I’m a Grief Educator. I Teach How to Grieve a Painful Loss

After my unexpected divorce several years ago, I was overwhelmed with grief.

However, my grief felt different than other losses I’d experienced. Desperate to “feel better”, I followed my curiosity believing that if I could better understand my grief, I could heal.

I discovered that grieving the loss of a loved one who is still living is incredibly difficult, namely because there are no societal norms to engage in, such as writing a eulogy or honoring them publicly with a funeral.

Like me in the early onset of my grief, I often find that grievers want to feel better and are looking to understand how to “get through” or “get over” grief.

Whether falsely taught or implied, many of us believe that to heal, we have to “let go” of our loved one or “move on” from our loss, but that isn’t true—and why would we want it to be?

Grief is a normal and natural response to loss and is proportionate to the love we have for the person or relationship we’re grieving.

In that way, while learning how to integrate our loss and reimagine life without our loved one can be painful, it is also an important step toward “healing”—and whatever healing means to you.

Our social media feeds confirm that we love to share about our “beginnings”, and we should!

Engagements, weddings, gender reveals, new business, etc. are great examples. But what about our “endings”? The engagement that is broken, the marriage that ends, the miscarriages, the bankruptcies.

Often, we don’t talk about our painful losses because we don’t have the language, or feel safe sharing with others. Adding to it, if shame or embarrassment about the loss is internalized by the griever, they often isolate and grieve alone.

I did this early in my grief and I understand why: We don’t talk about it because we don’t want to be talked about. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The more fluent we become in the language of “grief and loss” and the more practice we have at compassionately listening to grievers—without trying to fix or compare—the more comfortable we will be in sharing our “ending” stories.

Growing up in ’80s Cold War America, I remember feeling afraid at an early age. “Russian attack” and “World War III” held the top spots on my list of fears for nearly a decade.

It wasn’t until President Ronald Reagan ordered President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”, and the Iron Curtain later fell, that “quicksand” ascended to #1. That was 1989 and I was 15.

Thirty-four years later, I’m turning 50, and according to the recently published 2023 Chapman University Survey of American Fears, 52.5 percent of American adults indicated they are “afraid” or “very afraid” of Russia using nuclear weapons.

This ranks third in the top 10, with “Corrupt government officials”, “Economic/financial collapse”, and “The US becoming involved in another world war”.

But it was numbers five and six—”People I love becoming seriously ill” and “People I love dying”—I found most significant.

Though I wasn’t surprised to find “quicksand” excluded from the list, another omission did give me pause. I scanned the full list of 100, until I finally found it, way down at fear number 66: “Dying”.

At first glance, this may seem curious, but a closer look reflects a sad state of American grief literacy. That’s because what this data really reveals is that we are more afraid of grief than we are of death.

It’s easy to understand why: We simply don’t talk about death. Perhaps we don’t discuss death and dying because it wasn’t modeled for us, or maybe we want to have these discussions, but we don’t know how. For many, it may be a topic too tender to try to traverse.

In this case, we opt out and evade emotional expression lest it make us—or others—uncomfortable. But to overcome this fear, we’re going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, at least initially.

We do this by learning how to grieve and how to support those who are grieving. Some ways to do this include:

• Naming our experience as grief and engaging with our feelings.
• Listening to grievers with care and without judgment.
• Not minimizing, comparing, or hijacking a griever’s story.
• Implementing compassionate bereavement policies in the workplace.
• Recognizing grief and grieving are onset by more than physical death, e.g., infertility, divorce, estrangement, illness, incarceration, identity change, and addiction.
• Connecting with grief groups and finding support with those who have experienced similar grief.
• Engaging in societal norms such as funerals and memorials, when possible.
• If societal norms don’t exist for your specific loss, create something like a eulogy or hold a ceremony.

Death is a truth of the human condition that we cannot escape. Since it is a natural phase of life and grief is a natural response to loss, investing in our grief literacy seems to be both a prudent and empowering strategy for overcoming the fear of our loved ones dying.

While we have little individual ability to thwart a foreign threat, we do have agency over our hearts and minds and can therefore learn to greet grief when it inevitably arrives.

Until we do, I suspect that grief and grieving will not only continue to occupy the American list of fears but march steadily higher in the rankings.

Stephanie Sarazin, MPP, is a writer, researcher, and Certified Grief Educator. Her book, Soulbroken: A Guidebook For Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief is the Gold Winner of the 2023 Nautilus Book Awards for Grief & Grieving. Connect with her at [email protected].

All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

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