Friday Festival Highlights
28.10.2020
And we’re off! Friday 30 October is the first day of Good Grief Fest, a three-day virtual festival of love and loss. Here are some of today’s live-streamed highlights.
MAIN STAGE HIGHLIGHTS
As people across the world appear to be surrounded by a pervasive sense of loss, we start the day with a big question – ‘Is This the Age of Grief?’.
Grief experts Julia Samuel, Andy Langford and Shelby Forsythia join us to delve into the human experience of grief and bust myths around what grief looks and feels like in ‘Am I Grieving Right?’.
To discuss Grieving for Justice, we welcome Patrick Vernon who kickstarted the campaign for an amnesty for the Windrush Generation; the Rt Hon. Stuart Lawrence, who runs the Stephen Lawrence Trust and Kathryn de Prudhoe of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Group.
Julia Samuel will be joined by Alex Evans and Ivor Williams from the Collective Psychology Project, the group behind a recent report titled This Too Shall Pass: Mourning collective loss in a time of Covid-19 to talk about The Covid Cataclysm asking ‘How do we grieve for normal?’.
Julia Samuel then shares her wisdom around coping with grief crisis when the worst happens.
Rebecca Tantony and guests round off the day with The Language of Loss: an evening of music, poetry and storytelling.
Discover more Friday highlights here.
WORKSHOPS AND WEBINARS
Today, explore Grief in the works of Shakespeare, or learn how to pen your own ‘portrait poetry’ for lost loved ones with The Poetry Machine, Beth Calverley (pictured below). An award-winning funeral celebrant will inspire you to create meaningful funerals and memorials, and drop into our ‘Grief Cafe’ to participate and ask questions or simply to listen and to find solace in a supportive space.
Choose your workshops and webinars.
LISTEN IN ON A GRIEF CHAT
Gifted podcaster Mark Lemon (below) hosts our series of intimate Grief Chats. Tune in as he brings together pairs of people who’ve experienced the same type of grief. Among other things, we learn how it feels to lose a parent in a traumatic way, how to cope when your child dies, and how to use humour (and podcasting itself) to survive when it feels like all just might be lost.
Browse Grief Chats.
CHOOSE YOUR GRIEF SCHOOL SESSIONS
Our Grief School opens its doors today. Each of its round-table discussions (or their Zoom equivalents!) looks at a certain type of grief in depth, from losing someone to suicide or dementia to losing a baby during pregnancy. We’ll also talk about the extra difficulties faced by those grieving in a time of Covid.
Explore Grief School.
HOW TO WATCH FOR FREE
Main Stage and Room 2 events are running at scheduled times as per the Programme. Grief School and Grief Chat sessions are available to watch on a loop for the duration of the event on their respective pages.
USEFUL LINKS