Rationale

The Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care established the To Absent Friends festival in 2014 as part of its Good Life, Good Death, Good Grief work. Here's why...

Each year 220,000 people in Scotland are significantly bereaved. Many people who have been bereaved experience social isolation, for example Age UK’s Loneliness and Isolation Evidence Review found that bereavement is one of the factors which increases older people’s risk of experiencing loneliness and isolation, and that loneliness and isolation are more common among people who are widowed. The Children’s Hospice Association Scotland and the Compassionate Friends UK have both made moving films about the difficulties parents who have experienced the death of a child face because people don’t know how to act around them.

Various academic models exist which attempt to describe how bereavement affects people, and most of these articulate the importance of finding ways of acknowledging a loss and moving forward, while maintaining some sense of connection to the person who has died.

Continuing Bonds theory suggests that when someone dies, people slowly find ways to alter and redefine the relationship they have with the person – we continue to have a bond to someone once they have died, but the nature of the relationship is changed. Recalling memories of a person’s life and the time spent with them is generally seen as something that can be helpful.

Bruce Rumbold and Samar Aoun have looked at bereavement as part of a public health perspective on palliative care. They propose that, when thinking about how to better support people who’ve been bereaved, it is important to look not only at data from clinical encounters, but at bereavement as it is lived out in everyday life.

They suggest that most people manage to live with and through bereavement without developing mental health problems, and that this is because their social and personal support mechanisms meet their needs.[i] Rumbold & Aoun suggest that it is important to develop community capacity to support people who have been bereaved.

Rumbold and Aoun suggest that rituals of remembrance and memorialisation build solidarity – they are ways of acting that ‘transcend or replace the struggle to find words of comfort’.

To Absent Friends, a people’s festival of storytelling and remembrance aims to address some of these issues. To Absent Friends provides an opportunity to share memories of people who have died, no matter whether the person was a close family member or a distant inspirational figure, no matter whether the loss was recent or long ago.

We hope that participating in To Absent Friends will increase people's confidence and comfort in sharing and listening to each others stories. Though To Absent Friends takes place just one week in each year, we hope that its existence will help us gradually as a society to get used to loss as an issue that affects us all at some stage, and to be more supportive and less afraid of reaching out to people who have been bereaved.