Anne – Page 2 – Anne Whitehead

24 May 202424 May 2024

Remembering a daughter

In a recent post, I observed that some of the trees in the memorial at The Angel have been marked as the ‘plot’ of an individual family, making the site feel increasingly like a more formalised cemetery or graveyard. At the heart of the wooded copse, immediately beneath The Angel, an alder tree has been surrounded by a small wooden fence and a metal plaque has been placed into the ground, inscribed with the name of a family’s daughter. This tree at the centre of the memorial garden, which commemorates a little girl, represents for me the emotional heart of the site.

I do not know the girl’s surname, or her story. I only know her through this memorial tree. Over the few years that I have visited the memorial site at The Angel, the child’s family have decorated the tree each year on her birthday with tokens of the gifts they would have given her, including a birthday balloon which records that she would have been three, and then four, years old. I have found it moving to witness these tributes, both because of the parents’ ongoing ritual of remembrance, and because of the evident care with which the objects have been chosen and placed. The annual decoration of the tree takes place in the winter months, and the bare branches of the alders mean that The Angel is clearly visible above.

This tree raises questions for me about how I represent the memorials at The Angel, which are at once both public and private. The tree is so central to the memorial site – both physically and emotionally – that I do not feel I can tell the story of the grassroots memorial without documenting it. At the same time, there is a sensitivity in relation to it, because of the nature of the grief that it represents.

In an earlier post, I wrote of artist Miriam de Burca, whose work records the cillini: memorial sites in Ireland, which were burial grounds for those deemed unworthy of an official grave, including babies and children who had died before baptism. De Burca makes meticulous and detailed drawings of clods of earth from these remote and hidden sites, which she digs up, draws in her studio, and then returns to the site once the drawing has been made. De Burca’s drawing represents not only an act of recording, but also a quality of attention. The drawing takes time – it is not the instant image of the photograph – and it requires a sustained and careful process of observation.

Following de Burca’s lead, I have chosen to draw the tributes on this tree, with each pencil sketch taking several hours to complete. I hope that these works, which record just a selection of the many objects left on the tree, both recognise and honour a family’s acts of love and remembrance.

I have pointed out in a previous post that, while objects that are left on The Angel sculpture tend to be moved, the tributes left in the trees usually remain in place, disturbed only by the wind. This is true of the objects suspended from this tree, which visitors will often hang from its branches again if they are blown to the ground. On a recent visit, a toy monkey, which had been left at the side of the path leading out of the trees and which was getting muddy in the rain, had been placed in the fork made by two branches of the tree. This gesture protected the toy, and its positioning suggested that other visitors had also been moved by the memorial, wishing to leave their own gift for the little girl alongside those of her family.

In a moving piece of writing, Marcus Weaver-Hightower – the father of a stillborn baby, Matilda – reflects on the importance of things to parents who experience baby loss. He writes that material objects connected to the baby can help parents to resist ‘a pressure from others to forget (get over it)’, as well as offering a focus when there is ‘a lack of adequate quantities of memories and few people who share these memories’ (476). Weaver-Hightower adds that some parents actively create memories by buying new toys and other baby things, which can ‘provoke memory’, and which ‘might be kept in private or publicly displayed’ (476). His words chime with the memorial rituals that I have observed at the tree beneath The Angel, and my drawings of some of the tributes that have been left there seek to register their affective power, not only for the family but also for those who visit the site and encounter them.

References

Marcus Weaver-Hightower, ‘Waltzing Matilda: An Ethnography of a Father’s Stillbirth’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41.4 (2012), 462-91.

13 May 202413 May 2024

International Booker Prize

I was delighted to receive a recent invitation from Anna Walker, senior arts and culture editor at The Conversation, to contribute to a review piece of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024. I am an admirer of the International Booker not only for its commitment to literature in translation, but also for its explicit recognition of the translator, who shares half the prize with the author. This year, the judging panel was chaired by Eleanor Wachtel, and included poet Natalie Diaz and artist William Kentridge.

I was asked to review Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, which was translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey. Readers of this blog will recognise my research interests reflected in the work, which documents the grief process of a younger twin following the suicide of her brother. Posthuma’s novel was published in the Netherlands in 2020 and was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2021. Her first novel, People Without Charisma, was published in 2016, also to wide critical acclaim.

Given its subject matter, What I’d Rather Not Think About is surprisingly readable, in part because of its tone. The narrator – known to us only as Two because she was the second born – reflects with wry humour on her situation. The book also reads as a series of interconnected flash fictions. It came as no surprise to read that Posthuma is a fan of American short story writer Lydia Davis: her prose echoes Davis’s precision, and Posthuma also shares Davis’s interest in probing questions of intimacy and distance. The brevity and concision of both writers focuses our attention on what is unsaid, as much as on what is expressed.

The winner of this year’s International Booker Prize will be revealed at a ceremony held in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, on Tuesday 21 May.

The article in The Conversation, which contains mini reviews of each of the shortlisted novels, can be accessed here.

10 May 202413 May 2024

May

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

The new month has brought the flowering of the various springtime plants that grow on common land such as fields, parks, and roadside verges – the daisy, the dandelion, and the clover. Their familiar flowers spread across the field on which The Angel stands, reminding us of the everyday nature of this site as post-industrial brownfield land. In this post, I am interested in dwelling on the ordinariness of these flowers, not as an opening onto the history of the site, which I have explored in previous posts, but rather as a prompt for reflection on the grassroots memorial at The Angel as it relates to the ordinary.

If we turn to an influential essay on the grassroots memorial, we can see that the connection between this kind of site and the ordinary is a surprising one. Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero have marked the origin of the grassroots memorial in the 1980s, indicating that it has now become a ‘recurrent pattern’ in the wake of ‘a traumatic event or crisis’ (p. 1). Placing mementoes and tributes at the site of a traumatic event or death becomes a form of ‘social action’ that at once mourns an unexpected death and seeks to effect change, to ‘precipitate new actions in the social or political sphere’ (p. 2). Roadside memorials, for example, both mark the site of a fatality and seek to prevent future accidents by warning other drivers and agitating for the stretch of road to be made safer. The placing of objects removes the site from the everyday, elevating ‘ordinary, secular ground into the extraordinary’ (p. 21). Nevertheless, the authors point out, the primary function of the grassroots memorial is not ‘to create relations with the supernatural’, but rather ‘to manage emotions and to deal with grievances and contestation’ (p. 24).

I have pointed out in previous posts that, while the grassroots memorial at The Angel shares in common with other sites the placing of tributes in a public space in order to grieve, it is distinct in that The Angel is not the site of a traumatic event or death, but a place of comfort, and perhaps hope. The social action that Margry and Sanchez-Carretero see as central to the grassroots memorial is largely lacking at The Angel, though traceable perhaps in the possible origins of the site in a grassroots baby loss initiative. I have suggested that there may be something in the memorial at The Angel that enhances or magnifies the sculpture’s effect in transforming the ordinary ground of the field into an extraordinary place, imbued with the feeling of the sacred. But, for at least some of those who leave tributes there, the reasons are more prosaic. The Angel was particularly loved by the person who died. The ubiquity of The Angel in the media offers a sense of permanent contact with the person who has been commemorated there. There is no grave and The Angel offers a place to visit on birthdays and anniversaries. The constant presence of visitors and the memorial tributes left by others offers a sense of companionship for the dead. These are all important and understandable motivations for leaving mementoes at The Angel, but they are expressive less of grievance and social action than of the everyday practicalities of grief.

The ordinariness of the memorial at The Angel does not render it less important than those grassroots memorials that mark the site of a traumatic death, and the love expressed in the tributes is just as strongly felt. By commemorating their losses at the public site of The Angel, there may be, for some, a desire to make their grief visible to others. But this does not seem to be the primary motivation for many, and the evolution of the memorial into individual trees marked out as family ‘plots’ suggests that, with grief rituals in flux, The Angel represents an alternative to the traditional cemetery and increasingly echoes its conventions. The site offers somewhere to visit either if there is no grave – as many friends and relatives return to a place where ashes have been scattered – or if the grave of a loved one cannot easily be reached.

On my visits to The Angel, I have repeatedly witnessed visitors encountering the memorial that they had not expected to find there. Time and again, they stand quietly reading the messages that have been left and looking at the tributes. Some take photographs, but many simply observe. Often, they are visibly moved by an object or a token, or perhaps by the accumulation of tributes that they encounter. One or two have written notes and left them in the trees, recording their own responses to the site. These visitors are not responding to a social agitation that seeks to bring about change, but rather to the everyday, ordinary expression of love and grief.

References

Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Memorialisation: The Concept of Grassroots Memorials’, in Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero (eds.), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 1-48.

25 April 202428 May 2024

Geophone

Last night, David and I met for a recording session at The Angel of the North. It was a beautiful evening and there were a lot of visitors on the site. We are making field recordings across the seasons of the year, and this was our recording for the sounds of Spring. For each season, we have recorded the sounds of nature on the site – from the autumn dawn chorus, through the high winds of winter’s Storm Babet, to the springtime ambience of early evening. We have also recorded the interior resonances of The Angel at the different times and seasons, taking ‘readings’ from the north, east, south, and west faces of the sculpture.

We usually use the contact microphone to record the resonances of The Angel, but David brought to this recording session a new recording device – the geophone.

Usually used to pick up underground vibrations, David placed the geophone at the four points around The Angel, which, as usual, varied in their pitch and tone. The geophone had a magnet embedded within it so it attached more securely to The Angel than the contact microphone. David used both recording devices, and it was possible to switch from one to the other through the headphones, attending to the differences between them. The photograph at the top of this post shows me listening to the geophone on the north side of The Angel (the front of the sculpture). The sound was more airy and ethereal than in the other recordings we have done. There was little wind and heavy traffic so the resonances would have been formed by sound travelling through the ground from the motorway, rather than wind echoing down from the wings.

As we stood behind The Angel recording the resonances from its south side, the structure contracted, producing the booming noise that I had heard on a previous visit. As before, the sound resonated through my body and it travelled up through The Angel and along its wings. Even though both the contact microphone and the geophone were recording at the time, David felt that the unexpected volume was most likely to be picked up as distortion by them, although it may have been captured by the field microphone that was recording beneath the west wing of The Angel.

The trees on The Angel’s west side, including the memorial site, were filled with birdsong and we set up a field microphone facing in the direction of the trees to capture these sounds. Before I arrived, David had recorded the rustle of the leaves that are now on the trees, and I walked down to the memorial with the field microphone to try to record the blackbird that was singing from their highest branches.

As we recorded, the sun gradually lowered in the sky and the shadows lengthened across the field. I took the photograph above to document the long shadow cast by The Angel, and it speaks more broadly to the project. I have described the memorial in the trees as standing in the shadow of The Angel, and this photograph gives a sense of the sculpture reaching out across the site, its wings embracing everything that lies in their radius.

18 April 202418 April 2024

Objects left on The Angel

Most of the posts in this blog focus on the memorial tributes that are left in the trees, which stand immediately below The Angel of the North. A variety of notes and trinkets are regularly either suspended from the branches of the trees or placed beneath them. Less often, memorial objects are also left on, or at, the sculpture itself, and it is these tributes that form the subject of today’s post.

The construction of The Angel means that a series of enclosed ‘shelves’ is created where the ribbing between sections meets, and these alcoves are readily accessible at the height of The Angel’s calves. That these ‘shelves’ can be easily reached is attested to by the layers of grafitti that are inscribed there – another way in which visitors to the site leave traces of their presence behind. When I visit, I often walk round The Angel first to check whether any objects have been left there, before proceeding down to the stand of trees.

I have written in a previous post about the difficulty of being able to tell whether an object is a memorial tribute, or if it is something discarded, or perhaps something found that has been placed there in the hope that it will be reunited with its owner. I observed that this problem of identification increases on the perimeter of the memorial site in the trees, and the same issue arises when faced with those objects that have been left at or on The Angel. It can be impossible to determine sometimes why a particular object might have been left there. In this post, I therefore focus on four tributes that I believe have been left with memorial intent, even if I do not know who or what is being commemorated by them.

The first tribute is a cap and a single red rose, which were left on adjacent ‘shelves’ on The Angel (pictured above). The rose had a card attached, but I could not see if any message was written on it and I followed my usual practice of leaving the objects undisturbed. It was tempting to read the grafitti behind the objects – the ‘Jacob was here’ behind the rose and the series of three kisses inscribed above the cap – as accompaniments to the objects, but it is more likely that their placing was either accidental, or that the person, or people, who left the objects there felt that they formed appropriate backdrops for their tributes – although the accompanying image behind the rose seemed to discount that theory.

The rose was more ephemeral than the cap, and it had disappeared by the time of my next visit. The cap had been moved to the memorial site in the trees and it was hanging on a branch of the oak tree near the entrance to the copse. Over my next few visits, the cap changed position in the memorial site a number of times. I was unsure whether it was being moved by the person who had originally left it there, or if other visitors were positioning and repositioning it across the site. I found that this degree of mobility often characterised objects that were left on or at The Angel; much more so than with the objects that were left in the trees, which tended to be moved by the wind but not by other visitors.

The second tribute also makes use of adjacent ‘shelves’ on The Angel, this time to place two bouquets of flowers, which were seemingly purchased on the way to the site and with the shop label partially removed. One of the bouquets is accompanied by one of the wild flowers that grows on the edge of the field on which The Angel stands. The next time I visited, there was no sign of these flowers; these seemingly quite spontaneous tributes are often ephemeral in nature. These two bouquets were left on The Angel, but it is more common to find them leaning against The Angel’s feet, at the front or side of the sculpture.

The third tribute that was left on the ‘shelves’ of the ribbing was a pair of plaster-cast wings. I spotted them as soon as I arrived, because they had been placed on the eastern side of The Angel, visible from the path that leads from the car park. Occupying a single ‘shelf’, the wings had been carefully positioned to echo but not to touch each other, and other visitors, like me, were looking at them but leaving them undisturbed.

When I returned the following week, I could see that the wings were no longer on their original ‘shelf’. Walking round to the west side of The Angel, however, I found both of the wings positioned on adjacent shelves, and arranged vertically to form a different kind of pairing.

Once again, I had no way of knowing whether the wings had been moved by those who had originally left them on The Angel, or whether subsequent visitors had altered their positioning and their placement. The movement from east to west had shifted the wings from sunrise to sunset, and I was tempted to find some meaning in this, even as I was aware that it was most likely coincidental. On my following visit, the wings had disappeared, and, even though I looked for them in the trees over succeeding visits, there was no further sign of them. This disappearance of the object was unusual, unless it was itself of a more ephemeral nature: it was more common that a tribute left on The Angel would turn up in the trees, if it was no longer visible at the sculpture itself.

The fourth tribute left on The Angel was a small, artificial candle. Smaller than the other objects, it had been positioned on The Angel’s north side, where the ribbing is narrower and the ‘shelves’ correspondingly smaller. There was no accompanying note or message, although its memorial purpose seemed clear. There was something touching in the contrast of scale between The Angel and the diminutive candle; something too, perhaps, in the way in which The Angel seemed to shelter the candle’s tiny flame and to offer it protection. I thought of The Angel, unlit at night, forming a vast shadowy presence, and I wondered if this solar candle would then illuminate a tiny scrap of the surrounding dark. There was something of the altar about this tribute; the positioning of the candle transforming the domestic ‘shelf’ into something with a more sacred resonance.

The placing of objects at or on The Angel is facilitated by the design of the sculpture itself, which, as I have noted, forms ‘shelves’ of varying depths onto which the tributes can be placed. It is nevertheless striking that the memorial tributes are more commonly left in the nearby trees rather than at The Angel itself. This might be due to practical considerations – objects left here are more exposed, both to the weather and to other visitors, and so are often moved or disappear. Objects left at The Angel accordingly tend to be ephemeral and disposable in nature – tributes such as flowers, or a candle. The exceptions to this – the cap and the plaster wings – were subsequently repositioned, whether by the same visitor/s or others, with as much apparent thought and care as when they had originally been placed there.

Why, then, do the trees rather than The Angel seem to have a gravitational pull, such that even objects placed on The Angel seem to end up there? One factor certainly seems to be the shelter that they afford from the elements, especially the force of the wind. But the trees also offer shelter from other visitors, who venture less frequently into the copse, and are less likely to disturb what they find there. Leaving a memorial tribute on or at The Angel is a more public act, even if it is conducted when nobody else is there. The memorials in the trees constitute tributes that are public and private, and that speak not only to The Angel, but also to the community of other memorial objects that they join, and by which they are surrounded.

11 April 202412 April 2024

April

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

In my March post I noted the arrival of Spring, with the daffodils in flower under the trees that form the memorial garden at The Angel of the North. Although some of these daffodils are still blooming, I turn my attention for the month of April to the fern-like foliage of two other plants that grow on the Angel site, and that will come into flower in the summer months: yarrow (the feathery foliage of which is depicted above), and tansy (a serrated frond of which is shown below). Both of these plants thrive on disturbed ground, such as roadsides and waste land, so it is unsurprising that they are growing on the former pit site where The Angel stands. The more delicate yarrow, with its clusters of small white flowers from June to August, can be found in the field in front of The Angel. The compact golden buttons of the tansy can be seen there from July to October, and its flowers also line the path that leads up out of the trees towards The Angel.

In addition to thriving in the same kind of conditions, yarrow and tansy are also linked by having been used for medicinal purposes from the time of the ancient Greeks. This medicinal association is reflected in their names: yarrow’s Latin name, Achillea millefolium, connects it to the warrior Achilles, who was said to have applied the plant to the wounds of his bleeding soldiers; while tansy’s common name is derived from the ancient Greek word for immortality (Athanasia), because in Greek mythology Zeus gave the shepherd Ganymede a drink of tansy to make him immortal. Folk names for these plants also gesture to their healing properties. Yarrow is variously known as soldiers’ woundwort, staunch grass, blood wort, and herb militaris – names that reflect its historical (and military) use to stop bleeding. Tansy is also called bitter buttons, referring to its tartness when drunk as a tincture to ease digestive problems.

In addition to staunching wounds, yarrow was also added to ointments, due to its soothing and anti-inflammatory properties. It was a popular infusion for colds, and it was known to lower blood pressure and to relieve indigestion. Tansy likewise had a range of uses, including the treatment of fevers and of sores. However, the plant can be toxic if too much is used, or if there is an existing allergy to it; BBC presenter Sue Perkins experienced tansy poisoning on the documentary Supersizers . . . Go Restoration, when she sampled an historical recipe in which the plant would have been used.

Because of its medicinal properties, yarrow became associated with good luck and protection, and it was pinned to cradles to guard newborn babies against harm. Tansy’s ability to repel insects meant that it was often placed in the coffin with the dead to help preserve and protect the corpse before burial. In Yorkshire, biscuits flavoured with tansy and caraway seeds were traditionally served at funerals.

The foliage of these plants is easily overlooked before they come into flower, but the distinctive fern-like fronds that are visible at this time of year act as reminders of these resilient plants, as well as having their own delicate beauty. The plants’ long association with healing, the dead, and protection gives them a particular resonance in the context of this project’s interest in the memorial garden that is located at the feet of The Angel, and it feels apt that they grow amid the grasses there, even if they largely pass unnoticed.

25 March 202426 March 2024

Chimes

There are a few sounds that are particularly evocative for me of the memorial site at The Angel of the North: the rustling of the alder leaves overhead in the summer months, the steady background hum of traffic on the nearby A1 motorway, and the tinkling of wind chimes when they are caught by a gust of wind.

Over the several years that I have been visiting the memorial, I have photographed a number of different wind chimes that have been suspended from the branches of the trees. Some, as in the photograph above, have been comprised of several bells, while others are made up of a single bell. The placing of wind chimes at the memorial is unsurprising, given their traditional association with good luck and the summoning of benevolent spirits, as well as their conventional placing at the site of a shrine.

When I visited The Angel last Friday, it was late afternoon and there was a high wind carrying occasional spatters of rain. There were only a few visitors and they did not venture down to the memorial site, which does not yet have its sheltering canopy of leaves. The strong winds had brought down even more branches since my last visit and the site felt raw and exposed with the late winter gale and darkening skies.

As I emerged from the memorial site up the little banked path that leads to The Angel, I caught the intermittent notes of a wind chime as it trembled in the wind. I headed along to one of the trees that edge the path leading west from The Angel to listen more closely to its strange music. As David wasn’t with me, I captured the sound by holding my mobile phone close to the chimes and pressing record.

Audio credit: Anne Whitehead

When I listened back to the recording, I could hear the tinny tinkling of the chimes, the gusts of wind, and the ever-present background noise of the traffic.

David’s recordings of The Angel with his contact microphones enable us to hear both the wind and the traffic resonating through its hollow structure. I have written in a previous post about the ways in which listening to these vibrations through his headphones shifts our perception of the sculpture, so that it is transformed momentarily into a vast musical instrument. If The Angel resonates with the wind that buffets its wings and vibrates down through its body, then the wind chimes in the trees form a high percussive complement to its deep notes.

Attending to the various sounds of the memorial site enables us to register the invisible but powerful presence at The Angel of the wind. Its destructive effects can currently be seen in the fallen branches and scattered tributes. But the wind can also be heard as it sets into motion the chimes that hang from the trees. With the help of David’s microphones, we can also capture the wind’s eerie booming and droning within the interior space of The Angel itself, as it forms a mighty echo chamber. The influence of the trees on the memorial site is evident, because it is visible. But if we attend to the auditory aspects of the site, we can encounter the vital agency of the wind, in its creative as well as its destructive aspects.

21 March 202429 April 2024

Honouring its Telling

Film still, *Where We Will Go* (2023) by Kate Sweeney

I am delighted that a special issue of the journal Literature and Medicine on the representation of pain has just been published. Edited by Sara Wasson, the focus of the volume lies not in the claim that pain is unspeakable, but rather in its varied cultural legibility – the ways in which existing cultural contexts and expectations influence what can be heard of pain’s particular stories.

My own essay in the volume looks at two poetry collections by mothers who have lost their babies – Rebecca Goss’s Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds (2014). Their experiences of loss are different: Goss lost her daughter, Ella, from an incurable heart condition at sixteen months, while McCarthy Woolf lost her son Otto at birth. In their haunting collections, both poets nevertheless adapt the form of the lyric elegy to express the pain of maternal grief. This form invites its readers to inhabit and linger in the singular moments that the poems commemorate, rather than reading towards a recovery. Both poets also address the ways in which cultural expectations of pregnancy and motherhood exacerbate the pain of grieving for a baby, because they make it difficult for the experience to be heard.

I wrote this essay as I was preparing to work with the parents who had experienced baby loss from a multiple pregnancy. As we talked with the parents in the workshop sessions, I could glimpse threads of connection between the work Kate was developing with them in the film and the poems I had been reading. The poets attend carefully to the shaping of the words on the page, and this found its echo in the parents’ drawings, using the inks that Kate had made. Their careful tracing out on paper of the names of their lost babies gave weight and form to their loss, making it tangible and constituting its own kind of poetry. The question of how to move forward from the loss also resonated across the poems and the film. The parents’ articulation of what it means to live as a family beside the lost twin echoed the closing poems of Goss’s collection, which explore how she shares with her second daughter the ongoing presence of her older sister, who died before she was born. The poets emphasise that the pain of losing a baby is heightened by the cultural illegibility of baby loss; for the parents, the complex grief of losing one twin while another survived rendered their experience particularly challenging to tell and to be heard.

Thanks to Sara for her commitment to the special issue on pain, and for her meticulous care in bringing the essays to publication. It’s been wonderful to be a part of this project.

You can read a version of the essay here.

References

Sara Wasson, ‘Pain’s Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honouring its Telling’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023). The article can be accessed here.

Anne Whitehead, ‘”Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn”: Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023), pp. 372-90.

20 March 202420 March 2024

Facing the Future

Last week, I spoke on the phone to Alison Shindler about the Facing the Future Support Groups for those who have been bereaved by suicide. These online peer-support groups are run by the Samaritans, and Alison is a Facing the Future Facilitator and the Samaritans London Region Partnership Officer. We talked about the free support service that is available through Facing the Future for anyone who has been affected by suicide loss.

Alison began by explaining the origins of Facing the Future. The scheme started in 2011 and was prompted by the recognition that there was little specialist support available for those who had been bereaved by suicide. To address this gap, the central London branch of the Samaritans joined up with the Kensington and Chelsea branch of Cruse Bereavement Care to combine their expertise in suicide and bereavement counselling respectively. Face-to-face groups were set up, originally in London, and provision was then expanded to selected areas in the UK. Participants found the groups made a real difference to them in navigating their loss and helping them to feel less isolated.

Alison outlined that the support groups were moved online during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although this was originally in response to lockdown, it became evident that there was a value in continuing to meet online after the restrictions were lifted. It meant that those attending did not have to travel to the group (with the related costs in terms of time and expense) and it also helped participants to be in their own familiar space after the meeting had ended. The move online also meant that the support groups were available to anyone with access to the internet. In my book Relating Suicide, I reflected that suicide support is often focused in cities in the UK, and that an ongoing challenge is to build and sustain networks of care in rural, coastal, and island locations. The online network of support offered through the Facing the Future scheme is a good example of bereavement care rippling out from London to other areas of the UK, and then reaching beyond this to include more remote and isolated locations.

The support groups meet every week over a 6-week period. Groups are closed, to offer a safe space for participants in which trust can develop between the members. Each group has a facilitator but there is no agenda to the conversations, which are directed by the participants themselves. Facilitators are there to ensure that everyone has a chance to speak and to support anyone who becomes upset or distressed. In this way, the emphasis of the groups is firmly on peer support. I wrote in my book of the importance of lived experience to the understanding of suicide. Facing the Future offers a positive model of foregrounding the value of lived experience, in its central commitment to enabling those who have lost a loved one to suicide to offer support to one another.

I was interested to hear from Alison that no one bereaved by the same loss participates in the same group, so that group members can speak freely and feel they have their own space. Unlike some other suicide bereavement support organisations, Facing the Future does not organise groups according to the relationship of the bereaved with the person lost; support groups are not made up solely of parents or of siblings, for example. Equally, participants in groups might have been bereaved a few months earlier or decades before. Alison explained that this broke down the assumption that a similar type of bereavement or time period since the death might give a greater connection with someone, when connection with others’ experiences can come from many different aspects of the experience. Equally, the mixed constitution of the groups enables participants to hear experiences that are different from their own, which might increase their understanding of how suicide loss is affecting those around them. For example, a parent could learn from a sibling in the group how the suicide of their son or daughter might affect surviving brothers and sisters. Having lost my sister to suicide, I would certainly have found it helpful to hear not only from other siblings but also from parents and friends about how they experienced their loss.

Alison and I ended the conversation by reflecting that most people are related to suicide in some way, if not directly through the loss of a family member, then perhaps indirectly through the experiences of a friend or a colleague. I mentioned that whoever I have talked to about my own experience has had their own relation to suicide to tell. Yet it is still a topic that is hard to speak about. The supported safe spaces that schemes such as Facing the Future offer are vital in this context, enabling members of the group to share their experiences of loss and to learn from the perspectives of others.

You can learn more about Facing the Future, including how to register interest in joining a group, here.

Many thanks to Alison for speaking with me about Facing the Future and for sharing the important work that the Samaritans are doing to support those bereaved by suicide.

14 March 202414 March 2024

Suicide Cultures Seminar

On 18 May 2023, I was delighted to contribute to a seminar series hosted by the Suicide Cultures team at Edinburgh University. The paper I gave was based on the third chapter of my recent book, Relating Suicide. I countered the understanding of suicide as a solitary act by tracing how it ripples out through a diverse range of bodies, institutions, and objects. Conceiving of suicide as inherently relational, I thought about the ways that its dispersion connects lives which are otherwise unrelated. I also thought about the ways in which the act of suicide relates human and non-human lives and agencies.

In my paper, I focused on Orlando von Einsiedel’s 2018 documentary Evelyn. This beautifully made film charts von Einsiedel and his family as they start to talk about his younger brother, Evelyn’s, death by suicide a number of years earlier. Evelyn’s family and close friends share their memories of him, and talk about the effect his death has had on them, as they walk in places that Evelyn had loved. In this way, place and landscape forms an important element of the film, as does the act of walking itself. The family speak to other people who have lost loved ones to suicide, meaning that their walks also map Evelyn’s death in relation to other deaths that they learn of along the route.

The care that the family shows for each other ripples out to other people in an expansive gesture that is also evident in the screenings of the film at cinemas around the UK. Each of the screenings, which are timed as afternoon matinees, has a family member present for the post-show discussion and audience members can also choose to go on a local walk with others who have been affected by suicide. When I first saw the film screened at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, I was struck by the distance from which families had travelled to see the film and by the shared desire to share their experiences in the post-screening discussion. Borrowing the idea of ‘promiscuous care’ (The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 2020), I thought in the paper about the ways in which the film generates community and solidarity around suicide by harnessing the potential of the local, as well as pointing to the important role that networks of peer support can play in supporting those who have been affected by suicide loss.

Many thanks to Amy Chandler and the Suicide Cultures team for including me in their seminar series. The discussion after the talk raised important questions about the unsettling quality of the place where a loved one has died by suicide; how we define places as rural, urban, coastal, etc., in identifying them as sites of suicide; and the potential of creative responses to suicide for navigating the ongoing relation to the place where a loved one has died.

You can watch Evelyn on Netflix.

You can access a video of my talk here.

You can listen to the related podcast here.