Life After Death: How Women Are Finding Community In Their Grief
Nestled in wild gardens, alive with frogs with frogs and blooming citrus trees, stands Paço da Glória, an 18th-century gothic castle turned beautifully renovated guest-house in northern Portugal. Sweeping morning mists, a serene saltwater pool and a yoga deck all invite guests to unwind. So far, so boutique break – but here, wellness is done differently.
At Paço da Glória – run by Rebecca Illing, a practising end-of-life doula as well as a hotelier – guests are invited to contemplate mortality in a so-called ‘Death Garden’. It’s all part of Illing’s plan to curate a space where grief is welcomed and death isn’t taboo. This autumn, the property will host its first retreat for bereaved families with renowned psychotherapist Andrea Warnick. Participants will be encouraged to play, craft and engage with nature as ways to navigate loss.
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The retreat is named ‘Camp Alex’ after Illing’s late brother. ‘The grief was insurmountable, yet I knew I needed to embrace it,’ she says. ‘I have learnt so much from grief and the deaths of my loved ones. I wanted to expand the conversation and connect with others.’ It’s a conversation that, for a long time, many people have been reluctant to have.
Despite the fact the only sure bet in life is that it will, for all of us, end, death isn’t seen as palatable small talk. In the UK, our collective stiff upper lip doesn’t lend itself to pondering our mortality and that of those close to us. We tiptoe around the subject, employing platitudes and euphemisms, typically saying we ‘lost’ someone or labelling the dead ‘late’ (as an obsessively punctual person, please never call me that when I’m dead). And as for grief? We treat it as if it’s contagious and keep our distance.
But things are changing; a new movement is calling BS on that approach and normalising conversations around loss. Nici Harrison knows that the appetite for these conversations is there; spaces at Grief Alchemy, her five-day retreat in Cornwall, have been full for four years. Harrison, who lost her mother Lizzie in 2016, calls her work ‘grief tending’. The retreat includes writing sessions, nervous-system-support workshops and sharing circles, alongside yoga and organic meals.
The week culminates in a grief ceremony for the group, performed around a water altar. ‘People take it in turns to go up to the altar and speak offerings, prayers, longings and losses into the space. It’s as much about being witnessed as it is about holding space for others; grief is communal in this way.’
Certainly, it’s a far cry from one-on-one counselling behind closed doors. Harrison’s goal is not to overcome grief but rather to find ways to gently welcome, and integrate, it into a purposeful life. ‘The greater our willingness to feel the depths of our sorrow and longing, the greater our capacity to feel wonder, awe and beauty,’ she says.
While grief is new territory in the wellness space, Harrison points out that ‘tending to our grief and sorrow is deeply ordinary and ancient work’. It is, however, something we have lost the art of in Western culture. She’s meeting the ancient with new approaches; a soon-to-be-launched store on her website The Grief Space will sell such soothing wares as ‘Grief Balm’ and ‘Heavy Heart Tea’.
The passage of my own grief has been less communal (and with no grief tea). At the end of 2019, on the cusp of the Covid outbreak, my husband Cam died of gall bladder cancer at 34. Mere months earlier we had been living in Barcelona, rock climbing and hiking; young, free and blissfully unaware of the tragic turn our lives would take. Death was the last thing on our minds, until Cam had sudden onset nausea and a persistent cough, which led to a stage-four cancer diagnosis: the type that is caught too late to cure.
After a short, harrowing illness, our life together ended in a hospice. We were the youngest patients there by decades, and I was grateful that cancer had clouded Cam’s once razor-sharp mind so he couldn’t fully grasp the weight of that. One day, in the communal lounge, I picked up a pink leaflet for a support group titled: Widowed, Separated and Divorced. It only made me feel more isolated. Each of these is a life-changing event, but they are profoundly different experiences. There were no pamphlets for Widowed And Still In The
Honeymoon Phase. I craved a connection to those whose loss felt more similar to my own; who could understand the messy and enormous feelings that make deep grief
very different to sadness.
It was the start of lockdown when I began messaging Lotte Bowser, author of the forthcoming memoir Bittersweet, which charts losing her fiancé Ben, also to cancer. We exchanged the things we couldn’t say to our ‘real-life’ friends or family, partly so we wouldn’t scare them, but also because they wouldn’t always know what to say back. Like me, Bowser was the first in her community to experience such a profound loss. ‘I felt alienated. Grieving during lockdown only compounded that loneliness,’ she says. ‘I turned to Instagram in search of others who understood... I found countless support pages, along with women who had lost their partners, who felt what I was feeling. Those connections saved my life at a time when I didn’t want to be here.’
Bowser, who had garnered a following on social media as a yoga teacher before Ben’s death, began sharing her grief with her thousands of followers. The more candid her posts, the more her following grew. ‘When Ben died, it was as if a part of me died, too – and I couldn’t face returning,’ she says of the changing shape of her online presence. ‘I discovered just how unprepared and inept we are at talking about loss and supporting those going through it. I wanted to do my bit to change that.’
Like Bowser, Amber Jeffrey – whose mum died when she was 19 – found connecting with others online healing and necessary. Three years later, she created The Grief Gang podcast, which has become a go-to platform for young grievers and has broached a broad spectrum of topics in the sphere, from navigating loss due to addiction, to dating while grieving. It was ‘born out of desperation’ Jeffrey says, after finding other, more traditional pathways didn’t work for her. ‘I “failed” at therapy,’ she adds, noting that counselling was only offered during the day when she, like many other young people, had to be at work.
What she wanted, what she needed, was something more approachable and flexible, the sort of thing you could access at 1am and feel as though you’re not alone. ‘I was motivated – persistent, really – to see if there was anything else out there that could bring me solace in my grief. I searched high and low and couldn’t find the perfect fit. So, I made it myself.’ In the wake of the pandemic, Jeffrey has expanded her platform to include in-person events. She’ll be co-hosting her first grief retreat this year, and has talked on panels at both Cambridge and Oxford universities. It’s not lost on her that it’s a remarkable achievement for someone who ‘left school with next to no education’.
Grief is universal, and has the power to transcend hierarchies and cultural differences unlike anything else. Still, there is work to be done: ‘Black, brown, queer and “othered” communities are often after-thoughts in grief education and events,’ Jeffrey notes. ‘If we’re going to talk about trauma, it is sadly these communities who know it quite intimately and should be at the helm of these discussions.’ In one episode of The Grief Gang, Jeffrey unabashedly announces: ‘I love talking about death!’ It is a statement that neatly encapsulates the new, transparent landscape we are stepping into.
But why are many of us dropping our emotional armour now? Grief coach Mira Simone observes: ‘One of the positive ripple effects of the pandemic was that it brought the concept of grief to the public’s attention with much more urgency. There has been a societal shift towards openness around the importance of sitting with and giving voice to our grief.’ That
strange and scary time forced people all over the world to confront questions of mortality. We saw first hand how flimsy life is, and how vital community is. As we’ve opened up conversations on grief, more of us are willing to talk about death and even consider the concept of planning for a ‘good death’. This is where an end-of-life doula may help, providing holistic support that mirrors a birth doula, albeit at the other end of the story.
As well as curating Paço da Glória, Illing is a practising end-of-life doula and describes her
role as ‘a person who can assist in the process of dying, make plans for care and plans
around death, listen to the needs of the person who is dying, support family members and people within the community.’ Indeed, it’s a burgeoning area. Living Well Dying Well, the UK-based organisation that offers doula training, notes that 350 people have completed their course, with the number growing organically.
The role of end-of-life doula marks a remarkable career shift for Katie Rose Whiting, who once worked in fashion for Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. ‘I’ve always been interested in my own mortality – I used to dress up and host my own funeral as a child’, she says. ‘There are no lessons at school on how to grieve or what the dying process looks like, so we’re all in the dark. I wanted to get ahead of the game.’ Her unwavering curiosity led her to attend Death Cafés – meet-ups where strangers get together to ‘eat cake, drink tea and discuss death’. Still working in luxury fashion at that stage, Whiting says: ‘It made me confront the question, “If I died tomorrow, would I be proud of what I’d achieved?” The answer was a hard no.’
After retraining as an end-of-life doula, she co-founded the organisation Fin: Exploring Endings with psychologist and fellow doula Dr Emma Clare. Together, they hope to modernise and normalise practices of preparing for death and grief that are ‘often lost in the sterile medical system’. ‘We’re reviving that primal, heart-to-heart care in a tangible and unapologetic way,’ she says. As for looking back at her former life, Whiting says she has no regrets about changing direction. ‘There’s an unparalleled sincerity in this work, allowing me to engage with the most fundamental aspects of the human experience... If I died tomorrow, I would be proud of the work I’ve done.’
It has been almost five years since my husband died. He still punctures my thoughts multiple times a day. Time has softened some of the agony, but the loss is always there. Since he died, death has become my raison d’etre in my career as a grief writer. I’ve recounted our story countless times; how we met, how he died and how I keep going. But the strangest thing is, amid all this loss, I can honestly say I have never felt more conscious and appreciative of being alive. The people who operate in the grief space are some of the most open-hearted people I know. There’s a common thread of living purposefully, which comes from knowing how quickly life passes through its hourglass. As grief coach Simone says: ‘When we pull back the curtains on loss, we allow the light to shine in and touch us.’ If that’s not really living, I don’t know what is.
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