When I think about my childhood, I often think about my great-grandmother’s blue blanket, because every morning I’d wake her up by jumping underneath it. While my grandmother worked, my Nanny Edie became my greatest companion, and sitting with her under that blanket made everything feel, when things were going wrong, like the world was crumbling apart a little less. As a kid, my Nanny Edie and her blanket were twin symbols of safety for me, and as children do, I thought she was invincible – until she wasn’t. She died when I was 13 years old, and without her there to coax me through it, my world really did crumble apart.
We all deal with grief in different ways. My grandmother, Edie’s daughter, responded to her loss by throwing away all of her possessions, unable to manage looking at her things without ever seeing her there again. But as a young boy, coming home from my great-grandmother’s funeral without a trace of her left to hold on to was difficult, and meant I didn’t get to process the gravity of her loss. My great-grandmother’s death was my first real experience of grief, but looking back on it now, I realise that I never got the opportunity to truly mourn her.
This experience, and the death of my father by suicide nine years later, inspired my latest song Photographs, about that feeling so common in grief of regret, and wanting more – time, memories and, of course, photos. It’s an emotional concept backed by a simple, common thought: so often we wish after loved ones pass that we had more photographs of them to look back on. While filming the video for the song, I even learned that my grandmother didn’t have a single photo of herself with her mother. It only highlighted more for me the importance not only of capturing fleeting moments with those we love, but also of properly mourning those moments lost.
The reception to the song has proven that people need this kind of dialogue around grief. After Photographs came out, the hashtag #wishthatitookmorephotographsofus became a forum for those who connected to the song to share stories and photos of their loved ones. Scrolling through the hashtag is an overwhelmingly emotional experience, but also a celebratory one, full of life and love as much as it is mourning. Grieving can be such an isolating process, but the community that has built up around this song has shown that it doesn’t always need to be. It has shown that all we need to help us to discuss our feelings more authentically is the opportunity and the platform.
We need to be encouraged to talk more openly about grief. It’s not healthy to internalise it and suppress the significant, often life-altering effects of the passing of loved ones.
This is why I’ve launched a petition calling on the government to nationally institute a National Grief Awareness Day. A day on which people can publicly mourn and celebrate their lost loved ones, call for more education about grief, and engage with the effects of grieving.
If we recognise a National Burger Day, or National Blue Jeans Day, it feels like a massive oversight to not appropriately honour something as significant and universally felt as grief, mourning, loss. This day exists in the US already, and it’s my hope that we can soon do the same in the UK.
Since the holidays at this time of year can be especially challenging for those feeling the loss of loved ones, our petition is calling on the health secretary, Matthew Hancock, to commit, before Christmas, to a National Grief Awareness Day, and to hold the first recognised observance of it in a year’s time.
There’s something undeniably precious about proper grieving that binds us to those lost loved ones forever. When we lose someone, we want to honour their lives by taking the time to remember them, but taking that time to grieve can be hard when we aren’t setting any aside. I want to grieve for my Nanny Edie, mourn the photographs my grandmother doesn’t have, and to celebrate the love and care I felt beneath that forever-lost blue blanket. That kind of grieving is necessary to moving forward, whether flipping through old photographs, sifting through the things they loved, or just sitting with our thoughts of them. This is so often a private affair, but there’s a real desire – a need – to be public about it, too. We can change this by instituting a National Grief Awareness Day.
• Professor Green (aka Stephen Manderson) is a rapper and film-maker and a patron of the anti-suicide charity Calm. His petition calling for a National Grief Awareness Day, launched alongside Cruse Bereavement Care, can be found here
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
