What we grieve

We often associate the word grief only with death. We perhaps also recognise that people around us are grieving when there has been a loss of an individual to fate and to death. However, that is such an incomplete and undeserved space that we give to the whole emotion and experience of grief.

Grief is something that we can experience across losses of different kinds. The experience can sometimes be the same, and sometimes even more intense than what we might experience following a death. At other times, it might be present only in fragments and parts of what we would otherwise recognise as grief.

And perhaps what makes some of these losses even more difficult is that there isn’t always a socially recognised space for them. When someone dies, we know what it means to say that a person is grieving. We know that they may need time, that they may not function in exactly the same way for a while, and that their sadness has a name. But when the loss doesn’t have the same visibility, we may not always extend the same understanding to it.

There are many examples of how and where grief can come up. It can happen when we have lost a person by choice, for example, following a breakup or divorce, or when family members have abandoned us and left us.

It can also emerge when we have lost a connection, or when a relationship is no longer what it used to be. For example, we may have had a friendship that we valued deeply and that was once very close to us, but over time, the relationship changed and transformed. Now, that friend and the space that relationship occupies in our lives feel very different altogether.

And sometimes, what we are grieving isn’t even the complete loss of a person. Sometimes, we are grieving the loss of what the relationship once was. The person may still be there. We may still speak to them. We may still see them. And yet, something about the relationship has changed, and we are left trying to make sense of the absence of something that technically hasn’t disappeared.

Perhaps it is children moving out of their homes and being away from their parents for a long period of time, bringing with it a sense of grief for the space that used to exist and what that space brought to everyone’s lives.

There can also be grief around futures that never happened. The career we thought we would have, the family we imagined, the relationship we thought would last, the person we thought we would become. Sometimes, what we are grieving is not only something that existed and is no longer there, but something we had imagined would exist and now never will.

Grief can also be present when we experience the loss of parts of ourselves. I think this is one of the most underrated areas that we ever speak about.

So often in clinical practice, we hear people talk about parts of themselves that used to exist earlier: how much they miss those parts, how they wish they could be that person again, and how they no longer recognise their current selves when they think about who they were in the past.

It is heartbreaking to not recognise yourself. It is perhaps one of the most painful losses that we have to make peace with.

And I think this is where grief can become particularly complicated, because there may not be a single moment that tells us, “This is what you have lost.” There may not be an event that we can point towards. We may simply look back one day and realise that something about us has changed.

Some parts of ourselves may have been lost because we grew up. They may have been lost because of developmental changes, or because of events and experiences that have happened to us. They may have been lost because we had to take up responsibilities that weren’t age appropriate for us. They may have been lost because there was a crisis immediately around us. It could also be a sociopolitical crisis that was happening and completely transformed the individual and their family, requiring them to move through the world in a certain way.

There can be so many factors that lead a person to miss or feel that they have lost a part of themselves. When they look back in retrospect, they may realise that this was something they valued and cherished deeply, and that realisation can bring a great deal of grief with it.

And perhaps grieving that part of ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean that we want to become exactly who we were before. Sometimes, it may simply mean acknowledging that someone we once were mattered to us. That the life we lived then mattered to us. That there were things about that version of ourselves that we loved, and that losing them deserves to be acknowledged too.

The stages of grief given by Elisabeth Kübler Ross are one of the most popularly discussed theories around grief. They have, in some ways, given us a frame through which to speak about grief and describe it as something that may involve different stages.

There might be a sense of denial, where we find it difficult to accept that a loss has even happened. There could be anger about the loss. There could be bargaining, sometimes wishing that something else had happened instead, or imagining that things could somehow have unfolded differently.

There could also be depression. And by this, I don’t mean clinical depression, but rather a persistent state of sadness that we find ourselves in, which can feel almost depressive in nature.

And finally, at some point, there may be acceptance, where we begin to recognise that perhaps the loss is real.

However, Kübler Ross also spoke about how grief does not necessarily follow a protocol of moving through all of these stages in a particular order. We can experience these emotions at any given point, in any way, in any order, and with intensities that we perhaps never comprehended or anticipated.

And perhaps this is important because grief is not something that we can always organise neatly. We can have days where we feel like we are doing okay, and then find ourselves affected by the loss again. We can feel acceptance and sadness at the same time. We can miss something and also know that we would not choose to go back to what was. These experiences can exist alongside one another.

Acceptance is also never necessarily the end.

Sometimes we might accept a loss and then find ourselves feeling angry about it again. We might experience sadness after having felt that we had accepted what happened. And all of that is completely normal.

What prompted me to write this article is how sometimes we might minimise, or not even recognise, the depths at which an individual might be experiencing grief because of any of these factors, or perhaps many others.

And how easily that grief can get lost in the day to day experience of life.

Sometimes, perhaps, it gets lost because we don’t know what to call it. We tell ourselves that it wasn’t “big enough” to grieve. That nobody died. That the relationship technically still exists. That everyone else has moved on. That it was our choice. That we should be grateful for what we had. That we should simply move forward.

But I wonder whether that grief ever really and truly gets lost. And whether we even recognise that it is grief, that we are grieving.

I wonder whether we give ourselves enough permission for that grief to exist.

I don’t know. Maybe we do. But maybe we don’t.

And sometimes, giving ourselves the space to grieve through any kind of loss, not only the ones that are visibly big, can be one of the kindest things that we do for ourselves.