The Good Grief Trust: 10 Years of Help & Hope in One Place

When her partner, Graham died in 2014, Linda Magistris OBE remembers feeling “lost and alone”. From this despair came a desire to ensure “that no one has to suffer unnecessarily because they cannot access the support that is right for them, at a time they need it the most.” And thus The Good Grief Trust was born.

Since then, The Good Grief Trust have spent the last ten years building an extraordinary national network of professionals and influential ambassadors, with easy-to-access resources and expert advice. Run “by the bereaved, for the bereaved”, the trust aims to “normalise grief and raise awareness on a national platform”. Their website is helpfully straightforward, with resources organised by type of loss, support available, and guides about what to do when someone dies.

Grief is messy, complicated, unpredictable, all-consuming. It is a fog that impairs or vision and our judgement equally. In the midst of this, when we don’t know which way is forward, a signpost, looming out of the fog, can be an anchor, a guide. This is what The Good Grief Trust provides: simple, straightforward answers to questions we didn’t even know to ask.

“What do I do when someone dies?”
“Are there any grief support groups near me?”
“What do I need to think about when I am planning a funeral?”
“Someone I love is end of life…what do I do?”
“Will I ever feel okay again?”

With national campaigns throughout the year, in-person and online events, resource cards distributed to major hospitals, hospices, and burial grounds like ours, as well as QR codes on benches directing people to their website, The Good Grief Trust acts as a bridge between the bereaved and the support they seek.

This year, Linda Magistris invited friends, colleagues, and supporters of the trust to join her at Westminster Abbey to mark the trust’s 10 year anniversary. Tithe Green’s very own James and Helena O’Donnell were enormously honoured to join the celebration, spending the evening chatting to some of the most influential thinkers and creators in the grief and bereavement space. Everyone there was united by a shared purpose: to keep talking about death and grieving, the universal experience which none of us can escape and which none of us should face alone.

Tithe Green are proud to support the ongoing work of the Good Grief Trust and direct people to their resources by including resource cards in all our post-interment paperwork for families and installing “sit with hope” plaques on our benches.

To access their resources, visit thegoodgrieftrust.org. We are particularly impressed by their National Map of Walk and Talk Groups, on which you will find Tithe Green’s monthly Memory Mile Walks and Guided Grief Groups.