'Grief isn't textbook - there is no way to grieve correctly'
Kat, who works as a poet and a creative writing facilitator and lives in Langford, North Somerset, has been involved in Weston-super-Mare's Good Griefs Festivals, which encouraged conversations about death to help people deal with bereavements.They said: "I don't think you can ever prepare for it [death]." "You feel like the rug is out from under your feet."I was like, 'I'm an adult. I can do this stuff' and, of course, you absolutely can't even make a cup of tea, brush your teeth, all the things," they said.
Kat said they needed to put their grief "in a box and lock it down" to manage day-to-day life.And then, to process grief, they said people needed to "gradually open the box" and not do it all at once.For artist Helen Acklam, who lives in Bristol, locking away the loss of her daughter Gail, who was stillborn, had a profound impact on her.Pregnant at 16 and growing up in the "very religious" and "very tight community" of the Welsh Valleys, Helen said the stigma of being a teenager and having baby loss "made it a very difficult experience"."I think, for a lot of women who had stillbirths in the 70s and 80s, we didn't have a voice," she said.With that in mind, Helen said she had no way of talking about or describing her loss and instead felt "silenced" and "angry".
"I went in alone to have Gail and then came out on my own. All the things which had been collected, like nappies and the things you get ready for baby, were gone. My father took care of everything."All the stigma and shame of the family, the community - I absorbed all that," Helen added.She said she only started processing the loss of Gail after seeing a news report of someone going through a similar experience decades later.Helen said she did not even go to the funeral, something Kat found very important.Kat said their mum's funeral was the first they had ever attended and without rituals like funerals, it can be difficult to process that someone has died.
Meanwhile, Helen said she underwent her own ritual years after Gail's death which helped her heal."I went back to her grave, which I'd never visited, and I suppose quite literally, dug into the earth and dug into myself," she said.Taking earth from Gail's graveside back to her art studio, Helen has since used it in her work, a way of taking back what happened to her."There were times when it was incredibly painful. I was crying. I had the mud on me, I was right in it," she said.
For Kat, writing about loss has helped them cope."It lets you approach grief indirectly because you're holding the pen and you can put it down."It allows this small measure of control at a period where you feel absolutely out of control," they said.However, Kat acknowledges people grieve "in different ways"."A common misconception is there is a very linear journey - that everyone goes on in the same way," they said.With that, Kat said they feel people are also worried about "doing grief wrong".Kat said during their grief journey, they had often questioned their reaction."I was like, 'I should be collapsing on the floor and crying. Why am I doing my tax return instead?' - or 'I shouldn't be going out partying, because you know that is wrong, because how can I party when my mother is dead?'.""There is no way to grieve correctly," they said."We aren't textbook and grief isn't textbook," they added.
For Helen, processing loss is helped by talking openly about it, as "shying away" from the "natural feelings" causes damage.Helen said that years after her loss, she found out her parents had experienced a stillbirth themselves.Had she been able to speak to them about it, she said she would have known what she was "going into".Dr Lesel Dawson, the co-director of The Bristol Centre for Grief Research and Engagement, said some people find talking about death uncomfortable as they can "awaken our own fears of mortality" and "our loved ones dying".But she added she hopes the research centre "will help people feel more confident" in having open conversations around grief and death.One of her ideas is having grief education in schools. "I think it could radically change the way society thinks and talks about death."There's lots of ways of talking about death and grief, through stories, through biology, through different cultural approaches to death and grief," she added.
'An act of love'
Kat agreed and said some find the vocabulary around grief difficult to manage."They do this kind of head tip and the soft voice and they're very concerned."Then after three months, anyone who hasn't been bereaved just stops asking because they're thinking it's been quite a long time but that's just the start of it."You will survive, even though it feels like you won't," said Kat.Helen said loss changed you as a person as you learn to live with the loss."Grief is not something you get over, the person you love has died and that is a loss you will carry with you through your whole life," Dr Dawson, who also runs the Good Grief Festival said.Kat added: "It's very messy, and we might suddenly get really angry and then we might suddenly get really sad and it doesn't really matter as long as we're feeling."It is just the flip side of love. If you don't love someone, then you're not going to grieve them. Grieving is an act of love."
If you or someone you know has been affected by the details raised in this story, advice on where to find help and support can be found at BBC Action Line.
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What do King Charles, Lulu, Gerry Adams, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Ian McEwan and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? The answer is that they were all born in Britain in 1948, widely thought to be the luckiest birth year of the 20th century. 'Everything dropped unexpectedly on our plate at exactly the time we wanted it to,' says Deborah Moggach, born in June 1948 and the award-winning author of 20 novels, including These Foolish Things, which was adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. 'It was very unfair but also very reassuring, as if the world reflected one's own burgeoning feelings – of rebellion or ecology or sex or music. You felt a sense of companionship: as if you were leading the world, or the world leading you.' There is always, of course, a danger of generalisation with social history. 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The rise of the teenager This rising leisure time, coupled with a post-war baby boom and increased urbanisation, led to the relatively new concept of the 'teenager', a word imported from America. By 1960, when the 1948-ers were on the verge of this milestone, there were some four million teenagers in Britain, fuelling significant spending on burgeoning industries such as fashion, cinemas, magazines and music. 'People start talking a lot about teenagers just when you yourself are becoming a teenager,' explains Dominic Sandbrook, an historian of post-war Britain and co-host of The Rest is History podcast. 'You have a sense of having your own tribe, a cultural self-confidence. If you're born in 1948, you're about to turn 15 when the Beatles break through – the perfect age. There's a popular culture that exists just for you, which didn't really exist before.' According to Sandbrook, the 1948-ers also avoided the sense of cultural alienation experienced by many other generations. Having enjoyed a relatively innocent 1950s childhood of Airfix models, Eagle comics and Just William stories, and an exciting teenagerhood in the 1960s, there is never, he argues, 'a cultural shift that leaves them feeling confused or marooned. They're completely fine with Bowie in the 1970s. This is a generation that drunk deep from 1960's individualism – a lot of them ended up as Thatcher voters in the 1980s.' The late-1960s also saw a raft of liberalising legislation under Roy Jenkins's tenure at the Home Office, making divorce and the contraceptive pill easier to obtain, while legalising homosexuality and abortion, just as those issues became relevant for some of those born in 1948. And although Jenkins's successor James Callaghan rejected proposals to legalise cannabis, it was still widely available. 'We could dabble and experiment without it being too venal,' says Moggach. 'The cannabis we smoked then was just enough to be pleasantly uninhibited – not this psychotic drug which kids are smoking now.' So, were there any downsides to being young then? Moggach thinks hard. 'It hurt more at the dentist,' she says, eventually. 'And there was something about the era that could make you feel left out – everyone seemed to be having the most amazing time.' Education Many of those born in 1948 were schooled for free by Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act and supported through university by the introduction of means-tested grants from 1962. The number of UK universities more than doubled in the 1960s, with Harold Wilson's government adding a further 30 polytechnics. Public expenditure on education more than doubled in the decade after 1952. Admittedly, the 11+ system for grammar school entry was highly divisive, saddling young children with a sense of failure and leading to Wilson's attempts to introduce a comprehensive system after 1965. However, it is perhaps not coincidental that social mobility declined dramatically in the final quarter of the 20th century, in stark contrast to what the Sutton Trust calls 'the former golden age of upward mobility'. 'The 1948 generation experienced the most social mobility of any generation,' says Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. This, she explains, was especially the case for women, who started to go to university in much larger numbers. 'You also see a huge increase in women who had had children go into further education in the 1970s,' she says. 'There was a chance to have a second bite at education, retraining and upskilling, and giving them better opportunities in the job market. 'For those born in 1948, it's all brand new. There's a real thrill, a real adventure: you see women going into the arts and getting involved in politics and trade unionism. And although it's true that women born later have had it easier from the start, those born in and around 1948 knew it was going to be tough. Today, young women often say when they have children, 'I didn't know it was going to be this hard.' Women back then knew it.' Employment and housing A working woman born in 1948 would have benefitted from the Equal Pay Act in 1970, passed when she was 22, and the Employment Protection Act of 1975, introducing paid maternity leave (ideal timing given that the average age of a mother that year was 26.4). The 1960s were generally a good time for anyone to enter the workforce. GDP per capita rose almost every year until 2008, while the average hours worked continued to fall steadily. Real wages increased by an average of 4.6 per cent every decade until 2008, whereupon many of the 1948-ers retired aged 60, the last year in which a majority could still take a final salary pension (this figure had fallen to 30 per cent only a year later). Real wages subsequently dropped every year between 2008 and 2014. According to a report by the Sutton Trust, the managerial and professional classes more than doubled between 1951 and 1971, offering a raft of new employment opportunities to the 1948-ers. 'The 1960s expansion in education, welfare and local government sees people going into all different kinds of work,' says Todd. 'There are sons and daughters of domestic servants and factory workers going into white-collar jobs for the first time – although you don't see many of them becoming bankers.' The big caveat to this thesis is, of course, unemployment, which remained below 5 per cent until 1976 but then averaged 9.4 per cent between 1978 and 1988. In May 1986, the unemployment rate hit 19.1 per cent in the North East compared to 10.1 per cent in the South East. 'Someone born in 1948 would have been 31 when Thatcher came to power,' says Sandbrook. 'If you were a working-class man, especially in an area of the country reliant on manufacturing, things could have been tough for quite a long time.' For many, however, the 1980s were marked by huge growths in personal wealth and cushioned by a continuing period of extraordinary rises in house prices. If a 1948-er had bought their first property in 1970, they would have paid an average price of £3,611, taking their first step on the ladder just in time for annual price increases to hit double digits for the first time in 1971 and then rise by 50 per cent in 1973. Later generations missed this boom: property prices increased by more than three-fold in the 1970s, compared to not even doubling in the 1980s. If you bought in 1990, your property probably wouldn't recover its value until 1996. As long as their household finances could withstand the high inflation and interest rates of the 1970s, the property of an average 1948-er homeowner buying in 1970 would increase 65-fold by 2025. In London and the South East, those figures were even more eye-watering. 'My great-aunt died in the late 1960s and left me and my three sisters a house just off the Fulham Road,' says Moggach. 'We sold it for £12,000, divided up that money between us and I got on the property ladder. God knows what that house would be worth now [probably £3-£4 million]. We all just sat on our behinds and made thousands and thousands of pounds a year – it was insane.' Today Many 1948-ers certainly seem to have enjoyed a blessed life in the Goldilocks zone of wealth, health, personal liberty and state support from cradle to grave. But is 2025 a good time to be 77 years old? Again, of course, it depends. Moggach feels terribly guilty about her good fortune and the prospect of being a burden on the NHS. 'Everyone I know is having scans and illnesses and tripping over and having new knees. I don't think it's a good time to be frail in any way. The state can't scoop you up, partly because people my age, who had it so easy, are now a drain on the state. I'm amazed that a younger generation hasn't risen up and breached the barricades.' According to Mark Dayan from the Nuffield Trust, the NHS is actually better in some ways today than it was a decade ago, 'but access to care is getting worse and the state of social care is very bad'. Not that this appears to be causing undue alarm for many 1948-ers. A report from the Office of National Statistics in April revealed that those aged over 70 are less likely to experience depressive symptoms than any other age group. Its other findings, which presumably enjoy a degree of correlation, include that they are more likely to trust other people, eat healthily, spend time outdoors and feel a sense of belonging in their community. The only area in which the over-70s are more negative than younger people is in their hopefulness for the future – perhaps partly in the suspicion that no subsequent generation will ever have it quite so good again.
