The Word of the Month for November is GRIEF
This month there will be a THIRD THURSDAY event
on Thursday the 21st of November at 6 p.m.
at St Mary Abchurch
ArchiCantiores will be returning for a recital of words and music on the theme of ‘grief’ centred around The Shropshire Lad poetry sequence by A E Housman and the recently acknowledged poetry of Lara Munden.
We are grateful to ArchiCantiores for organising this event and commissioning new musical settings for the occasion.
The event is free to attend. A cash collection will be taken in aid of the Royal British Legion, or you can donate online here:
Composers and poets
Framed by poems of grief and hope by A E Housman and Lara Munden, set to the music of Butterworth, Hughes, ArchiCantuor, and Southam, the programme will weave a thread through the phases of grief with selected writings from Agnes Whitaker, Margaret Torrie, Rabindranath Tagore, Christina Rossetti, Alan Paton, Paul Munden, Thomas More, Mari Louth-Cook, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, W H Auden, and others.
Besides introducing the much lauded poetry of grief and hope by Lara Munden, which has prompted both a new commission Missing from Bernard Hughes and also a new setting by ArchiCantuor of The Long Road Home, the poetry of A E Housman resonates with Munden’s sentiments recording cycles of grief and hope, of pain and acceptance.
Acknowledgements
“ArchiCantiores Singing for the Architectural Heritage” is a troupe of singers, musicians and wordsmiths who perform words and music live to explore and support architectural heritage.
SOPRANO | Rebecca Ryland-Jones sings with The Epiphoni Consort and Thomas Tallis Society and is principal soprano with ArchiCantiores.
BASS-BARITONE | Jonathan Louth, architect and cathedral choirman, sings with Thomas Tallis Society under Eamonn Dougan, and in Solo Ensemble recitals. Founder of ArchiCantiores, he has been instrumental in commissioning works, both music and words from, among others, John Tavener, Paul Munden and now Bernard Hughes.
POET | Lara Munden, prematurely deceased in 2023, daughter of the writer & poet Paul Munden from Yorkshire, was a highly skilled and creative writer, working as a director with Bright White Ltd until her death. Her poem sequence Glass Magnolias: a cycle of Grief and Hope may be found on the web at https://paulmunden.com/lara-poems/
© The Estate of Lara Munden
COMPOSER | Bernard Hughes is a composer of exciting and appealing choral music, ranging from the memorably melodic to the fast and rhythmic, including a particular commitment through Epiphoni Consort and other choirs to a new generation of young people.
ArchiCantiores is immensely pleased to announce that Bernard has embarked upon a new commission to set Lara’s poem sequence for unaccompanied voices: ‘Missing’ is Bernard’s ‘pilot’ setting.
ARRANGER | ArchiCantuor is a soubriquet for members of the ArchiCantiores troupe when writing and arranging settings of words for recital performances.
Thank you to Jonathan Louth for providing text for the booklet and for this website page.
Many of the readings during the recital will be taken from All in the End is Harvest: an anthology for those who grieve, edited by Agnes Whitaker and published by Darton Longman Todd, London 1987, in association with CRUSE,
ISBN 0 232 51624 3.
The musicians may be contacted by email. Please contact the same email address if you would like to join the ArchiCantiores mailing list.
Some reflections on grief
HEALTHY & UNHEALTHY GRIEVING - 3 NECESSARY STAGES
Healthy grief, dramatic and even traumatic as it may be, is a three-stage process.
First, it is fully experiencing and expressing all the emotions and reactions to the loss.
Second, it is completing and letting go of our attachment, both to the deceased and to sorrow.
Third, it is recovering and reinvesting anew in one’s own life.
Other phases are present within these three stages, each appearing more or less patent along each person’s unique road of grief.
Missing any of the steps in the grieving process may result in unhealthy or unsuccessful grief. Because these stages may take many months, unsuccessful grief may not show up until long after the loss. However, when even unsuccessful grief becomes evident, it can be explored and successfully resolved. Unsuccessful grief is usually reversible.
Grief is an emotion that takes many forms, showing up in varied ways. There are many types of grief, such as complicated grief, chronic grief, anticipatory grief, disenfranchised grief, traumatic grief, unresolved grief, and ‘normal’ grief. While some people may experience the grieving process immediately, others might have what’s known as a delayed grief response.
Six phases of grief
The ‘five plus one’ phases of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, then moving on - are part of a framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss as there is no typical loss. They help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. Not stops on some linear timeline in grief - as not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order - our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief‘s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss. At times, people in grief will often report more stages than three and more phases than five. Just remember our grief is an emotion as unique as we are.
Grief after death
From leaving school to retiring, we experience many key milestones throughout our lives: research into those major life moments demonstrates we can experience grief provoked by many incidents, such as buying our first home, getting married, having children, as well as experiencing the death or life-changing events in our circle of kinship or acquaintanceship, and planning our own funeral. “Dignity Funerals” created a “Life’s Moments” resource, from which we can even look into how the nation felt when approaching these stages.
The loss of a loved one can be among one of the most overwhelming and painful experiences we are likely to encounter. It comes uninvited and it takes us through a range of emotions, which often contradict one another and make no sense. The physical pain of it can have a negative effect on our health and is likely to affect our thinking, alter our behaviour, and disturb our sleeping, eating and working.
Grief is a natural reaction to loss. It is a personal experience, characterised by some shared physical and emotional symptoms, which are often unpredictable and determined by individual circumstances. The duration and severity of those symptoms depend on the individual’s ability to cope with their loss and adapt to its challenges.
Traumatic grief
Traumatic grief may ensue from a person suffering life-changing injury, or dying in an accident, by suicide, through drugs and alcohol, or as a result of violence. We, or the person who died, may have been involved in a major accident or terrorist incident. But traumatic grief can also follow any sudden or unexpected death, or where we have witnessed someone suffering or in pain.
Some reactions and feelings are very common in the hours, days, weeks, months and years after a traumatic event. These feelings can be very strong and frightening. People tell us they feel they are losing control or ‘going mad’. But for most people the feelings do become less intense over time.
Anticipatory grief
"My heart is shattered at the thought of no longer being there for you" Kristin Hallenga, Coppafeel! cancer campaigner, 1985-2024
People expecting a loss may experience anticipatory grief, feeling sad before the loss occurs. Rather than grieving for the person, who is still with us, we may feel grief for things, the things we won't get to do together in the future. It's also normal to think about what our life will be like after they have died and how we shall cope. This doesn't mean we have given up on the person or that we don't care for them.
People diagnosed with a terminal illness as well as those facing the death of a loved one may experience anticipatory grief. Some feelings we might experience - all natural reactions to a significant loss - while grieving are:
- numbness or disbelief;
- guilt;
- sadness;
- anger at ourselves or at the person who is dying;
- anxiety or fear about the future
- relief;
- mood swings.
Complicated grief
For some people, feelings of loss are debilitating and don't improve even after time passes. Also known as ‘persistent complex bereavement disorder’, in complicated grief, painful emotions are so long lasting and severe that we have trouble recovering from the loss and resuming our own life. Different people follow different paths through the grieving experience. The order and timing of these phases may vary from person to person and usually must encompass:
- Accepting the reality of our loss;
- Allowing ourselves to experience the pain of our loss;
- Adjusting to a new reality in which the deceased is no longer present;
- Having other relationships.
Delayed grief
Even when grief shows up later, whether from losing a parent, a spouse, a child, or other forms of loss, grief is a necessary process for closure. While some people may experience the grieving process immediately, others might have what’s known as a delayed grief response.
Delayed grief occurs when the feelings associated with loss don’t arise for weeks, months, or even years after the event, by which time it often appears as if there’s no reason for sadness or other emotions related to grieving.
The trigger for delayed grief can occur due to shock, denial, guilt, or simply being overwhelmed by the situation. The grieving seems inexplicable yet, with attention to ourselves, the buried cause can be explored and resolved, even (and then necessarily) years later.
Relationship grief or estrangement grief or separation grief
Many describe family estrangement as a form of ‘living loss’: the stages of pain and healing after estrangement are not dissimilar to those of when someone passes. Indeed some clinicians recognise an equivalence between loss through death and loss through separation
The same can be true for the loss of our working life or our status among colleagues or friends, even and not infrequently upon retirement: the continuation of the position we no longer hold can cause a grief of regret and an ache in the soul.
The primary and perhaps most obvious difference between the grief of estrangement and the grief of someone passing, is that the person or situation we are estranged from is still living & breathing or still extant.
Full closure and moving forward can be more challenging when we know that one day we may meet that person again, we may hear about their lives from others or see them on social media.
Disenfranchised grief
Examples of disenfranchised grief include loss of a pet, perinatal losses, elective abortions, loss of a body part, loss of a personality from dementia, and loss of a loved one who is not “blood related” (i.e., a boyfriend/girlfriend, extra-marital lover, in-laws).
Loss of employment or status or belonging in a group can feel like disenfranchisement and manifest with a persistent regret that is barely distinguishable from grief. These can be losses neither “seen” nor “sensed” by people at large yet held privately in our hearts.
Absent grief
Working through our grief over any loss is one of the best ways to heal from it, but if we can’t grieve, we might have absent grief, manifesting itself with little to no sign of normal grief - no signs nor symptoms of crying, lethargy, missing of the deceased, nor anger, nor grieving whatsoever. Symptoms of absent grief include irritability, forgetting about the loss, not feeling connected to the loss, and denial.
When experiencing absent grief, we may then try to avoid grieving, focussing instead on taking care of others, turning to drugs or alcohol to numb the pain, or diving into work in order to distract ourselves.
We can move on from absent grief, once we accept the loss, work through our pain and grief to move forward with our life. If we need help doing so, don’t be ashamed.
There’s nothing wrong with asking for help.
We might feel like we have absent grief if we aren’t grieving, but it might simply be that we just weren’t that close to the deceased.
If that’s the case, it’s OK.
Poetry by Lara Munden
Missing
It must have
dropped
out of someone’s pocket,
the blue glove.
Perhaps it
fell from an overstuffed bag,
or maybe it was hurled
from a pram.
Who knows
where its twin is…
fingers outstretched
on tarmac…
I’ll hang it
on the fencepost
and pass it every day
until it’s gone.
Petri dish
You’re still there, I think,
Amongst the others, stuck
At the back of the freezer.
They’re just going to sleep now
The doctor said. Frozen. In a time
When there was still hope, of life.
You might be almost four now
My little aliens, still awaiting your fate.
At least you are sleeping.
I only wish I hadn’t given you names
That would never be called.
Sweet dreams my darlings,
I’ll meet you in another life.
The Long Road Home
When once we roamed through woods without a name,
And talked of all we’d do in years to come,
There was no thought of dreams we’d need to tame,
I did not hear the distant beating drum.
When days were long we ran without a care,
Through meadows and along the winding lane,
But now that time is short, the trees are bare,
And memories are all that now remain.
Whenever I return along this road,
I count my weary footsteps up the slope,
And sense the ticking clock has now been slowed,
But in this moment I can dare to hope.
For though the golden years of life are done,
There’s beauty in the setting of the sun.
© The Estate of Lara Munden
From the Bible
But the mountain falls and crumbles away,
and the rock is removed from its place;
the waters wear away the stones;
the torrents wash away the soil of the earth;
so you destroy the hope of mortals.
You prevail for ever against them, and they pass away;
you change their countenance, and send them away.
Their children come to honour, and they do not know it;
they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed.
They feel only the pain of their own bodies,
and mourn only for themselves. (Job 14:18–22)
Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and agitated. Then he said to them, ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.’ And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’ Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, ‘So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Again he went away for the second time and prayed, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’ Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words. Then he came to the disciples and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.’ (Matthew 26:36-46)
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14)
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
© Copyright St Mary Abchurch Guild Church Council 2024. All rights reserved.
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