some reflections on our recent ACTIVE GRIEF WEEKEND retreat

You’ll see a lot of photos in this newsletter. They have all been made during our recent ACTIVE GRIEF WEEKEND retreat held at a venue on Dartmoor, our local and wonderfully wild expanse of nature near our home in South Devon UK.

Photos of course tell stories, sometimes in a way that words can’t. Which is why we make quite a big thing of them in our book WHEN WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH and why there is so much interest in the Reframing Grief photography workshop, one of three creative workshop sessions we hold on the retreats.

This is fifteenth retreat we have held in the 15 years since our son Joshua died in 2011. (Round of applause !!!) We’ve learnt a lot about grief in that time but each retreat teaches us something new.

It’s about relationship

Photographs are all about relationships. People like to think of photography as an individual art. It has of course given rise to some very unique and talented artists. Generally speaking though, the process of making photographs is a collaborative effort. To make a portrait of someone you must be in relationship with them. One of the things we realised over this last weekend was that grief too is about relationship.

Shifting the meaning

We ask our guests to bring any photos they have of their child or sibling to the workshop. We use these as a starting point to help us explore the way photographs ‘work’ and the way they can help us navigate this strange land called grief. Photos are often a gateway to a certain memory, a moment in time, but a moment that has added significance now that they are no longer with us. By making new photographs, we can shift those meanings. Not away from the person who has died, but towards a different way of staying connected to them, to continuing our relationship with them.

A Continuing Bond

The idea of a continuing bond has changed the way we understand grief. We no longer expect people simply to ‘move on’ from their loss and return to a ‘normal’ life.

As bereaved parents and siblings, we know that this isn’t the way it works – the idea of still being in relationship with our most precious loved one, of continuing to hold them close to our hearts, while at the same time learning how to accept their death is crucial to the way we navigate our grief.

And this is what we see happening in our photography workshops. By working in pairs, we help each other create new photos that reflect our grief and affirm the love we still have for the deceased. We might re-photograph the photos we already have, put ourselves into the picture (or not), or produce altogether new visuals.

And it isn’t just about the final photograph. It’s about the process – of working alongside someone else who understands. Sharing ideas. Making something together. Finding the courage to confront the reality of our loss – of making their death real.

We Are Carriers of Their Unfinished Stories

We need to acknowledge that making new photographs about our grief is hard and often painful work. It really isn’t for the faint hearted which is why we applaud all those who took part in these workshops

As Francis Weller writes in his book “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”, it takes courage to “look into the face of loss and keep it nearby”.

Perhaps these photographs are one way of doing just that.

The results may not be perfect but they are a way of saying: this person mattered, this loss matters, and I need you to bear witness to it.

And in honouring (and sharing) our losses we are, in Weller’s words “living our lives as carriers of their unfinished stories”.

There is no story that remains unsaid.

ONE LAST THING … Grief is not private.

Something else became increasingly clear to us over this weekend. By observing how our guests engage in the various activities, whether thats the joint enterprise of making new photographs, swapping ideas in the creative writing sessions, pairing up for pad boxing, or merely enjoying a meal together, we’ve been reminded of a fundamental truth – grief has never been private … it’s always been a part of community.

Yet so many of us have been conditioned to grieve alone. We encounter silence. We worry about upsetting other people. We have learnt to keep our grief to ourselves and somehow muscle our way through it.

Was this ever truly possible?

On our part we have needed those private moments to mourn our son but in the end we must bring our loss into the light of day, to share his life story and the story of our grief to have them both recognised and accepted by our community.

Grief as a relational process

So grief is a relational process. As much as we need that continuing relationship with the deceased, we also need relationships with the living. We may have to find ways to breakdown the fear that grief engenders amongst our friends, family, or work colleagues, but our sense is that that grief can only blossom as a communal endeavour.

To paraphrase Francis Weller again “a repressed grief is a compressed grief” – one that can generate a lot of rage and resentment. Untended this anger (and we’ve known it and we’ve felt it) can explode and rupture those ties that bind us to community. But cared for and released in a safe environment it becomes a fuller (and necessary) expression of one of the most elemental of human conditions … our resilience to suffering and our ability to grieve well.

Thanks for reading

With love and compassion

Jimmy and Jane (September 2026)

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