When Words Are Not Enough and Further Reading on Grief

‘When Words are Not Enough is our attempt to bridge the divide between the silence that surrounds grief and the lived experience of the bereaved.’
Jane Harris 

Beautifully illustrated,the book explores their own responses to Joshua’s death along with contributions from 13 others who have also found solace from doing and creating new things following the death of a loved one.

‘Over time we have come to realise that our grief has been a series of creative acts.’
Jimmy Edmonds

Throughout history people have needed to talk about their grief, but much in contemporary society tells us that grief is a depressing, morbid subject. When Words Are Not Enough is a necessary counterweight to those who would have us hide grief away. In both word and image, all the stories told here, from visual story tellers who reimagine their loved ones depicted in their own lives now, to artists who have taken their children’s artworks as a basis for their own creations, to those who have found peace in their music and their poetry, to some who relish the challenge of diving into cold waters as a way of connecting with their children. All are very different and uniquely creative responses to trauma following the death of a loved one and testament to the value of a shared and more openly expressed grief.

Everything we do to attend to our grief, the authors claim is about accommodating the loss of a loved one into our on-going lives, of filling the void left by their absence. Almost by definition grief, they argue, is a creative process. It’s about making something new, something that didn’t and couldn’t have existed unless they had died.

With a foreword by Dr Kathryn Mannix, author of With the End in Mind and Listen. ‘This is a book about sorrow, yet it is brimming with hope. This is a book about loss, but it overflows with love and generosity. The community of bereaved people is as diverse as humanity itself, and this book is a gathering of their wisdom, guided and curated by the creative talents and parental grief of Jane Harris and Jimmy Edmonds.‘

‘The word I keep coming back to with this book is beautiful, not a word I would usually associate with grief. But this book is rich in detail and compassion, it is authoritative and kind. Through their immense loss and pain Jane and Jimmy have done an extraordinary thing and redefined grief as love turned inside out. They make grief less scary. I have not read a better book on grief.’
Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian

‘Such an inspiring book – full of moving stories of people who have found active ways to respond to their grief, from photography through to (my favourite) cold-water swimming. Jane and Jimmy’s ten ‘lessons learned’ about the loss of their child wisely reject any idea of ‘moving on’ or ‘closure’. Indeed, this beautifully designed creation is itself an example of what the book is all about.’
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, Statistician, University of Cambridge