ABLY SAVED OUR LIVES
before he died and they felt a calling to return with their cameras to document their odyssey through grief.
Their hope was that making the film would take them from a place of acute distress to acceptance.
“As bereaved parents we represent something unthinkable,” says Jane. “This is a situation that can’t be fixed but we wanted to be as creative and active as possible for ourselves and our surviving children in finding rewards where we expected none.”
In August 2015 they set off on their three-month American road trip to meet and film 11 families in the US and two in Mexico having appealed for interviewees through a bereavement charity and academic friends.
“It was very cathartic for us and the families also found it therapeutic because they had been coping in isolation,” explains Jane. “It was strange but by doing this we found we were also making it ‘OK’ for other people.”
Then came the challenge of editing 80 hours of some highly personal material into a featurelength documentary. “This is not just a film for bereaved parents,” says Jane. “It is for anyone who has suffered a loss.”
When Jane met Jimmy at film school in 1982, his son Joe from a previous relationship was just three years old and dreamed of having a younger brother and a sister. When Josh and then Rosa came along, the blended family was complete.
“Josh was just an ordinary young man although of course your own children are never ordinary to you,” remembers his mother. “As a little boy he was gangly, shy and wore glasses but as he grew up he developed incredible confidence and a very dry sense of humour. Kind, compassionate and gentle he was on the launch pad of his life and was having an incredible time.”
Josh flew to Bali in October 2010 on a trip which would have ended with a flight home from Delhi in March 2011. He had backpacked his way through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Laos before joining up with three others to ride from Hanoi to Saigon on motorbikes they had bought.
The accident happened on January 16, 2011, in a remote village when a man pushing his bicycle up a hill stepped out to avoid a pile of building bricks by the side of the road. Josh swerved and was killed instantly by a passing tipper truck. His death was witnessed by one of the young men with whom Josh had been travelling, who was behind him.
“We heard the news just after breakfast on a sunny Sunday morning,” remembers Jimmy. “The rest of the day was spent in a kind of limbo as we waited for Joe to arrive from London. We couldn’t tell him over the phone so we asked his best friend in London to tell him and they both arrived later that day.
“It was only when we were all together that we really felt strong enough to try to take in what had happened,” he says.
Joe, 40, was 33 when his brother died. His sister Rosa, now 25, was 18. “Rosa’s eyes were opened by his death with an insight into what is Daily Express Saturday May 19 2018 truly important in life,” says Jane, who explains that her creative family were united from the first moments of loss by the desire to do things their own way. Having never buried a child before they realised that they could find their own way to celebrate his vibrant life.
They decided to invite his devastated young friends to help create a unique ceremony which one guest described as “a collision of grief and happy memories”. Thirty of Josh’s friends from the nightclub Ministry of Sound arrived on a bus on the day of his funeral.
“None of us really realised the depth of feeling Josh engendered in his friends, many of whom we hardly knew,” says Jane.
HIS body had been repatriated via undertakers in Hanoi who included local banknotes in his coffin “to help speed his way to paradise”, she says. He was then collected from Heathrow by a local funeral director.
“Waiting for him was very tough. Planning the funeral was a distraction but seeing him lying in the coffin we had made was an extraordinary moment that we will never forget,” explains Jimmy.
After carrying his homemade coffin came speeches and songs composed especially for him and videos from his short life.
Through the Good Grief Project, the charity they founded in the wake of losing their son, Jane and Jimmy are about to hold their first Active Grief Weekend designed to help bereaved parents manage and express their grief by promoting the development of a new relationship with the child who is no longer here.
“We call this ‘continuing bonds’,” explains Jane. “It is about not wanting to cut off from the deceased but about building a new kind of relationship with them. On the one hand the bereaved are expected to ‘get over it’ as soon as possible yet on the other they find it almost impossible to continue.
“They need to feel that the emotional turmoil they experience is both valid and survivable, and that they can build a new kind of relationship with the child who is no longer present.”
She says that Josh’s death has proved extraordinary in many unexpected ways.
“We had 22 years with him but since he died we have learned more about what is truly important in life and I think of that as his legacy,” she explains.
“Although I would do anything to bring him back I would not go back to who I was before he died. His death has shifted everything.”
A Love That Never Dies is being screened in UK cinemas now #LoveNeverDiesFilm. To find out where it is showing near you go to: alovethatneverdiesfilm.com