Millie
Millie worked as a designer in theatre. Her dad Perry died in 2014 and her brother Ethan in 2019.
When Ethan died, she made headdresses for his funeral.
“Being creative is a really hard thing to do. It’s a weird thing in your grief because it’s something you have to put your heart and soul into, but your heart’s really broken. How can I put my whole heart into creativity? I don’t know but my heart was in it.
When dad passed-away from cancer and I was like ‘I don’t want to work in theatre it’s really superficial work - you make something, and someone destroys it’.
I couldn’t just watch TV like I normally would I’d have to be doing something; so crochet was a massive thing; counting the numbers, counting the stitches, counting the rows, and then something is formed from that.
When Ethan died, very suddenly in 2019, I was just like ‘well that’s it’.
Festivals have always been a big part of our family; we’d been going to Womad for years and years and there was a lot of fancy dress and head dresses involved. I would always make fancy dress for Ethan.
We wanted the funeral to be a celebration - even though it was a horrible, horrific thing that had happened - we told people ‘you can wear black if you want, Ethan would have just wanted you to be comfortable and wear whatever you want. We will be in our festival gear and we invite you to do the same’.
“I was like ‘I’m going to make this the best production I’ve ever done in my life’.”
All his coffin bearers had flamboyant head dresses that I made. All different. Some I had already, and some Ethan had worn.
With the help of one of my theatre friends we made over 200 and put them on the chairs for people to wear. Some people took them home, some people gave them back, and a few people wanted to buy them.
I continued making them after the funeral - every day I was just making head dresses, not for any reason, my head would bubble over - I just felt anxious and a bit overwhelmed so I’d be like ‘right I can get nice flowers and some glittery things, and I can create a head dress’.
Doing them distracted me from my own thoughts for hours on end - for days - I was just watching Netflix, making head dresses with no goal in mind or anything, just a coping mechanism.
I didn’t have to think too emotionally about it or be too involved - maybe someone will want it but if not, it can stay on my shelf and I can wear it doing the washing up or something.
People did want them.
I didn’t want to sell them but that gave me the idea of wanting it to live on, and wanting Ethan to live on, so I thought of taking them to a festival, and people wearing them dancing in a field – there’d be an element of Ethan being there.
The Shambala experience was great because loads of people did buy them, and I was going round the festival like ‘eek that’s mine’!
Ethan was living on somewhere else on someone else.”
Written by Faye Dawson