Good Grief: How do we help families and children through grief?

Lance Alexander (0:01)

Best of Live Well ft.

Audrey Perera (0:03)

Lance Alexander.

Lance Alexander (0:05)

Good morning, Singapore. You know, when someone we love dies, it can be hard to find the words for our own grief or to comfort someone on their loss.

And loss can be harder to explain when the relationship is complicated, or when those around us expect us to move on. The Rights of Us Festival 2026 is a new community arts event, opening up conversations about love, loss and remembrance in Singapore. Through theatre, music and talks, it explores how we grieve, how different cultures remember their loved ones, and how we can support one another. It takes place on the 31st of October and the 1st of November at Common Ground Civic Centre in Bedok. So let's ask, how can we become more comfortable talking about grief? Audrey Perera, Director, Passion and Purpose Asia, and Producer of Rights Of Us Festival, and Darren Cheng, CEO, Direct Funeral Services, which is an advocate for grief literacy for children, joins us this morning. Good morning, Audrey and Darren.

Audrey Perera (1:11)

Good morning.

Lance Alexander (1:11)

Good morning. It's a hard topic to tackle, but let's see whether we can pull through. What prompted you to create a festival around grief in Singapore, Audrey?

Audrey Perera (1:20)

The roots of this are really personal to me. My family suffered a very profound loss when we were very young. Our parents passed away within weeks of each other, very unexpectedly. I was nine and my oldest sibling was 21

We had a lot of love between us and surrounding us, but what we didn't have was conversation, because back then people didn't talk about counselling, they didn't talk about suicide survivors, they didn't talk about all these things. So our lives went on with this huge silence, like an elephant in the room, because we had each experienced it differently.

Lance Alexander (1:58)

Did you find that you needed to support each other as well? Did you find it with your parents passing within weeks of each other? Did you find that the three of you?

Audrey Perera (2:07)

Six of us.

Lance Alexander (2:08)

Six of you? And my uncle. Did you all come together a whole lot closer?

Audrey Perera (2:12)

We did. On the one hand, we banded together and we supported each other, especially as the youngest. I probably got the most support because I was the youngest. But we never talked about it. That's the thing. And that silence carried over into the rest of our lives. It made us not able to have difficult compositions. It made us withdraw into each other, even while there was a lot of love. And then two years ago, I experienced an event about End Of Life Conversations. It was a series of workshops.

And here's a room with 12 strangers. And because the settings felt safe, the sharing was unbelievable. The sharing about grief, about loss. I mean, End Of Life will segue into loved ones, challenges, loss, grief. It was very healing for me because of the conversations that I was having for the first time in my life.

And it made me want to do something to create these spaces for people, to just learn about grief. Like, for example, Lance, we were talking about this earlier. We tend to think that grief is about death most of the time, but it's not. There's so many forms and reasons for grief, and that was something I had to learn as well because I didn't know that.

So if we could create spaces and opportunities for people to learn more about grief, to experience it, or even have ways to start a conversation which they never had before, that is what my vision was two years ago.

Lance Alexander (3:47)

I still grieve for my father who left us when he was just in his early 60s. My mom is into her 90s now, and she has dementia, so I grieve about not having these conversations that I used to.

I used to have a pet as well, and the pet died very suddenly. So that's painful as well. You find me looking at my phone and looking at pictures. So some people grieve in different ways. Some people grieve throughout because they remember what's happened in the past and what's happening currently. And it's difficult to put on a brave face because sometimes it's so, so difficult. Darren, let's come to you. As CEO of Direct Funeral Services, what do you find families are least prepared for when someone dies or is in tremendous amount of pain and is close to dying?

Darren Cheng (4:36)

A lot of times, they're not ready in the planning that comes ahead, because most people don't plan for their final chapter, their food stop, right? So when it comes to the funeral itself, they don't know what to do. And Singapore is a very blended society. We have mixed cultures, mixed religions. In one family, they don't know how to celebrate a person's life. So that's why we come in. We help find the middle ground for everybody, find a safe space for everyone to mourn peacefully.