Helping people to remember - Memorialisation

This booklet aims to encourage hospices, hospitals and care homes which are supporting people at the end of life and families into bereavement, to think about how both formal and informal opportunities to remember those who have died under their care can be part of the meaning-seeking and meaning-taking processes.

Two ways that can help people find meaning in bereavement are through the holding of memorial services and making available memory books.

This booklet contains ideas and suggestions for both memories books and memorial services to help end of life care providers consider carefully how they can help people, through bereavement and in the years which follow, to remember a loved one and create a space in which they can do this, alone or with others.

The content has been based on a study of ‘Free-writing in Bereavement ‘conducted within the research project ‘Remember Me: The Changing Face of Memorialisation.’

This research project at the University of Hull was led by Professor Margaret Holloway and funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Ethical approval was granted by the Department of Social Sciences and the university. It also draws on the theory of meaning-making as comprised of meaning-seeking, meaning-creating and meaning-taking, developed through the fore-runner study, ‘Spirituality in Contemporary Funerals’.

This project from which this publication derives took the form of a study of memorial books and memorial services at 10 hospices across the UK. We are grateful to each hospice who allowed us to conduct research on their site.

We would like to say a special thank you to the following people for producing this resource:

• Andrew Goodhead, Spiritual Care Lead, St Christopher’s Hospice
• Claire Henry MBE, Director of Improvement and Transformation, Hospice UK
• Melanie Hodson, Information Specialist, Hospice UK

Published by Hospice UK in November 2018.