What is Grief?

Grief is normal. There’s some inertia in the way that medicine and society treats grief. Here in the West, most of us experience grief as something that you’re allowed for a moment or two — for a brief period of sadness and distraction. Pretty quickly, we’re expected to get back on the horse, as if everything returned to normal.

Those of us who have actually grieved know that it just doesn’t work that way.

Grief is part of the human experience. It is the process by which humans metabolize loss, digest our life circumstances, and segue to a new reality. If we allow ourselves to grieve, what we’re doing is we’re making loss part of our lives. We cultivate an active relationship with loss.

That’s a really key distinction for me in my own grieving. Early on, I thought I could hold my breath with grief, muscle through it, and move on. I later realized that this wasn’t possible. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to grieve so transiently.

In our society, we reduce our expectations of those who are mourning. Because we are so discombobulated during this time period, we’re not asked to act normal, per se. That’s why I love cultures that mark grief with clothing or an armband or another way to note that grief is ongoing. It’s a sign to handle with care.

The final thing to appreciate about grief is its varying magnitude. Personally, some of the larger losses for me include the loss of my limbs and the loss of my sister. They’re not terrifically different from other losses that I’ve had in my life that seem smaller or less significant. I think the adjectives of significance become hierarchies that we apply to our losses into our sufferings. We don’t have to do this. We don’t need to compare whose loss is bigger.

In some ways, loss is loss.