Jane Harris & Jimmy Edmonds - A Love That Never Dies directors' exclusive interview

HARRIS: No parent ever imagines that they will have to bury their child. When our son Josh aged 22 died suddenly in a road accident whilst on holiday in Vietnam we had to do just that. Designing and organising a ceremony to remember him and to say goodbye (we did it all ourselves without recourse to a funeral director) was probably one of the hardest challenges we have ever faced. But it wasn't until after the funeral that we realized how important this would be as the first step in our journey through grief. We were thankful that we had asked a friend to video the event so that after interviewing many of the people who had been there, we could put together not just a record of the event but a new memory for us to treasure. This film is now called 'Beyond Goodbye'. Intended initially as a family keepsake, it has attracted a wide audience from those interested in alternative ways of honouring the dead. Of course, grief doesn't end with the funeral. As a way of trying to put some perspective on our loss, we started to explore how other people grieve. This led us firstly to producing a film for the bereavement charity The Compassionate Friends (Say Their Name) and then to what would become A LOVE THAT NEVER DIES - a return to Vietnam to the place where Josh died and a road trip across the USA. A journey is the perfect metaphor for a life in grief so our desire to go travelling (as Josh had done) fitted well with the idea of making a film in which we could ask some more questions about how we grieve, why we grieve and why conversations about death, dying and bereavement can be so difficult in contemporary society.

HARRIS: We found most of our contributors via The Compassionate Friends (USA) but we also had help from academia, specifically Robert Neimeyer, Professor of Psychology at Memphis University. Not only did he introduce us to a number of his contacts, but he also introduced us to the concept of 'continuing bonds' – maintaining an ongoing relationship with the one who has died – something that lies at the very heart of our film – and a persistent theme with everyone we met. So finding participants was not difficult. In fact, we were inundated with offers to take part. Many of our contributors felt that friends and family were often quite fearful of talking about their dead child leaving them feeling isolated and shunned. For them, an opportunity to share their stories and to have their grief witnessed and heard was seen as a godsend. While we only had a couple of days with each family to get to know them, to figure out what we would film and then to allow them to open up on camera, we believe the footage contains an intimacy that filmmakers who are not similarly bereaved would fail to get, and reveals more of the complexity of grief than otherwise would be the case. As bereaved parents ourselves, we found we were immediately talking the same 'language'. So while if truth be told we were slightly anxious about hearing so many different tragic stories about the death of a son or daughter, in the end, our meetings were hugely comforting for everyone.

HARRIS: I love the scenes where Kim talks about how she feels when people ask her how she is - 'how do you think I am, my kid just died''. The pressure on the bereaved is to be silent and dignified and get over it as soon as possible but Kim expresses something that the bereaved are not supposed to share. Anger. Kim knocks that one on the head with directness and a searing honesty. She speaks for so many bereaved parents who feel isolated, sidelined and unheard. EDMONDS: Probably our conversation with Denise from the motorbiking family. Denise has a very strong community to lean on, yet her grief is still a very private affair – 'my love for my son is sacred' she says and the pain of her grief is sacred – it is hers not to be shared too widely lest it becomes diluted. And then there is Kelly, the mother of the boy who accidentally shot himself, who after just ten months has discovered how to 'lean into the grief' – not to shy away from the pain but to live it, experience every emotion that grief throws up and become stronger for it.

HARRIS: The biggest challenge for us was that we were making a very personal film. And at times we lost sight of who we were making it for. On our return from the USA and after about six months in the edit, we showed a rough cut to various industry professionals. All were moved and totally engaged with the stories we had shot. Our contributors had opened their hearts to us in ways that would clearly resonate with an audience … but … where was our story, why had we not revealed our own grief in the way they had? This goes to the essence of how documentaries are made - the requirement for honesty on both sides of the camera is a must. Technically difficult, but a requirement none the less. On our travels, we had found we'd been far more interested in recording other peoples' experiences than documenting our own. This is easy to do. But a personal documentary is nothing if it's not personal. And without our own story of how we have grieved for our son, this film was going nowhere. To correct this we engaged a third party to shoot two separate interviews with both of us. We had found that trying to interview each other on camera produced rather forced if not formulaic responses – we already knew the answers so there was nothing to discover for us or for the audience. In the end, this 'error' made a film with more layers and textures than we had anticipated and it certainly made editing more interesting and possibly the film is better for that. We laid parts of the film out as a letter to Josh but then transitioning from one timescale (our home life) to another (the road trip) also proved to be very effective story-telling.

HARRIS: For many the decision to come and see the film comes with a degree of anxiety, especially for the newly-bereaved but also for their friends. The expectation is that this is going to be a painful if not harrowing watch. But in general and once the film is over, the reaction from our audiences is one of relief - and we've had some very rewarding Q&A's. People generally respond positively to the film's underlying message of hope. "A Love That Never Dies" is after all, more of a love story than a death story. So we have had a range of responses. From an 11 year old who asked why grown ups don't discuss the subject and then saying he was going to bring it up the following day with his teacher. To a 90 year old woman who said she hadn't been able to grieve for her son who died 40 years ago and who wondered if it was now too late to start her grieving journey. One audience member shared that she went to her GP after her son died and was met with "well you know most parents who go through this will split up". This notion is fed by a certain myth that bereaved parents are more prone to divorce following the death of their child. This is mentioned in the film and is the reason that we like to attend our public screenings together, as a couple. We all grieve differently and Mums will grieve differently from Dads, so being able to respond to this question together and from our own different perspectives is important to us. We hope to allay the fear that a relationship might not survive, though, like all relationships they do need to be worked on. Other members of our audience have told us how they feel fundamentally changed by their loss. This again feeds into the idea of a fragile relationship. We are changed as people, as parents and as partners. How could we not be? Our relationship changed when our child was born, when we became a family. How can it not change again when that child dies? More than any other this is probably the topic that surfaces most in the discussions after each screening.

HARRIS: Presently we are fundraising to continue making short personal films about untimely death and life after loss. Who knows what we will find? Grief is often seen as a temporary phase following the death of a loved one and that after a while life will return to normal, that after a while we will find a way to move on from the death of a loved one, to find closure in order to get on with the rest of our lives. This doesn't ring true for us. In fact rather than closures we think that grief can offer up a number of openings. But this does mean that we rethink how we can now relate to the world, to our friends and family, but especially how we now relate to our child who while here in spirit is no longer physically present. Renewing and maintaining these relationships is a necessarily an active and creative process. So we have developed our ACTIVE GRIEF PROGRAMME a series of residential retreats designed to help bereaved parents find new and creative ways of expressing their grief. We introduce them to various disciplines including photography, creative writing and physical activities of which non-contact boxing is proving to be a real hit.