selected, or enter a competition, but the scheme will run annually and hopefully involve colleges and music departments throughout Gloucestershire.
If you have any thoughts about which institutions might like to take part please let Jane know via the comments section below.
We also need to come up with a title for the scheme – any ideas ditto!
Part of me still can’t believe that I’m writing this but our film of Josh’s funeral has found some new audiences.   In the coming months we have been invited to show ‘BEYOND GOODBYE’ at The Compassionate Friends Annual gathering (that’s on 8th September) and at the Dying Matters “Day of the Dead” event in November.    The Compassionate Friends is a support network for bereaved parents and siblings and Dying Matters is a coalition of all sorts of people connected with end of life care.    Each screening will be followed by a discussion.
Are we nervous? Â Yes. Â Are we pleased? Â Â Kind of. Â Does it matter? Â Guess so. Â Â But two years ago who could have thought that we would be showing a film about our son’s funeral to audiences like this. Â I am sure we will be received with kindness but my stomach sinks when time and again I have to rethink that terrible day we heard the news that Josh had been killed. Â Â Â For many a journey through grief is essentially a private matter but from the moment Josh died we have needed to reach out to friends and family for support. Â Â Documenting his funeral for what many have found a very moving film, was part of this process. Â Josh’s sister Rosa remarked “Josh wasn’t just ours”. Â Â How right she was and we have found real solace in getting to know so many of Josh’s friends both from his life in Gloucestershire as well as in London.
But to take this openness to another level that includes a wider public provokes some pretty weird feelings.   Yes, it is gratifying to be asked to show our film but the idea of sharing our grief on such a public stage is a complex one. On the one hand we  want to share Josh and to share the burden of our grief.  But part of me also wants to keep my relationship with him private lest my memories and all my thoughts about him now become somehow adulterated.   Both Jane (Josh’s mum) and I also have a nagging doubt that going public is a kind of diversion from grief proper (whatever that is), or at least a distraction from the pain of our loss. I know that when we attend these events, many will admire the strength and courage we show, but obviously that’s a bit of a mask, and the actual chaos of our mourning lives will be carefully hidden (or at least held in check) by the civilised practicalities of putting on a good show.
But we have been changed by Josh’s death. Â For good or for bad we are who we are now and I’m glad we have been able to open up like this because the rewards have been many.
Now comes the news that we have also been nominated for the Good Funeral Guide annual awards (a kind of Baftas for the death industry) to be held in Bournemouth later this month. Â Â Â This is for the “Most Significant Contribution to the Understanding of Death in the Media” …. Â that might sit nicely alongside my real Bafta, but oh, how I wish our skills had not been called upon in this way.
I’m afraid the Compassionate Friends event is for members only  but if you’d like to attend any of the others here are the details –
The Dying Matters – CELEBRATING THE DAY OF THE DAY – event is on 1st November at  Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1 7HU (near Euston Station).    The full programme is not published yet  but you can keep up to speed by visiting their website here DYING MATTERS .
The Good Funeral Guides Annual Awards is part of THE JOY OF DEATH FESTIVAL to be held in Bournemouth from 7th to 9th September – that’s next weekend so if you want to attend you better get your skates on.  Here’s the link for tickets GOOD FUNERAL GUIDE ANNUAL AWARDS at THE JOY OF DEATH FESTIVAL
Joe will be representing the family at Bournmouth.
Joe and Josh - New Years Day 2009 - just before plunging into the sea at Coney Island New York
Ok, a ‘tri’ is a Triathlon and ‘TCF’ is The Compassionate Friends…  and on 23rd September Josh’s brother Joe is competing in the Brighton Tri and hoping to raise £500 for TCF.
This is actually big news because Joe is a truly sporty fellow, loves a challenge, loves to compete, and loves to raise money for charity. Â Â But much of this endeavour has been sadly lacking in his life over the past year and a half, and his plunge into Brighton Marina will be the first such sporty/fundy thingy he will have taken part in since Josh died.
So in memory of his brother, we wish Joe every success in his day out to the south coast. Â Â We hope the weather is fine, the sea is calm (and warm) and that the hills around Brighton flatten out a bit. Â Â Â But most of all we hope Joe reaches his stated goal of finishing in the top ten.
And you too can share in his glory by cheering him on his way and supporting him in his (actually far more difficult task) of collecting that 500 quid. Â Â Â Please go the Just Giving page by clicking here and donating whatever you can. Â Thank you so much. Â As that well known east end grocer once said “every little helps.”
The Compassionate Friends is primarily a support group for bereaved parents but the money Joe raises will go towards developing its work with siblings who have lost a brother or sister. Â Â Â This is a new development for TCF and is very much needed. Â Â Â For more info about TCF click here.
6 days to go and two of Josh’s best friends are going to get married.
So what so special about that?
Get out of here … Â you can’t be serious!
Mr Thomas Cockshot and Ms Becca Hyde go back a long way with our Josh – like they were all at school together and Westley Farm where Tom lives has always been a favorite haunt of all (and more) of the Chalford crew. Â Â And the said Cockshot and Hyde are getting married next Saturday – where?
– at Westley Farm of course (actually I understand that they are already spliced and this is a damn good excuse for a party!)
– and what is also really special is that Tom and Becca have specifically invited and made a space for Josh and for us his family – and that the whole thing will take place in the field below Josh’s Tree which we think is really wonderful.
A lot of Josh’s friends are going to be there so its going to be a big moment for us and for them.
But the biggest moment will be for Tom and for Becca and all our thoughts are going to be with them on this special day – we wish you all the happiness in the world and lots of luck on your adventures together (off to California – or is it British Columbia – somewhere west coast with lots of trees!)Â Have a wonderful day and thank you so much for inviting us.
Oh I nearly forgot – Tom and Becca are going against convention and have forfeited the age old practice of conferring the husband’s name to the bride – all very modern – yeh but they’ve changed both their names to…. wait for it …. Westley! Â Â hmmm … all the best Mr and Mrs Westley. Â xxxx
And if that’s not modern enough here’s link to their wedding site where you can find out more about the day and donate to their special travel fund – gwan you know you want to….. Â tom and becca wedding
When they hear the words “radio four” and “play” all in the same breathe, many people seem to recoil with the speed and determination that even Mo Farrar would envy. Â Â That’s unfortunate because they then miss many gems amongst which is a quite remarkable story that was broadcast last month. Â Â Although a regular radio 4 listener, I actually missed the transmission and was only alerted to it by a member of The Compassionate Friends, a support group for bereaved parents. Â Â Â I don’t know how I would have reacted to FOUR TREES DOWN FROM PONTE SISTO, if I had heard it before Josh’s death, but I like to think I would have been equally moved by what I now consider to be one of the best shows on radio … ever! Â Â Â Â Here’s what the BBC blurb has to say about it –
“Twenty five years ago in Rome, an American student named Geoffrey Charde fell to his death from a wall above the river Tiber, late at night and with no witnesses, four trees down from Ponte Sisto. Since then, his mother, the poet Sharon Charde has been writing her way through all the dimensions of her son’s death; writing her way back to life through a series of poems that combine her fearless examination of specific details and events with deep philosophical insights into the close proximity of death within every aspect of life.”
Jane and I listened to the play on the way back from Scotland recently. Â Â Potentially a distressing and painful experience, it was perhaps a slightly dangerous thing to do while driving one of Britains busiest motorways. Â Â But we both actually found it quite comforting to hear bereavement dramatised in a way that seem to mirror so accurately much of what we have been going through since Josh died. Â Â Hopefully you will find it as life enhancing as we have, though to have a box of tissues nearby wouldn’t go amiss … and do give yourself time – the play is 58 minutes.
FOUR TREES is no longer available from the BBC as a download but you can listen to it here (hope we’re not infringing copyright or anything) – unfortunately because of file sizes we’ve had to split it into two parts
Originally broadcast on 29th June 2012,  FOUR TREES DOWN FROM PONTE SISTO was  adapted and composed for radio by Gregory Whitehead.   Performed by Anne Undeland.  Producer Jeremy Mortimer.
The Gale Family have been a fantastic support for us since Josh died. Â Â Holly was one of Josh’s best friends and Rosie is his sister Rosa’s best friend. Â Â Â Claire is their mother who has written these words which Hollie read out at the time of the tree planting
Rosie Gale scatters some of Josh's ashes
This tree is planted in memory of you,
All you are, all you knew.
Every  leaf a person who loves you so much,
Memories rich, lives you have touched.
Every  branch an offer of support and hope,
As the days go by and we try to cope.
The  trunk is the strength that will help us stand,
Josh’s death has inevitably resurrected memories of past losses, of other tragedies, of other deaths.  As part of remembering and honouring Josh I also want to remember them.  Over the past few days I have been giving quite a lot of thought to two friends in particular.  Gillian Burnett was a girlfriend of mine who died in 1971, and Bob Trattles, a very good friend from my London days, who was killed in an airplane crash in 1983.  I was still very young at the time of these deaths and I have begun to realize that given the circumstances of the time, I was not able to mourn them in ways that enabled me to fully accept my loss.  In many ways I don’t think I was emotionally equipped to handle the pain, neither did I have the support network to help me recognize some very confused and conflicting feelings that grief inevitably provokes.  So what did I do?  I hid the pain, repressed my feelings, tried to be strong, and focused on getting on with the rest of my life.   But both Gillian and Bob have always stayed with me, although nearly all of our friends from that time have not.   I can’t really remember how it came about that I should lose contact with most of the families and friends who also knew them, but I’m pretty sure that the difficult emotions we would all have been experiencing must have played their part.
This image of Gillian is a reworking of a photograph I took on a trip to the highlands of Scotland.  She was a darkroom assistant for two well known photographers and we shared an interest in the dark art.  I loved the calm way she engaged with her photography – it seemed to come so naturally.  Her talent had not fully developed but her ability to capture a scene unselfconsciously was already apparent.  And in one of her employers she had an excellent tutor, Philip Jones Griffiths.  At the time Philip was working in South East Asia and one of Gillian’s duties was to prepare his photos for publication.  I remember visiting the house in West London, with its darkroom on the top floor, where she was responsible for duplicating his original negatives.  At the time I had no idea how much skill went into finding the right colour balance, the most effective shading for a photograph’s emotional impact, when to crop when not to.  For Gillian this was becoming second nature, for me these were my first lessons in the power of photographs to tell stories.  And what lessons they were.  The images Gillian was working on would become Philips seminal book – Vietnam Inc. which, with its graphic black and white depictions of the effect of war on the civilian population were first to clearly show the mismatch of American soldiers in a place they didn’t belong.  Vietnam Inc. is now credited for having a major influence on how Americans viewed their war in SE Asia.
What I remember of those days though, were feelings of intense envy as Gillian left each morning to go to work, knowing that she was somehow closer to things that really mattered.   We were both curious about the ways of the world and started planning a journey to circumnavigate the shores of the Mediteranean Sea.  This would be our first big adventure together and like Josh the prospect of a million discoveries overtook any anxieties we might have had.  We had traveled as far as Mostar (now in Bosnia, then in the former Yugoslavia) when the accident happened.  The car we had hitched a ride in was hit by another, ran off then road and fell into a deep and fast flowing river.  Gillian could not swim.  She died.  I survived.  The year was 1971, we were both 21, a year younger than Josh when he met his death.  We had begun our trip in Norway where we had been working on stone age archeological sites.  Our friend, Bob was also there, in fact he had found us the jobs.  When I returned to London after the accident, I found it  difficult to fit back into our friendship group.  At that age things move on quickly, new friends are formed, old ones easily lost, but in any case talk of death and bereavement is not high on people’s chat list.  Bob was slightly older than the rest of us and understood things better and so within weeks I had flown back to Norway to rejoin him on the digs.  We began planning another ‘world tour’, working and saving hard to buy the Land Rover that would take us round the globe – and barely a year after Gillian had died I was off again – first stop North Africa.
Bob became my closest and best friend – he had known Gillian well and understood better than anyone else I knew what it meant to lose someone close, but I wonder now how much of our desire to travel was a need to journey away from pain. Â Â But the extraordinary daily and hourly revelations that overland travel can bring, especially on a continent that was more foreign than foreign, soon rendered memories of my life with Gillian, and the horrors of her death, to a more obscure and more forgetable part of my soul. Â Â The world trip didn’t quite come off and for reasons I don’t need to go into, we returned to London, I to start work as a bus driver, Bob as a town planner. Â We both ‘settled down’, found partners had children, Joe was born, we both discovered we weren’t in the right relationships, found new loves – continued to holiday together – and then in November 1983 Bob was on a flight to South America with his Chilean girlfriend Martha, when the plane crashed on its stopover in Madrid. Â Â Of the 200 people on board only 11survived. Â Martha and her young son Diego were lucky, Bob was not.
How to remember these two friends now. Â Â Their deaths were so long ago and I have few around me now who knew them well enough to keep their memory alive. Â Gillian, quiet and unassuming, was my first real love and perhaps unfortunately for her, is forever trapped in that romantic dream of a relationship that could only develop and blossom as we explored the world together. Â Â But who knows how long we would actually have stayed together.
Bob was a kind of older brother to me.  A Yorkshire man from a small village near Redcar where his Dad worked in the steel mills, he was the first of his generation to attend university.  Bob introduced me to working class politics – I admired his empathy with the socially deprived and his commitment to fighting injustice.  Together we joined the Revolutionary Marxist Leninist League, one of the many far left fringe groups active in the mid seventies.  Our cause was the overthrow of imperialism, our God was Chairman Mao who had led the Chinese in a utopian vision of a liberated mankind.  Our moment was to show solidarity with the Vietnamese whose struggle had been so eloquently revealed in the book Gillian helped to produce.  Had she lived, would she have joined us?  I’m not sure she was the one to take sides, but I like to think that the world is poorer now for not having her photographs or her commentary on our political activism.
Joshua of course, knew little of this. Â It was years before he was born and like many today, he saw the idea of protest and demonstration a little, shall we say, pointless. Â Â But the country he was travelling in when he died, is now a free country, independent of foreign influence with one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Â Â Our chants of ‘Ho Ho – Ho Chi Minh, We shall fight and We shall win’ are now a distant echo but my friends Gillian Burnett and Bob Trattles helped me discover how exhilarating it is to be part of progressive movements and I am still very jealous of Joshua that he got to go to Vietnam before I have.
Josh died on the Ho Chi Minh Highway;  Bob died as he accompanied his partner on her way back to Chile; Gillian died before she had found her own direction. They all died too young but  I remember them all now as three of the most significant influences in my own life and I am so proud to have known them as well as I did.
Posts on Facebook get gobbled up so fast and speaking for myself,my attention span is not too long anyway,not to mention slow running computers and links that won’t open!,but that in no way detracts from the great love that exists for You and your large family of friends who suffered the loss of Joshua in his prime of life.I have watched “Beyond Goodbye” many times on my own and with selected friends.I was and my friends were always left speechless,with wet faces but strangely happy from the great love,sincerity and humour that comes across!I especially like the part where Jane,explains to us how there is so much to live for,just getting through each day in the best way possible,adding that life goes on,it’s just very different.I was also soothed by the part in Rosa’s dream section,where people share that in their dreams Joshua has consistantly,”communicated” that he is ok ,and not to worry!”I can easily imagine Joshua actually using these very words!I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your generosity and courage to include those of us who were not able to be around at that terrible time through this thought provoking and deeply loving tribute to Joshua.I would recommend anyone recently berieved to take a look at”Beyond Goodbye”
The drive to understand experience, and make sense of the world is as vital as the need to breathe – to eat.    And so it is that trying to understand and give meaning to life’s final moment is equally significant.   This may be a vain attempt to make sense of the inexplicable but for the moment the process of coming to terms with and accepting Josh’s death has inevitably raised the issue of our own mortality – the fear it holds, even the release it promises.    A year and some months on from this tragedy I am beginning to feel accustomed to my grief.   It’s not that life is any easier or that the pain of our loss is any less sharp.    It’s just that I know that pain better and my grief is not such a hostile companion.
What I am also beginning to understand is that we are at the start of a new journey with and without Josh.    And for this I am deeply grateful to our friend Fiona Rodman, a psychotherapist and very wise woman.  The following is an attempt to synthesize some of her ideas as contained in her recent thesis – “Mourning and Transformation – Sifting for Gold.â€Â (MA University of Middlesex)
Sifting for Gold
After I had read Fiona’s thesis for the first time, I had a real sense of a burden lessened; that the grief I had felt for Josh was less complicated and more natural than I had previously supposed it to be.     Here was an account of the mourning process, told not just from a theoretical perspective, but illuminated with the real insight from her own personal experience.   Fiona’s mother died at an early age, she endured the break up of a long marriage, and witnessed her father lose his own battle to dementia.       Her journey – her different journeys of coming to terms with these deaths inform her conclusions of what it means to mourn.
To a certain extent I think I have been caught up with what I thought society had expected of me in dealing with Josh’s death… how to behave, what to say, what to feel.   How could it be otherwise.  Even in this modern age with its fast changing moral and ethical codes, we are so influenced by long standing attitudes to death and its aftermath, that it seems the only the right thing to do is to rely on the consensus and on traditional ideas when we are trying to find a way forward on the journey through grief.    In her essay Fiona, explores the connections and the tensions between personal emotions and public expectations.   What I’d like to do here is to try to extract from this necessarily lengthy and rigorously academic piece of work, some of her basic ideas that have helped me understand a little more some of the thoughts and feelings we have all been experiencing since Josh died.
“Sifting for Gold†is concerned with the transformative power of grief.      Another’s death, particular someone who is close to us and some one we love, is always a life changing event.  This might seem so obvious, it shouldn’t need saying, but until Josh died I hadn’t fully understood how difficult it is for many people to accept this change.    Fear of our own mortality certainly kicks in; confronted with the fact of another’s death, or another person’s loss, our thoughts about the inevitability of our own death become so uncomfortable, they prevent us from truly seeing, or at least acknowledging another’s pain.       As a family, we have all experienced having to skirt round the issue of Joshua’s death, for the sake of not embarrassing a friend or an acquaintance.     Yes, its weird, but to hide one’s own feelings for the sake of another’s shame is, I have found, a common occurrence.       All too often, we hear that people just don’t know what to say, but this becomes understandable when you realise that it’s not just that another’s death is such an ominous reminder, but that the bereaved have indeed undergone a fundamental change.     How that change is managed (or not) is the subject of Fiona’s essay.
Her own mother passed away when Fiona was in her early twenties.   But, it wasn’t until many years later that she discovered that she had not properly mourned her mother’s death.   At the time she had felt dislocated and adrift and that there were deep constraints on sharing her feelings with her immediate family.  “We were closeâ€, she writes, “as if clinging on to a shipwreck together. We could not however, weep together, fall apart, sob and hold each other.â€Â    Her father although loving and loyal, belonged to a generation that had known many war deaths; they were the survivors who had been severely traumatized by the horrors of war but who had learnt to suppress open expression of grief.    “Laugh†he would say “and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry aloneâ€.   Fiona is only now aware of how this view had shaped her own emotional responses, leaving her feeling alone in a world where “the role of tears as communication is completely denied.â€
Picnic at Josh's tree - will we eventually have to 'forget' Josh?
The standard model of grieving in 20th century Britain relies heavily on the stoic – our way of doing things has been to keep a lid on our emotions, to be strong and to weep only in private, and to avoid any public display of frailty or despair.   And the advice is to put some kind of time frame on the business of processing loss and to find closure – after Josh died a close friend even counseled that to avoid becoming excessively morbid, we would eventually have to ‘forget’ Josh.     The idea is that sooner or later we must ‘move on’ in order to regain the composure and the equilibrium necessary to continue with the rest of our lives.   To do otherwise is to risk a pathological descent into melancholia and depression and the social exclusion that will inevitably follow.
Death of course is all around us – over 10,000 people die every day in the UK, yet for most of us contact with death is relatively rare and as individuals many us lack the experience as well as the social models to help us deal with grief and those that mourn.     And when death happens unexpectedly many of us are understandably but sadly ill equipped to handle the emotions that ensue.   “We don’t learn to mourn at our mother’s knee†observes Su Chard in our film ‘Beyond Goodbye’ (Su is the celebrant who conducted Josh’s funeral.)     Conflicting feelings of sadness, despair, confusion, anger and guilt, which I’m sure all who knew Josh, will be familiar, need to find expression.       But if the emotional climate of society is such that we show only those emotions deemed appropriate for the occasion then what will happen to the inner rage, the impulse to self-destruct, and high levels of anxiety, ambivalence or even the manic laughter that can overcome us from time to time.  Not being able to mourn her mother Fiona writes of being exposed to terrible and “unlived emotional states.â€Â   Her experience of loss and separation were never really resolved but continued to provoke, “turbulent unintegrated long fingers of pain…that seemed to clamp my heart and block the flow of my beingâ€.
I was faced with a similar ‘block’ when aged 21 (a year younger than Josh) I too was involved in a road accident.   I was on holiday with my girlfriend in the former Yugoslavia, when the car we were traveling in was hit by another, ran off then road and fell into a deep and fast flowing river.   My girlfriend, Gillian could not swim.   She died.  I survived.      Totally unfamiliar with very unexpected feelings (particularly guilt and shame) and without the necessary understanding from friends or family, (and without professional help) I too now understand that I was unable to process my grief in a particularly healthy way.    Much of this really was the isolation that I experienced.   Returning to London, I felt shunned by many of my friends who had their own fears of how to behave, as well as my parents need to protect me from extremes of emotions.      This left me in a place where I felt completely disconnected both from my girlfriend Gillian, as well as from my environment.     At the time I would have seen this as distressing but acceptable, and my attempts to brave my way through it as honorable – the thing to do was to make the best out of a shit situation and to move on.     I had the rest of my life to get on with and to allow a tragedy such as this to mark me felt like failure.     But I had been marked and I had been changed.     And without the adequate means both personally and socially to express my feelings and with no acknowledgement of the importance of the grieving journey, I think I became quite introspective, learning how to cope on my own, actively avoiding close emotional involvement.   I lost contact with Gillian’s family and to a degree I lost my way in life.
But does surviving such untimely tragedies or even the anticipated death of a parent have to be such a lonely experience.     In retrospect Fiona identified a sense of an “arrested capacity to mourn†in the years following her mother’s death.     This led her to explore just what it is within the cultural and psychological life of our society that determines they way we grieve and how mourning has been understood by academics, writers as well as the bereaved themselves.     And going all the way back to Freud she discovers that, after a death, it is the way that we understand our sense of self in the world that plays a crucial role in our ability to regain the necessary psychological balance and the stability to continue living as functional human beings.  “Self†she posits, can be understood in two different ways – there is the idea of the ‘objective separate mind’ and the idea of the ‘subjective interconnected mind’.     The first of these philosophical positions, the idea of the self as a separate finite entity underscores a very western view that we are each (at our core) unique and autonomous individuals existing alongside other individuals in a highly individualistic society.      When it comes to processing trauma, of which grief and mourning come high on the list, our way of dealing with it is necessarily an internal and private journey of gradually loosening our attachment to our lost loved one until equilibrium is restored.    It’s a finite (even measurable) process which if unbounded becomes pathological – basically you’re sick if you grieve too long.
Contrast this with more contemporary yet still relatively unfamiliar philosophical ideas which shift the emphasis away from the ‘isolated’ self and the separate mind to a more relationally embedded model of the self, in which mourning and recovery are seen as being facilitated or impeded more or less in response to and with the help of others.   Searching out and recording the experiences of fellow travelers in grief, Fiona findings were confirmed in two ways.    First, whilst previous wisdom was heavily influenced by the pressure to get over it and move on, these new ideas revealed mourning to be a two-fold process with a constant oscillation between deep sadness and attempts to reconstruct life.    Now, as I write this, I believe I am in recovery mode.  An hour ago I was experiencing one of those painfully raw moments of missing Josh.   Later the hurt will return.
The second of Fiona’s findings was that processing trauma is not best achieved in isolation – Fiona writes, “we need others deeply alongside us in our mourning, we need to be known.â€Â  Rather than a private, closed, exclusively personal experience, mourning is here seen as an inter-relational process in which dependency on others is vital for us to heal our fractured life, reassert our sense of self and our ongoing being.
It might seem obvious that to share one’s loss and be supported by others can only be of value to the bereaved, but the actual process of mourning extends way beyond any public ritual in which an open (but limited) form of grieving is found acceptable.  The funeral, that necessary rite of passage, has more often been seen as providing opportunity for a final farewell, part of a closure rather than the start of a journey through grief.
Josh's funeral at the Matara Centre
Many people found that our funeral for Josh was not only deeply moving, but it was also quite unique with its emphasis on creating a symbolic journey in which we carried his casket into the main room at the Matara Centre, on to the next and then out into the night.    But if it was remarkable, maybe that’s only because in this country we seem to have lost the idea of a collectivised ritual and its ability to engage in or invent symbolic acts that give meaning to the loss the community is feeling and to the possibilities for healing.
In ‘Sifting for Goldâ€, Fiona describes her visit to the Musee Branly in Paris (“not like walking into a museum but a prayerâ€) in which displays of mourning rituals from all over the globe included ceremonial objects that marked death and its journey as being important as much for the mourners as for the deceased; like the carved wooden boat inlaid with mother of pearl, in which the bones of the deceased were finally sent out to sea after the long community ritual.
What is important here is the way a traditional community will come together and create elaborate rituals, in some cases lasting for years, in order not only to register the loss and its impact, but to help construct a voyage to a different relationship with the deceased.    As we know in many traditional cultures, the dead remain as valuable spiritual guides for the living.
Friends help to build Josh's casket
Our family was hugely supported by our local community in organizing Josh’s funeral and their creative involvement deepens the sense of a shared loss as well as providing the impetus for building a new relationship with Joshua.  The viral candle lighting ceremony was highly symbolic of the way we had all been in some way influenced by Josh and could share that with others.
But creating this ritualized journey, (as old as time itself) and the possibilities that holds for a communal sense of loss is not so possible in a world where the individual, the lonely and the private self is the norm.
viral candle lighting ceremony
This brings us back to Fiona’s definition of self, of how we see ourselves, our “selfâ€.  Are we unique, separate identities or part of a continuum with the rest of humanity.      In both cases of course we need to relate to others, but within the model that Fiona describes as the intrapsychic or separated self, we can survive without the other in the belief that nothing of our own self has been actually lost.   Not only that, we can endure the loss knowing that our mourning will be a finite process with a final letting go signaling a healthy outcome to our grieving journey.
However if our view of who we are is based on the idea of our “selves†being part of a commonality of all human experience, (a sense that we all more alike than different) and that we exist as relational beings, then when someone close to us dies, we feel that death as a loss of part of our own ‘self’.  I suspect that all those who knew Josh, all those who had any kind of relationship with him, will accept that when he died something inside of them died as well.
CONTINUING THE BOND
Fiona describes the traditional approach to mourning as “a cutting off and a moving onâ€.   But this need to detach oneself from the deceasedhas obscured another aspect of the work of mourning – to repair the disruption to the relationship we had (have) with the deceased.
Fiona describes the anxiety and the rawness at the loss of her mother, remembering in detail her illness and her death as if it were yesterday.   “At the same time I could not remember at all.   Such was the pain of bringing her into mind that I could not draw on a sense of continuing relationship with her inside me.â€Â        Twenty years on and in the light of subsequent losses, Fiona identifies this “continuing relationship†with the deceased as key to regaining the confidence and the stability we need to carry on living, to carry on living with another’s death.   She draws on the ideas of psychoanalyst, Darian Leader, that “we need to separate out the loss of the other from the loss of what we mean to them, the person that we were in their eyesâ€.
the person we were in their eyes
That last phrase “the person that we were in their eyesâ€.     Eyes that no longer see; the person that we were and are no more.     We lost Josh and what he meant to us, but we also lost that part of us that was Josh and what we meant to him.   Fiona desperately misses being a daughter to her mother, “of mattering to her†and I have not only lost a son I have lost my role as a father to that son.     No longer can I advise and argue with him, no longer can I protect and admire him, no more long phone calls to gather up his news, no more am I his last port of call.
With Joshua’s death we are changed and as much as we need to come to terms with his, or any death we need to acknowledge our changed selves, something I was not aware of when my girlfriend died all those years ago.
Fiona cites the work of The Compassionate Friends, a self help group that supports parents who have lost their children.   By meeting regularly, mourners are encouraged to name and speak of their child and to hold rituals on important dates.     Memories of the child and the parent’s grief are in this way validated and held in mutual recognition.    “Through this shared space†Fiona writes, “a transformation is facilitated in which the child comes to occupy a different, still living, inside space.    The pain that the child is dead and will never again be present in the way that it was, is given room to be, but through a shared space and over time this other internal journey can take place.â€
As I read these lines I wondered how this could be possible.     With only memories and history to sustain us, with no actual Josh, how could a new living relationship grow inside of me?      Then I was reminded of the various creative acts we have done in order to continue our bond with Joshua – the tree planted on a farm where Josh and his friends would often gather, has now become a Mecca for those same friends and family alike, the photographs I have made since he died, the film we produced as a celebration of his life, this website, all are sustenance for our new relationship with him.   And they are all necessarily shared and communicative experiences – on Josh’s still active Facebook page we talk to him (Josh we talk to YOU) and in speaking of Josh in these varied ways we acknowledge that new relationship not only with him but with each other.
reshaping and continuing the bond
In not relinquishing, in not cutting off from Josh we are in Fiona’s words “reshaping and continuing the bond in a different way, a way that is not a denial that the relationship has changed forever, but a way that honours the place and the significance of the deceased in ongoing life.â€
That our ongoing lives have been transformed by Josh death is beyond dispute. Fiona’s conclusion is that it will be the deep inner work of reframing our “self†in relation to others that will make them worthwhile once more.
The title of Fiona’s essay comes from a line she found in one of Alice Walker’s poems – ‘now I understand that grief, emotional speaking, is the same as gold…’ Yes, there are special treasures to be found in our mourning and grief can be good.
I miss you Josh
Your Dad, Jimmy (July 2012)
Fiona Rodman is a psychotherapist and lives near Stroud in Gloucestershire.     She is currently working on her next book – a further exploration of contemporary practices in mourning and grief.  To read “Mourning and Transformation – Sifting for Gold†in full please contact Fiona directly –mailto:fionarodman@gmail.com
I am particularly interested to find out how any of Fiona’s ideas might resonate with your own experiences – please leave any comments in the box below
Check this out – a truly remarkable video – when Wendii Miller’s 98 year old mother died she took all the funeral arrangements into her own hands and buried her herself. After collecting her mum’s corpse from Grimsby Hospital mortuary she drove off with it in the back of her camper van to her chosen burial site, dug the grave herself and as Wendii describes she “cocooned her in a natural cotton sheet and sort of slithered her down into the grave, where she lay at the bottom like a chrysalis”
For those who saw the recent Channel 4 documentary Undercover Undertakers, this is an amazing reposte to the funeral industry.
The Natural Death Centre describes the legal situation regarding natural DIY burials on its website. It says:
Arranging and conducting a funeral without employing a funeral director is something that only a few families undertake, but those who have done so are invariably surprised by how easy and straightforward it was.  There is no legal requirement to use the services of a funeral director but if this is something that you are considering, I would  suggest that you contact the Natural Death Centre for free advice and guidance.
It’s not been absolutely confirmed yet but the Ministry of Sound are offering a four week placement for a final year student from the Media departments of Gloucestershire colleges. Â This is something that Jane has been trying to set up for sometime and has now brought the MOS together with Andy Freeman from Cirencester College. Â As many of you may know, Joshua spent the last two years of school at Cirencester College before moving to London where he began work for the ‘Ministry’. Â So we’re absolutely thrilled to see this collaboration come off. Â It’s still very early days, and we don’t know if the student will be selected, or enter a competition, but the scheme will run annually and hopefully involve colleges and music departments throughout Gloucestershire.
