More Than Death: Understanding Grief in All Its Forms

As a therapist, I talk about grief a lot. And after years of clinical work, and after recently teaching grief and loss to master’s level social workers, I keep coming back to the realization that we don’t actually know how to talk about grief.

Most of us think grief means losing someone to death. And yes, that’s real, that’s heavy, that’s grief. But grief is so much bigger than that. It’s the response to any significant loss, and loss takes more shapes than we give it credit for.

There’s the grief of a friendship that ended. The grief of letting go of a dream you can’t pursue anymore. The grief of leaving home, whether that’s a country or just a house down the street. There’s even grief tucked inside joyful things, like becoming a parent, getting married, where you’re also mourning a version of yourself that no longer exists. And there’s grief for something you never even had: the relationship with a parent or sibling you always hoped for but realized, after years of trying, just isn’t going to happen.

Some of the heaviest grief doesn’t get a name at all. Ambiguous loss is what happens when someone is physically here but emotionally gone, dementia, addiction, or emotionally present but physically absent, like estrangement or incarceration. Disenfranchised grief is the kind that society doesn’t fully validate, a miscarriage, a pet, a divorce, a job. The kind where you almost feel like you need permission to be sad.

In our community, we hold grief with so much beauty. Velorios. Novenarios. El Día de losMuertos. Traditions that say: you are not meant to grieve alone. But we also carry messages like hay que ser fuerte, be strong, that can quietly teach us, especially our men, to push grief underground. And grief that goes underground doesn’t disappear. It just shows up somewhere else, later, often in ways we don’t recognize as grief at all.

If you’re grieving something right now, named or unnamed, recent or decades old, I want you to hear this: there is no timeline. Grief isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a process, and it moves at its own pace, not anyone else’s.

I go deeper into all of this in the latest episode, including the well-meaning phrases we should retire (RIP “everything happens for a reason”), what actually helps a grieving person, and how to show up for someone long after the funeral flowers are gone.

🎧 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it resonates, share it with someone who might need it today.