This week, from 2nd to 8th December, is National Grief Awareness Week 2023, run by The Good Grief Trust. The goal of the week is to create opportunities for people to discuss the loved ones they’ve lost and their experiences with grief in safe spaces and with people who’ve gone through similar events and emotions. After all, it is often easier to talk about difficult things with people who can relate. The organisation encourages people to put on events and arrange group meet ups during the week – online or in person – providing that safe space to talk.

For my part, I thought I’d share something that had a really big impact on my experience of grief, a line of thinking known as the Continuing Bonds Theory of Grief…

When I was thirteen, my Dad died very suddenly. He’d lived with a chronic illness for years but he developed pneumonia and quickly deteriorated (there’s a lot more to this story but I don’t think the post is big enough for all of it and it would distract from the point I want to make – maybe I’ll come back to that another time). Initially I scrambled for ways to remember him, still in a haze of shock and disbelief: I kept candles lit; I wrote letters to him; I bought the CDs of the music we listened to in the car. But after a while, that just hurt too much and I pushed all of those things away. And it was a combination of that, the lack of casual reminders (since I didn’t live with him and therefore didn’t have anything of his around me), and the fact that my family didn’t really know how to talk about what had happened, that resulted in a strange strange period of my life where… it wasn’t that we pretended he never existed; we just seemed to move around the metaphorical empty space with such focus that we didn’t even think about what we were dancing around. And that’s just how things were, from my perspective at least.

For a long time – for years – I didn’t talk about any of it: how much I missed him, how much it hurt, how disconnected I felt. I didn’t know how. I also avoided anything that reminded me of him. It wasn’t until I was in my early-to-mid twenties that I started to willingly – if cautiously – engage with the things that reminded me of him. I rewatched Hot Fuzz, a film we watched together (interesting choice, Dad); I reached out to a friend of his in the hope of getting answers to some of my long held questions; I even started to explore with the world of superheroes that he loved so much. I rewatched the Fantastic Four movies, the second of which we saw in the cinema together (plus there’s definitely a resemblance between Ioan Gruffudd, who plays Reed Richards, and my Dad so I do sometimes see Dad in some of the other characters he’s played, like Daniel Harrow in Harrow). I also watched Teen Titans from the beginning, an animated TV show that we had watched together on Saturdays and spent hours discussing, from the characters and their powers, to the storylines, to the silliest of jokes. All of those have remained special to me and after revisiting them, I moved further into that world. I watched films and TV shows that we most likely would’ve watched together and then endlessly discussed: I watched Supergirl (and I feel certain that he would’ve agreed with me that Season 1 was the strongest, when it was on CBS); we would’ve watched the new Fantastic Four movie and discussed the differences between it and the earlier ones; I would’ve nagged him until he watched Sanctuary with me and, when I inevitably adored Amanda Tapping (and he did too), we would’ve watched the entirety of Stargate SG-1 as well and he would’ve been the one to come to conventions with me (and I can absolutely imagine us dressing up); we would’ve gone to see Wonder Woman as soon as it came out in cinemas, her being my favourite DC character as a kid; we would’ve seen each of the Marvel movies and afterwards we would’ve compared favourite scenes before ultimately complaining how complicated the franchise was getting with every new film; and, most importantly to me, we would’ve watched Agents of SHIELD and Dad would’ve watched as the show, and specifically Daisy Johnson, became a new special interest that changed my life. I’ve always felt that superheroes, and the messages in their stories, are his legacy to me and that means a lot to me, even more so since it led me to Daisy. That’s something I will always be beyond grateful for.

Left collage: Teen Titans (top left), Hot Fuzz (top right), Fantastic Four (bottom left), and Justice League (bottom right).

Right collage: Sanctuary (top left), Black Widow (top right), Supergirl (bottom left), and Agents of SHIELD (bottom right). 

Alongside this, I’d also started to write songs about what had happened, songs where I talked to him, songs where we had new experiences together. It took a long time to get to that place – I’d been writing songs for about five years before I felt able to do it – but once I did, writing those songs felt almost sacred, regardless of whether or not they were any good when I finished them. It is, of course, my job to put out music and, while there are multiple songs about my Dad that I’m very keen to release when the time is right, that’s never been something I even thought about when writing these songs: they have always been solely for me and my heart and my voice. That is true, to an extent of all my songwriting – I wouldn’t be writing the song in the first place if it wasn’t an expression of something I felt deeply – but there’s a… I’m hesitant to call it this because it’s such a hard feeling to define… a healing element to writing these songs that is just different to anything else I’ve experienced.

It wasn’t until a friend mentioned the theory of Continuing Bonds to me, a passing comment in the thick of university research projects, that I realised that that was exactly what I was doing. Both in engaging with superheroes and in writing songs about him, but especially the latter. From the first song I wrote, a song about feeling frozen by grief, my relationship with him actively continued, a new chapter in our story.

The Continuing Bonds Theory of Grief was developed by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman and laid out in their book, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, in 1996. They questioned the existing models of grief that generally considered the process of grieving to be one where you eventually ‘let go’ of the person who has died, where any behaviour that encourages holding on is viewed as unhealthy and potentially harmful; they disagreed with this and proposed a new model where it’s normal and healthy for a person to hold on to and continue their bond with the person who has died, having observed many cases in their research where a continued bond had helped an individual to cope with loss.

Ask anyone who has any experience of grief and they’ll likely tell you that grief doesn’t just end. That’s a simplistic and frankly silly idea; just because a person is no longer physically there doesn’t mean that they no longer matter to you, that your relationship with them no longer impacts your life. Their death doesn’t cut your life into chapters of ‘with them’ and ‘without them.’ Many people consider grief to be a permanent entity but one that evolves, becoming more than just the pain of losing the person. We carry them with us and find ways to bring them into our present; the relationship – the bond – continues.

In my personal experience, it has been far healthier to engage with my memories of him and make art about my feelings than to try and ‘move on,’ to think of my Dad as belonging only to the first thirteen years of my life; I suffered more in the years when I didn’t think about him compared to the years since I started writing about him and to him. Before, there was only grief but now, even though the loss and the grief are still painful, that isn’t all there is. He might not be physically present in my life but he does have a presence: engaging with the things he loved, as well as the things I feel sure he would’ve loved, and writing the songs that keep him alive and here are, in general, really special experiences. As I said, I’d love to release these songs as a project at some point; I think that would be a really lovely way to honour him and could potentially – hopefully – also help other people to cope with their experiences of grief. Maybe it could inspire and encourage others to nurture that continuing bond rather than suppress it. I wonder what amazing, moving art could be made in the process…

Other than making art to connect with a lost loved one, there are many ways to honour that bond between you…

Talking to your loved one as if they’re still there (Amanda Tapping has talked about how, before her Mum died, they’d have a catch up over the phone as she drove home from work and how, after she died, she continued talking to her Mum as she drove home even though her Mum wasn’t on the phone).

Writing them a letter or keeping a diary of letters updating them about your life.

Keeping a little alter dedicated to them with, for example, a photo and candle.

Choosing a day, such as their birthday, to celebrate their life every year.

Continue to share memories of them as you meet new people and make new friends.

Listen to their favourite music, read their favourite books, and/or watch their favourite movies (or any of the former that you shared).

Going to their favourite places or places you visited together.

Research and write their memoir.

Pick up one of their hobbies.

Have a piece of personalised jewellery made to wear and keep them close.

Make a memory box or jar.

Keep something that belonged to them.

Plant a tree or flowers in their memory.

Reach out to their friends or family (if appropriate).

Do something that they would’ve enjoyed had they still been here (like seeing a film they would’ve liked or an event they would’ve enjoyed).

I hope that this week hasn’t stirred up too much distress, not that grief only exists during one week of the year of course. For some people, it can be validating to see so many people talking about grief but I know that it can also be very upsetting to suddenly have your social media feeds flooded with such stark reminders. I hope that, as hard as it may be to think about, that this post has been helpful in some way. The theory of Continuing Bonds – including the practical aspects of it before I knew what I was doing – has had such a big impact on me and I hope that, if it’s something you want, this has given you some ideas for how you might stay connected to your loved one.

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