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Interview: Roger Greene, deputy CEO, AtaLoss

11 October 2024

‘In a culture where we worship at the altar of success, losing people feels like failure’

I’m not sure if I chose the job or the job chose me. We raise awareness of the effect of bereavement and provide a central signposting and information service. We train and equip community support through churches, in particular now by helping them offer the Bereavement Journey course.
 

I ran it several times in my church, as it was so helpful for me when my wife died, and I saw it benefit many others. I wondered why it had taken me so long to discover that society isn’t good at grief support. How did I get to my age and not understand what was happening to me?
 

I went on to write Dancing When the Lights Go Out, after which joining the charity was a no-brainer.
 

AtaLoss was founded in 2016 by Canon Yvonne Tulloch. When she was suddenly widowed, she realised how little she and those around her knew about bereavement, its difficulties and needs, and how hard it was to find understanding support. Yvonne had been trained in funeral ministry, but grief tends to be felt most in the months following the funeral.
 

As a society, we’ve not been good at talking about death. We’re loss-averse and death-denying. The two world wars and medical and economic advances are the major causes of our death denial. Death’s an inconvenient truth, and we avoid talking about it because it’s too painful. In a culture where we worship at the altar of success, losing people feels like failure.
 

We don’t even realise that we need to deal with grief, though it affects our lives so deeply.
 

We’re beginning to realise that change is needed, though, and there’s talk in the media about death, but this tends to be about preparing for death, not grief. We need to understand bereavement better — its profound impact on our physical and mental health — to help those left behind.
 

Grief — for a spouse, parent, sibling, child, friend, even a pet — is different for everybody, as unique as our fingerprint. For men, there’s a social expectation: “Boys don’t cry.” We haven’t been brought up to talk about our emotions. The course particularly helped me identify what was happening in me and process it. Identifying and naming our emotions helps us process them and deal with them.
 

We don’t lose the grief: we grow through it. We can recover joy and meaning and hope, though they may seem to have been lost.
 

Vicky had been diagnosed with a rare form of dementia in 2015, after a long period of cognitive and emotional decline. I was grieving then for somebody still alive — “anticipatory grief”. I thought that that was preparing me for her death. In some ways it did, but in most ways it didn’t.
 

In the months after, it was the practical and emotional help of friends which helped most. They would turn up at my front door with meals. Their phone calls and texts were also helpful, and one friend took me for a walk every couple of weeks. Some recommended books and validated what I was feeling. Books helped me enormously; but attending The Bereavement Journey was a rocket booster to recovery.
 

We weren’t meeting in church when Vicky died, because of the pandemic; so I wasn’t exposed to well-meaning spiritual platitudes; but others told me that that was a big problem.
 

Until recently, the only generally known help for grief was counselling, and there’s a growing realisation of the need to deal with unprocessed loss as well as current bereavements. NHS counsellors are generally oversubscribed. Often, people need to talk and don’t have community support; so they’re using specialists unnecessarily.
 

People think oscillating emotional or psychological responses in grief is mental ill-health, when it’s a perfectly normal response to bereavement. But unsupported grief can lead to mental ill-health. The Bereavement Journey helps most participants, and they don’t need therapy. If they do, they discover through The Bereavement Journey the areas where they do need it, to use the therapist’s time constructively.
 

I’m a bit of a professional polymath. I trained as a linguist, teacher, and academic researcher, but, though it was great fun, it wasn’t really making that much difference to people’s lives — or so I thought; so I applied for the brilliant NHS national graduate training scheme, and spent 27 years working in the NHS.
 

When it was time to leave, I was fascinated by behavioural science, and I became a co-owner and director of a consulting company, Tricordant, founded and owned by a group of Christians who wanted to see “captives set free” in the world of work. We worked with leaders in commerce, industry, and health and care sectors to create healthy, compassionate employment policies.
 

How employers respond to bereavement is one question. We’d encourage even the Church to look at its approach to bereavement support for its clergy.
 

I was privileged to serve as a chief executive in the NHS for 12 years. I wouldn’t have swapped that for anything else, but the NHS is now a very different place. The work I’m doing now helps people holistically, and I hope it contributes to taking the pressure off the NHS and local authorities.
 

I grew up in Liverpool, always playing on the streets with my mates, obsessed with playing football, and frequently breaking windows with misdirected shots at goal. Now, there’s joy in being able to help others who have suffered loss to re-engage in life.
 

I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. I fell away from faith, but always carried a certainty that God was present in my life. I got married in a Methodist church, because that’s where my wife’s parents occasionally went, and started going to an Anglican church simply so our first daughter could be baptised. I reluctantly started going with my wife to an Evangelical/Charismatic community church, and found my spiritual home.
 

Growing up, I learned reverence for God, but my first personal experience of God speaking into my life didn’t happen until I was 35, when I cried out to God in deep despair about my work. What I heard then marked my life for ever.
 

Social injustice makes me angry. I get angry about abuses of power in any sector of society, including the Church. And when I hear fellow Christians judging people whose lives they’ve never lived. . . If we can’t live in someone else’s shoes, we can at least take the trouble to try and appreciate what it feels like.
 

It took a while for me to feel joy after being widowed, but many things make me happy now: seeing people take joy in their relationships, and the way my grandchildren relate to each other as they play. That’s one of those bitter-sweet experiences where I can see Vicky’s legacy, but she isn’t here to enjoy it with me.

My meaning in life gives me hope, a cause to live for and people to love, and realising that no matter what happens in this life, God promises good in the end.
 

Many bereaved people find prayer difficult. I chat to God about my everyday experiences and relationships through the day, but I also have discipline. I never start the day without a period of quiet time in worship and prayer. Philippians 4.6-7 has been foundational; so my requests are always framed with thankfulness.
 

I’d choose to be locked in a church with King David, the man after God’s own heart. He was human, he messed up, he experienced massive adversity and persecution, he experienced depression and anxiety, yet he always cried out to God whatever his circumstances. I hope I’ll never stop doing that.
 

Dr Roger Greene was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.

Dancing When the Lights Go Out is published by Malcolm Down Publishing at £10.99 (Church Times Bookshop £9.89); 978-1-915046-83-3.

lossandhope.org
thebereavementjourney.org

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