Scott lost his brother, and best friend, Craig, to Duchenne muscular dystrophy when they were young adults. Now, Scott is drawing on his own experiences of grief and loss to create ‘Where the Shadow Ends’, a short film inspired by his relationship with Craig.
My brother, my best friend: learning to live with grief
I have six siblings, but me and Craig were only three years apart, so I was always closest with him. We shared a bedroom from the day I was born, and although we fought like any brothers, he was my best friend.
Craig loved wrestling and cars. He was cheeky, always smiling and cracking jokes, often with a very dark sense of humour. He also taught me some of the most important lessons I’ve carried through life.
“As a teenager, I struggled to accept people smoking; it felt like they were taking their health for granted. But Craig was so understanding even at 20, and he told me to simply “let people live.” It was a small comment, but I’ve never forgotten it.”
Losing my brother
I lost Craig when he was 22 and I was 19. He died just two months after we lost our father, while our mother died when I was ten. It was an overwhelming amount of loss in a very short space of time.
Even as his condition became more serious, Craig remained my big brother right to the end – strong, loving and still looking out for me. I was devastated when he died, but fortunate to have wonderful people around me. My drama group organised a gala concert called ‘Seasons of Love’ to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy UK, which took place at our theatre in Llanelli, where we grew up.
I live in London now, but return home regularly and visit Craig’s grave, where he’s buried with our mother and grandmother. I have little reminders of him all over my house to ground me and reconnect me with where I come from.
Telling my grief journey
For the past four years, I’ve been writing a short film called ‘Where the Shadow Ends’. It’s partly autobiographical. The central character is Dan, who I’ll be playing myself, and his brother is Rob, Craig’s first name.
The film begins after Dan has recently lost Rob. Desperate to feel close to his brother, he tries different ways of finding reassurance, including visiting a psychic. That scene is inspired almost word for word by my own experience visiting what I now know to be a comically fake psychic.
At the heart of the story is Dan’s struggle to visit his brother’s grave because doing so means accepting that he’s really gone. Although the subject is painful, I didn’t want the film to be relentlessly heavy. Grief can be absurd, and sometimes laughter brings as much release as tears.
“When I remember Craig, I don’t just remember his illness or his death. I remember his jokes, his cheekiness, his love of cars and wrestling, and the person he was.”
We’re aiming to shoot the film in early autumn and premiere it in April 2027 at the same Llanelli theatre that hosted ‘Seasons of Love’. It will be partly bilingual, and we hope to take it to festivals in Wales, across the UK and internationally.
Learning to live with grief
I hope people recognise something of their own experience in Dan’s journey. Every loss is different, but grief can make you feel completely alone. In the final scene, Dan reaches the graveyard and sees people of different ages mourning parents, partners and children. He realises that although grief can feel incredibly lonely, he isn’t alone in carrying it.
People often say you learn to live with grief. To me, that means learning to let other people support you and finding a way to carry someone’s absence without losing the love and memories they left behind. Craig was the greatest influence on my life, and ‘Where the Shadow Ends’ is one way of keeping his memory close, honouring what he taught me and sharing a story that I hope might help somebody else feel a little less alone.
