Are we not carriers of their unfinished stories ...?
We have rarely seen such joy and enthusiasm from guests joining us on our recent ACTIVE GRIEF WEEKEND retreat. The image above is of two bereaved siblings working together to produce new photographs that both honour their loved ones and help them to process their grief. Elsie and Nickie did not know each other before coming to the weekend. Nickie’s brother Guy died in 2025. Elsie’s sister Sophie had died in 2024. In a sense that was the only connection they had … a common bond between strangers.
We carry them with us …
And it’s a continuing bond we have with the deceased that informs the way we express our grief for them. They are not forgotten and we don’t ‘move on’ or consign their memory to history. No, we carry them with us and their photographs provide an excellent resource for us make new memories, new imaginings of what they still mean to us. We are carriers of their unfinished stories. (ref Francis Weller: The Wild Edge of Sorrow)
The power of a photograph …
Our ACTIVE GRIEF WEEKEND retreats are exclusive to bereaved parents and siblings. For most this will be the first time they have thought about expressing their grief in a creative way and for many this is the first time they have considered the way a photograph of their loved one can hold so much power – how it can represent an ongoing relationship with the deceased – and the way it can nourish our grief. For some it’s too painful even to look at photographs of the one who had died. For others they are essential as a way of recollecting precious memories.
But by ‘reframing’ these images, by capturing a moment that acknowledges our loss, we have found a way to help us process one of the most traumatic, the most painful moments of our lives. By representing who we are now, changed by grief but with that continued relationship with our loved one, we can use these new photos to validate our feelings and have them recognised as a natural response and real. That’s the way photography works – it helps to make things real.
A shared endeavour
This is a shared endeavour. In the workshops we encourage participants to work in pairs, useful if you want to include yourself in the picture, essential in realising and releasing the creative energy that your grief holds.
In the first few months and years after our son Joshua died (in 2011) I found it difficult to share my grief. Does it surprise you that there is, sometimes, a shame embedded deep inside our grief so that for me I felt more comfortable processing my feelings on my own. And the task of making new photos that expressed my grief was work I wanted to do on my own. (I will write more about the project that became a self published book RELEASED in a future Substack … its about the ‘chaos of meaning’ that is often contained in photographs and which mirror much of the confusion I felt in the early days of my bereavement)
Of late, and as a result of being more open with my feelings, I have realised the value of a collaborative approach to creativity and especially to the work of making new photographs that express difficult and painful emotions. I have observed the way that people engage with one another in the workshop, tentatively at first but then with a growing confidence, the way they share their memories and the meanings they hold in the pictures they have brought, before working out how then to reimagine that new sense of connection. Practical decisions must be made, the framing, the background, what to include, what NOT to include, who holds the camera etc etc. But as much as they were helping each other create new images, they were also trying to weld together the past and the present – the past with all its longings and the present full of our current desires – and in doing so rebuild a sense of the future. A shared grief is a much more vital grief.
Thanks for reading
Jimmy (May 2026)
The Reframing Grief workshops are one of three workshops we deliver for our ACTIVE GRIEF WEEKEND retreats. They are led by myself and Gill Mann, author of A SONG INSIDE, a heart-breaking, thought provoking and ultimately uplifting memoir that chronicles her relationship with her son Sam who died in 2016. As participants have testified, she brings a very special sensitivity to the sessions that allows us to ‘follow our emotions’ more honestly.
