Holding Grief Together: A collective ritual
Updated: Oct 12
- Community Gathering, Wednesday 10/9/26, 7 pm
Following the publication of the independent report into the early deaths of young people who had been in care, Dr Lisa Cherry OBE, with the support of the Care Leavers Association, brought us together to acknowledge and honour the grief it had stirred within our community.
Through conversation, ritual, and quiet moments of remembrance, we made space to grieve collectively, recognise the lives of those no longer with us, and to find some connection and belonging amid the sorrow. There was space for grief to be something we didn't have to carry alone, and to recognise the systemic failures that had brought us together.
My thanks to Lisa for bringing us together and holding the gathering with such sensitivity, Dr Jim Goddard for his gentle presence, and the wider CLA team, trustees and everyone past and present for over 25 years of campaigning, care and support offered to the care experienced community.
We ended feeling the evening was held and belonged to everyone there, including the people we remembered. This piece grew from the part I was invited to offer within that collective space.
When I read the report, I cycled through waves of sadness and overwhelm. I felt the need to pause, step away, and return, much like reading through our care files.
I feel anger, rage, despair and grief reading the systemic harms and neglect those in the report experienced senselessly, and their lives lost before their time. Understandably, that took me to the many lives and losses before that have gone unreported prior to the report, including those in my family. Families, friends, and communities have carried their stories, often individually, with only now some official recognition in the form of this report.
I found myself thinking about how I learned about the report. Like many, I learned about it 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? It confronted me with racism, ableism, the role of the media and society, and a calling to responsibility and action.
I am conscious that there are many for whom Jason's death, alongside this report, lands through intersectional experiences and harms of racism, ableism and other forms of marginalisation, alongside care experience as it had for my late sibling. I needed to sit with what I was feeling and what it asked of me.
Through conversations with my friends Poppy, Dr Arzhia Habibi and sissy lykou, another question came into focus. Who gets to grieve, and how?
I feel pulled 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 anyone to take that anger 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, a phenomenon 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. A place where we can be human, mourn and remember. In childhood, many didn't have 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, care experienced researcher and co-author of In Care and Incredible. They recently led a University of Oxford, Nuffield Department of Population Health co-produced research exploring the health and wellbeing of older care experienced adults. A few months after they launched their research, this government report came out.
They reached out beautifully to those who had participated and attended their research launch. They were thinking about those with lived experience receiving this different report, and how we might encounter it in ways the headlines and the reports release hadn't. This might be called "trauma informed/responsive," but to me it was a conscious act of recognition and care for the care experienced community.
For many care experienced people, grief is not only about the people we have lost. We can also grieve what we needed and did not receive. The love, care, safety, holding and belonging we might have expected in childhood. To be seen and recognised by others, and to have people and community around us. These absences can stay with us, sometimes long before we have the words to recognise them as grief.
Over the years, I've found different ways to understand and make space for this, including through my own experiences, relationships, and therapeutic work. Francis Weller's writing on the Five Gates of Grief, particularly the fourth gate, "What we expected and did not receive", offered one way of naming something I had already come to recognise in my own life. (See editorial note below.)
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.
Those experiences have helped me recognise the importance of bringing grief into community, where it can be witnessed and held collectively.
There is much to say about what has happened, and what 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.
For this remembrance, I collected stones beside the sea over the past few days and brought them together with a bowl of water. The ritual draws on communal remembrance practices, including one shared by Francis Weller.
My friend Dr Arzhia Habibi gave me this bowl as a gift. Her late partner, an activist, writer and potter, David Gee, crafted it. When she gave it to me, I hadn't connected that David's bowl would hold the stones as we remember others, but I am moved that his crafting and memory will hold others.
I'm placing the first stone in the water for the young care experienced people whose deaths 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, they were our community, 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 my sibling and others.
When it feels right, you are invited 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.
[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.
Carrying the remembering on
The stones I placed in the bowl that evening have now been returned to the sea, but the ritual doesn't have to end there.
If someone came to mind while you were reading, you might want to find a stone of your own. Hold their name or memory for a while. You might place the stone in a bowl of water, speak their name aloud, or simply sit with them for a moment. Afterwards, you can return the stone somewhere that feels right to you.
There is no particular way to do this. It is simply an invitation to make some space for remembering, and perhaps not to let grief remain quite so private.
If you have arrived here wanting to do something for the care experienced community, connect with the Care Leavers Association. The CLA brings care experienced people together, creates spaces for connection and collective voice, and works for change. You can learn more about their work on their website or, if you can, support it with a donation.
The stones have gone back to the sea. The remembering doesn't have to end there.
A note added October 2026
Since sharing this reflection, I have become aware of serious accounts from women describing sexual and relational harm and abuses of power involving Francis Weller, whose work has influenced some of my thinking about grief and communal ritual.
I want to acknowledge the women who have spoken about their experiences and the importance of hearing and taking their accounts seriously. I am particularly conscious that many care experienced people have themselves encountered sexual harm, breaches of trust and failures of protection by those in positions of responsibility, as reflected in the recent Royal College of Psychiatrists apology.
I believe in accountability and the possibility of repair, while recognising that this requires truth-telling, responsibility and respect for the choices of those harmed. My hope is that meaningful accountability and repair are possible, without placing expectations of forgiveness or reconciliation on anyone.
I have retained acknowledgement of Weller's influence in this piece, while recognising that many other people, experiences, and traditions have also shaped my understanding of communal grief. I am continuing to reflect on how I engage with and share his work.
For readers who want to understand what I've shared, I encourage you to read Accountability Beyond Banishment and A Shared Accounting of Francis Weller's Abuses of Power.
My thanks to Sandra Hilton for bringing these accounts to my attention with such thoughtfulness and care, and for opening a conversation about how we might respond without becoming disillusioned anymore.
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