Stephen J Barlow

All Things Stephen J Barlow

On the 6 th of April 2017, just after 10.30am on a sunny Spring morning, Stephen Barlow receives a call that changes everything. His younger brother has collapsed at work and 'it's serious'. Within minutes, as Stephen quickly prepares to leave his Hertfordshire home and journey to the hospital some hundred and sixty miles away, the phone rings again. He is told his brother has died. He was fifty-two. In this adapted but uncensored journal, stage performer and therapist Stephen Barlow presents a raw and unexpurgatedpicture of that day and the full year that follows, vividly capturing the immediacy, the shock and the relentless unpredictability of the grief and loss experience. While the journal was initially written, as most journals are, for personal use and process only, a return to the text some time later revealed that it touched thematically upon many critical issues that will impact all of us when we too encounter loss in our lives. Disenfranchised grief, sibling loss, cultural failings, the significance of ritual and the price we pay for love and belonging are just a scattering of the issues that the journal ultimately and inadvertently addresses in the course of the year long journey. While we will all confront grief and loss in uniquely different ways, the hope here is that within the pages of just one person's story you may at times find yourself on common ground and on that ground, feel kinship, community and a sense of connection at a time that can so often leave us stranded and feeling brutally alone.