A Love That Never Dies sees parents come to grips with loss

WHAT exactly does it mean to grieve? Is there a certain way you should act? And how does the effect of that grief ripple throughout people’s lives after a person has been taken away? These are all questions sensitively yet forthrightly explored in this heartfelt and cathartic documentary that feels as deeply personal to the subjects as it does universal.

It follows the figurative and literal journey of co-directors Jimmy Edmonds and Jane Harris, a father and mother who lost their son Josh at the age of 22, not long after he went off to explore the world and ended up being killed in a road accident in Vietnam.

Josh Harris, who was killed in a road accident in Vietnam

It dips its toe into several pools of grief as these heartbroken parents, going through a pain all-too familiar for some, embark on a trip to the spot where he died and then across America to visit various families who have each suffered the loss of a loved one.

These include stories as diverse as a family of motorbike enthusiasts whose son also died in a road accident to a little boy who died while playing with a legally owned gun that he thought was unloaded. In their own way they open up difficult conversations about the need to assign blame and how that merely compounds the hurt once the person is gone.

There’s a lovely sense throughout the film of putting a life into context, feeling utterly personal to Edmonds and Harris yet inclusively universal – both in how it explores other people’s stories along the film’s therapeutic road trip and how it invites the audience to reflect on their own experiences of loss.

For Edmonds and Harris, their son’s sudden death on the other side of the world takes them to “a land we had not known before. To a place of strange silences and hidden anxieties. To a place called grief”, Harris explains in voiceover.

There’s a quiet courage in what they’re doing, a bravery in their open-heartedness that permeates a film positively soaked in a very specific kind of emotion; the bewildering sense of grief that can befall anyone at any time, exploring the relatable idea of wanting to turn back time, to go back and change that one moment that would rectify the pain. Is there a way to uncover what death means through confronting head on the grief that it brings?

There’s nothing especially fancy in the filmmaking style but the lack of showiness is actually part of its low-key effectiveness. It lets the themes and emotions, about how grief affects people in different ways as it “ricochets in all directions”, speak loud and clear.