Good Grief

Good Grief is a podcast about grief but also how we develop, learn and form meaningful traditions around it.

I’ve lost loved ones in my life, most of us have. But recently I lost someone and I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to process it, but equally I didn’t know what to do to help friends or family experiencing loss. Selfishly it scared me and reminded me of my own mortality. I guess I’ve avoided anything related to death or grief for my entire life. I was shocked by how much I didn’t know and how we never talk about it as a society. I mean it’s one of life’s most inevitable things, why don’t I have any tools at my disposal to deal with it? It’s clear we’re frightened to talk about it, which makes sense considering, but keeping it at arms length makes it increasingly more difficult to understand or create helpful traditions around. How can we ever help, understand or support people grieving if we never talk about it?

I did some research and development for a documentary film about grief (I’m a filmmaker by the way) and what became obvious through the conversations I was having was that it was potentially a very British phenomenon. I was told about useful grieving practices from other cultures that were so simple yet and so effective that I was dumbfounded I’d never heard of any of them. Why don’t we have our own traditions around death and grief? Is it because UK culture is famously reserved and we avoid the intimate conversations about pain and loss? Do we just ‘get on with it’? Added to that it was only 100 years ago that mortality rates were over double what we experience today. Death is now significantly less common so does that affect our relationship with it? 

I want to find out more about why we don’t talk about grief, what has changed over time for us and how we might make it less of a taboo and more of a healing process. I want to unravel pre-conceptions and explore beyond the traditional Great British reserve to address my own fears of loss and grief. I want you, the listener, to discover these new things about grief as I do. Throughout the series I’ll talk to a broad range of people about their experiences of grief including people from diverse faiths and cultures and professionals who deal with death and loss on a regular basis. From midwives to palliative care professionals, from physicians to historians. Whilst I realise the theme of this podcast isn’t exactly happy-go-lucky, we will be exploring the depth and breadth of the human experience, with tears, humour and a celebration of life and try to discover if there is such a thing as good grief?