Talking about grief is something we need to get better at

This isn’t new. Memento mori photography, Latin for “remember you must die”, in which deceased relatives were commemorated in photographs, was practised extensively during the Victorian era, when disease was rife and children often didn’t live to see adulthood.

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But when taken in the modern context, these photos are often rushed and sterile, set in impersonal hospital wards or operating theatres. Reinboth’s charity gives those photos to professional artists to create hand-drawn portraits for bereaved parents to cherish.

It still astounds me that in an era where we share so very much about ourselves – what we’re eating, what drinking, what we’re watching, what we’re buying – that the sharing of feelings, especially when it comes to grief and sadness is something as a village we are so roundly bad at. We don’t allow people to sit in, feel and acknowledge grief. We want them to turn it off. Or grieve privately. Crying and mourning in public? How obscene.

In a recent article for The Times, Rob Delaney explained in excruciating detail the grief of losing his two-and-a-half year old son to a brain tumour, and his relief when one of his son’s night carers reacted with open grief to the news that Henry was going to die.

“She yelled, ‘Oh no! Oh, Henry! Oh, Jesus Christ, no!’,” Delaney writes. “She recoiled from the news like I’d hit her.” He described this reaction as “water in the desert to me”, and that it “beat the hell out of a lot of the responses Leah and I were getting from people when they heard the news”, adding that people were “afraid of you when your child is dying”.

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Perhaps that fear is based around the fact that when a child dies, there is no silver lining. What’s the upside in this situation? That they were born at all? That they had a few short minutes of breath? A month? A year?

While we can talk about our collective discomfort with grief as an academic point ripe for debate, this is just one example where it has real life consequences. If charities set up to support parents after the loss of a child cannot advertise or seek community support, they cannot generate the donations needed to provide their services. And that is where the discomfort around grief creates a real-life deficit that compounds the pain and trauma that we as a community could be helping, in some small way, to ease.

Isabelle Oderberg has been a journalist for more than two decades. Her book on miscarriage, health equality and how to improve care for those who experience it, Hard to Bear, will be released in April by Ultimo Press.