ITV's "Anne": an evocative portrayal of grief and meaning-making
As a Therapist and Trainee Counselling Psychologist specialising in grief and loss, it was a pleasure to watch ITV's powerful, yet harrowing four-part series "Anne". Based on real-life events, the series documents one woman's grief and subsequent fight for justice following her son's death at the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. The series provides an often visceral insight into the longevity and pervasive nature of loss and the magnitude of the grief response after a sudden and unexpected death. However, it also conveys the power bereavement can have to propel someone towards a higher purpose and find meaning in the face of tragedy.
The chaos and uncertainty of disaster
The series begins with Anne's heart-breaking decision to allow her 14-year-old son, Kevin, to attend the fateful football match. This decision is all the more poignant for us, given our implicit knowledge of what is to come. This series portrays the chaos and confusion in the initial hours following the tragedy: the absence of effective communication channels, the immediacy of the press intrusion, the scale of the disaster response effort and the role of support workers and police who were supporting partners, parents, friends and family in highly emotional states. Anne's uncertainty over whether her son was alive or dead during the chaotic hours that followed the disaster leaves the audience with an unbearable feeling of agony for her and the many other families living with that ambiguity.
A face in the crowd: the importance of empathy
Anne and her husband's pain was intensified when they identified their (step)son from a line-up of polaroids of the dead. This moment felt particularly unbearable and traumatic. Having to look at a wall of faces, searching for a face you recognise, a face that holds significant importance and meaning to you, knowing that if you find the face you are looking for, your world will be changed immediately and forever, “shatterering" your assumptions about the sanctity of life (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). Faced with sudden death, the world immediately feels less safe, less kind, less rational and, perhaps, malevolent. Your fundamental beliefs in a good and predictable world are shattered. The proverbial rug is pulled from beneath you, yet the world keeps on turning. What struck me particularly about this part of Anne’s story was the critical importance of sensitivity, human kindness and compassion for the distressed friends and family members in the wake of a disaster. Yet, as the story unfolds, empathy felt like a luxury not afforded to the victims and their families.
Dehumanising and blaming victims: impeding the grief process
As someone still in primary school when Hillsborough happened, I did not appreciate the level of victim blaming placed on those who died. The focus was shifted rapidly from police inaction and possible negligence to the fans' actions. In doing so, media representations reassigned culpability to "irresponsible others". It was a way of making sense of a nonsensical situation, rationalising the irrational, preserving our natural human instinct towards invincibility, that the world is fundamentally good, and that reason can be applied to chaos. However, in doing so, the media, government and police dehumanised those who tragically lost their lives and impeded the relatives' ability and right to grieve. For many, then, the perceived injustice and search for the truth was an inevitable focus of the families' grieving processes.
Finding meaning in tragedy
Perhaps the most evocative part of the story was Anne's search for meaning, which is an essential component in working through grief and adjusting to life without your loved one. Gillies & Neimeyer (2006) suggest that making meaning from death involves a process of sense-making, identity change and benefit finding. The uncertainty surrounding how her son died led Anne down a long road to justice. Anne assigned significance to and found purpose in her son's death by fighting for justice, assuming her role as an activist, finding connection in a shared grief experience and writing a book about her experiences. Indeed, in the final episode, she suggests to her daughter that this sense of purpose and life significance had kept her going.
Unacknowledged grief and its impact
However, it is important to remember that Anne was not the only person affected by Kevin’s death. The series also evocatively captures how people affected by the same loss can experience and process it differently. The most poignant were the portrayals of Kevin's sister, whose life had been defined by her sibling's death and Anne’s husband, who grieved differently but grieved nonetheless and whose relationship with Anne was impacted by her grief and new sense of purpose. Both Kevin's sister and Anne's husband's grief and sense of loss go largely unexplored, which to an extent, speaks to the 'disenfranchised' nature of their loss (Doka, 1999), though I suspect was also beyond the scope and central tenet of the series. Their grief is less recognised in a society that privileges a parent's grief over a step-parent or a sibling. In this sense, it feels as if the death is considered perhaps less impactful to them both. However, irrespective of the nature of someone’s relationship with the deceased, a death is no less impactful, and can lead to long-term and lasting consequences that reach far beyond the grief itself.
Moving forward through grief
As a series, "Anne" not only did an excellent job of evoking the complexity and transformative nature of grief, but also the power others possess to provide a safe and compassionate space for the bereaved to support them through what can be a traumatic process. Grief and loss is a subject that is front and centre in the wake of Covid yet is still poorly understood and appreciated. The consequences of loss can be pervasive, but they do not always have to be life-limiting. Anne found a new purpose in life and built connections with a community of like-minded others with a shared experience. While it is never possible to replace those we have lost, there is a way in which we can move forward with our grief and find significance in life again.
If you’re struggling with grief following a bereavement and feeling stuck with how to move forward, have a look at my blog post: 5 practical ways to make meaning from grief