Holding Grief Together: A collective ritual
- Community Gathering, Wednesday 10/9/26, 7 pm
Supported by The Care Leavers Association, Dr Lisa Cherry OBE has offered to host a community gathering that offers a gentle, collectively held space for care‑experienced people to acknowledge and honour the grief that has surfaced since the publication of the national review into care leaver deaths.
This space brings people together in a circle of solidarity that centres collective grief, recognising that our grief is not individual pathology but a communal response to systemic failure.
Through ritual, conversation and quiet moments of holding, the group will create a sense of belonging in the midst of sorrow, affirming that care experienced people’s lives matter and that those who are no longer with us demand care, compassion and systemic change.
The session closes with a collective commitment to carry this grief forward as a source of solidarity, advocacy and remembrance.
When Dr Lisa Cherry OBE asked if I might have an offering for holding collective grief, following the publication of the Independent report into the review of early deaths of care leavers, it felt important to begin with my personal response as a member of our community.
When I read the report, I cycled through waves of sadness and overwhelm. A need to pause, step away and return, not dissimilar to the experience of reading through our care files.
I feel anger, rage, despair and grief reading the harms and systemic neglect those in the report experienced senselessly and the loss of lives before their time. Understandably, that took me to the many lives and losses before that have gone unreported prior to the report. Families, friends, and communities have carried their stories, often individually, with only now formal acknowledgement.
I found myself thinking about how I learned about the report. Like many, through news headlines and reporting that lacked care and compassion for those with lived experience who might be reading.
Weeks earlier, my friend Poppy Jaman OBE sent me a piece reflecting on the harms Jason Arday experienced that led to his death: Who gets to be human? confronting me with racism, ableism, the role of the media and society, and a calling to responsibility and action. I am conscious that there are some for whom Jason's death, alongside this report, lands through experiences of racism, ableism and other forms of marginalisation alongside care experience. I needed to sit with what I was feeling and what it asked of me.
Through conversations with Poppy and my friend and colleague sissy lykou, another question came into focus. Who gets to grieve, and how? I feel a pull towards the political. Towards understanding what happened, naming injustice, demanding accountability and asking what must change. We need those things. I need those things. I'm angry, and I don't want that anger taken away. I also recognise what can happen when we move there too quickly, and grieving is deferred. Care experienced people are so often mediatised, politicised, studied, monetised and tokenised. Our lives become evidence, statistics, case studies and stories often presented as a hero's journey without the necessary care and healing, the phenomenon of which Darren McGarvey explores in Trauma Industrial Complex.
I need a place for action and accountability, but more importantly I need a place where our lives aren't reduced to evidence of anything. A place where we can be human, mourn and remember. In childhood, for many, there wasn't a space with others where our losses could be held with recognition and care.
When the report came out, I reached out to other care experienced folk, and others reached out to me. My colleague and friend Erika Masnerus messaged to send love. She had found the report heartbreaking and wrote, “as a society we've really let people fall.” There was something important in being thought about without having to ask.
That happened again in an email from Jono and Dr Rosie Canning, who recently led co-produced research exploring the health and wellbeing of older care experienced adults. When this government research came out, they reached out to people who had participated and attended the presentation of the findings. They were thinking about those with lived experience receiving this news, offering care around how we might encounter it in ways the headlines hadn't.
Psychotherapist and soul activist Francis Weller's work has helped me in navigating grief. He describes Five Gates of Grief. The fourth gate, What we expected and did not receive,” speaks to me as a care experienced person. We come into life with an evolutionary expectation of love, care, safety, holding, belonging. To be seen and witnessed by others and have community around us. There is grief not only for the people we have lost, but for what we needed and did not receive. Dr Martha Stark reflects on this as a relentless hope, where grief isn’t held an adaptive and understandable refusal to grieve emerges.
At World AIDS Day commemorations and Transgender Day of Remembrance, I’ve stood alongside other members of the Queer community to hear names spoken aloud. Being in community to remember and grieve together stays with me.
I recognise something of that in Francis Weller's invitation to bring grief back into community, to be held collectively. There is plenty that needs to be said about what has happened, and needs to change. But in these next moments, this is an invitation to hold space to remember those lost, rather than to explain or evidence their lives. Let’s remember they were here, their lives mattered, and they matter to us.
Drawing from a ritual offered by Francis Weller, I collected stones beside the sea over the past days and a bowl of water. A mutual friend, Dr Arzhia Habibi, gave me this bowl as a gift. Her late partner, an activist, writer and potter, David Gee, crafted it. I hadn't made the connection when she gave it to me that David’s bowl would hold the stones as we remember others.
I'm placing the first stone in the water for the young care experienced people whose deaths have brought us here. We don't know all their names. Some have been changed in the report, and some may not be recorded. They were here, and their lives mattered.
[Stone placed into the water.]
As we sit with their memory, personal losses may come to mind. Someone you've lost, or whose loss hasn't had much space, or you want to remember together. I’ll also be remembering someone. When it feels right, I invite you to say their name aloud and perhaps who they were to you. We'll receive each name by saying it together in response, as I place a stone in the bowl of water. You don't need to offer a name. You can be here and remember quietly too.
[Receive the names, repeat them together, place a stone in the water.]
I'm going to place one last stone for those whose names we don't know, haven't been spoken, who we carry privately and for the grief that hasn't had somewhere to go.
Later, I'll take these stones to the sea and return them to the water. For now, they are here with us as we end our remembrance together.
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