Loss

What do we do with grief when the rest of the world has started moving again?

Grief is one of those things we know will be part of life, but knowing that does very little to prepare us for what it actually feels like. When we lose someone we love, particularly in the early days, it can feel as though everything has changed while somehow the rest of the world is carrying on exactly as before. People are going to work, making dinner, complaining about the weather and arranging weekends, and you can find yourself wondering how any of that is still happening.

There is no particular way grief is supposed to look. You might cry all the time or find that you can't cry at all. You might feel desperately sad, angry, frightened, numb or completely exhausted. You might even feel relieved, particularly if someone has been very ill or the relationship was complicated, and then feel guilty for feeling relieved. Sometimes you can be absolutely fine and then a song comes on, you catch a familiar smell or you see something they would have found funny, and suddenly there they are again.

When everyone else starts getting back to normal

At first, there can be a lot of care around a loss. People call, send messages, bring flowers and ask how you're doing. Then, quite naturally, their lives begin to move on. The messages become less frequent, you go back to work and the practical business of living starts again. The difficult thing is that grief doesn't necessarily move at the same pace.

There can be a strange pressure to appear okay, even when nobody has explicitly asked you to. You may not want to keep talking about it because you worry you're upsetting people or becoming the friend who is always sad. You might be trying to protect your children or your partner. You might simply be tired of answering the question, ‘How are you?’ when you don't really know what the answer is. This is one of the reasons having somewhere to talk can matter. Therapy gives grief somewhere to go when you don't want to edit it, explain it or make it easier for anybody else to hear.

Grief isn't always straightforward

When somebody dies, we don't suddenly remember them as a perfect person or the relationship as a perfect relationship. We bring the whole relationship into our grief. There may be enormous love, but there can also be anger, disappointment, resentment and regret and there may be things you wish you had said, things you wish you hadn't said and conversations you thought you would have one day but now never can.

This can be especially difficult when the relationship itself was complicated. Perhaps you loved a parent who also hurt you. Perhaps someone died while you were angry with them. Perhaps you had been caring for someone for years and alongside the sadness there is a sense of relief that neither of you has to live that way anymore.

We can be surprisingly hard on ourselves for these feelings, as though grief should somehow make everything simpler. Usually it doesn't. Love and anger can exist together. So can sadness and relief. Missing someone doesn't mean every part of the relationship was good, just as acknowledging what was difficult doesn't mean you loved them any less.

Not every loss comes with a funeral

Some of the hardest losses to explain are the ones other people don't necessarily recognise as grief. We grieve relationships that end, friendships that disappear, homes we leave and careers that don't become what we hoped they would. We can grieve fertility, miscarriage and the family we imagined having. We can grieve our health, our youth, children leaving home or the person we were before something happened that changed us.

Divorce is a good example. You may be grieving the person, but you may also be grieving Sunday mornings, shared friends, family Christmases, the house you chose together and the version of the future you had quietly assumed was waiting for you. Even when ending the relationship is absolutely the right decision, you can still grieve the life you thought you were going to have.

Sometimes we grieve things we never had at all. The parent we needed someone to be. The childhood we wish we'd had. The relationship we kept hoping would become different. The baby who was imagined but never came. There can be something particularly lonely about these losses because there isn't always a moment when the world stops and acknowledges what has gone. But that doesn't make the loss any less real.

What can therapy actually do with grief?

I don't think therapy should try to take grief away. Grief isn't an illness and it isn't evidence that you're failing to cope. When somebody or something has mattered deeply to us, it makes sense that losing them affects us deeply too.

Therapy can offer somewhere for all of that to be spoken about without needing to hurry towards feeling better. You can talk about the person you've lost. You can tell the same story more than once. You can be angry with them. You can miss them. You can talk about the parts nobody else seems to ask about. And sometimes you can simply say that today has been awful without somebody immediately trying to cheer you up.

Loss also has a habit of opening other doors. The death of a parent may bring us face to face with our own childhood, our ageing or the changing shape of our family. The end of a relationship can leave us wondering who we are without the other person. A miscarriage may touch losses and hopes that are much bigger than that particular moment. Sometimes the thing we are grieving today connects with something we thought we had dealt with years ago. Therapy gives us time to understand what this particular loss means to us, because no two people lose the same person, relationship or future in quite the same way.

When you catch yourself feeling happy again

One of the things people don't always talk about is how strange it can feel when life starts to become enjoyable again. Perhaps you realise you haven't thought about the loss for a few hours. You laugh properly with somebody. You make plans. You hear yourself talking excitedly about something and then, almost immediately, feel guilty. There can be a sense that feeling better means leaving somebody behind. It doesn't. You don't have to remain in the deepest part of your grief to prove how much somebody mattered to you.

Over time, something often shifts, not neatly and certainly not according to a timetable. The grief may still appear on birthdays and anniversaries, or catch you completely by surprise on an ordinary Tuesday. But there are other things in the day as well. Work, friends, family, laughter, food, music, somebody new perhaps, or simply the feeling that you are interested in your own life again. I think that is a kinder way to understand what happens after loss. We don't necessarily ‘get over’ the people and things that have mattered to us, and I'm not sure we should expect ourselves to. They become part of our story and part of who we are. The grief changes because our life continues to grow around it. And eventually, there can be room for missing what you've lost while also wanting what comes next…neither cancels the other out. You are allowed to carry the love with you and still turn towards your own life.