How PUD began ...
Pushing Up Daisies was born in 2015 when three women, Mary Clear, Sue Robinson & Hannah Merriman decided to create a volunteer-led, community-generated festival with the sole aim of ...
Creating space for conversations around death, dying and bereavement
Mary, Sue and Hannah were training to become Death Doulas with Living Well, Dying Well. Death doulas, or End of life Doulas, are 'lay companions' to those coming to the end of life, and their families. This 'accompanying' can take many different forms, in fact, the three of them do it in totally different ways, however they overlapped powerfully in their belief that taking time, giving space, having knowledge and being willing to sit with the "difficult stuff" can radically improve people's experience of end of life.
But there was also a desire to put energy into a community approach to death awareness, one where space was given to 'the person in the street', where trust was put into those within our community who had experienced a close one's death, bereavement, caring, and of course, grief. They believed that too much power had been handed over to professionals - health care and funeral care - to decide the death narrative. None of them knew who had made the rule up that we shouldn't speak about death in public, and they didn't agree. Hence the beautifully simple and yet profoundly powerful aim of:
Creating space for conversations around death, dying and bereavement.
Creating space for conversations around death, dying and bereavement
Mary, Sue and Hannah were training to become Death Doulas with Living Well, Dying Well. Death doulas, or End of life Doulas, are 'lay companions' to those coming to the end of life, and their families. This 'accompanying' can take many different forms, in fact, the three of them do it in totally different ways, however they overlapped powerfully in their belief that taking time, giving space, having knowledge and being willing to sit with the "difficult stuff" can radically improve people's experience of end of life.
But there was also a desire to put energy into a community approach to death awareness, one where space was given to 'the person in the street', where trust was put into those within our community who had experienced a close one's death, bereavement, caring, and of course, grief. They believed that too much power had been handed over to professionals - health care and funeral care - to decide the death narrative. None of them knew who had made the rule up that we shouldn't speak about death in public, and they didn't agree. Hence the beautifully simple and yet profoundly powerful aim of:
Creating space for conversations around death, dying and bereavement.
This is us collecting the inaugural Dying Matters Awareness Initiative of the Year Award in 2016 for the work we did in our first festival.
2017 - Hannah, pregnant - at the hugely popular family-friendly event Waterside Wonders, which became a staple of the festival.
PUD 2019-20
After five ever-growing glorious festivals a move was made to doing PUD in a new way. PUD Central wanted to pull back on their commitment and so invited other people to step forwards. Change was in the air and a new way of doing things was needed.
Our community had come to love PUD, expect it, feel thoroughly invested in it AND also want it in different ways. People didn't just want the big events during festival week in May, they wanted them throughout the year, in the cold Winter months, at times when personal need arose, throughout the year. They wanted it as a way of keeping the connections, the energy, the conversations and the warmth going throughout. So the idea came about to...
create conversations around death, dying and bereavement with a year round programme of events
The community pitched in and we came up with a really lovely year round programme of events: some big one offs, some seasonal happenings, ongoing meet-ups, specialist interest groups and quarterly sessions. It all looked beautiful, then COVID landed. And for the time being, getting together was put on hold.
Our community had come to love PUD, expect it, feel thoroughly invested in it AND also want it in different ways. People didn't just want the big events during festival week in May, they wanted them throughout the year, in the cold Winter months, at times when personal need arose, throughout the year. They wanted it as a way of keeping the connections, the energy, the conversations and the warmth going throughout. So the idea came about to...
create conversations around death, dying and bereavement with a year round programme of events
The community pitched in and we came up with a really lovely year round programme of events: some big one offs, some seasonal happenings, ongoing meet-ups, specialist interest groups and quarterly sessions. It all looked beautiful, then COVID landed. And for the time being, getting together was put on hold.
PUD 2022 onwards ...
Pushing Up Daisies - the festival and the year round programme of events - took a break. A long break. 2022 saw the relaunch of the endeavour. A new Board was recruited and some new PUD Central members. The work began to figure out how to bring back to life something that remains so vital and so needed. As always the community makes Pushing Up Daisies. Get in touch here if you want to help out or just to share your idea for a topic or event you'd like to arrange or see ...
