No One Can Grieve Our Grief for Us

When our son, Ben, died suddenly at 26, our lives collapsed. Nothing felt ordinary anymore. Thoughts of Ben arose relentlessly, minute by minute, and the reality of living without him pressed on my chest like a weight I could not lift.

Though we were inwardly shattered, life demanded that we move forward. But restarting even the simplest activities felt nearly impossible. Returning to work was especially brutal, and each unexpected encounter in the community reopened the wound, again and again.

One day, I summoned the courage to return to the gym. During my lunch hour, I stepped onto the treadmill and began to walk, then jog while watching the large television screen ahead of me. For a brief moment, I almost felt normal. What a relief, I thought. This is a small haven, a refuge from everything.

But the long-awaited peace was suddenly broken. A well-meaning acquaintance interrupted my gaze, stood directly in front of me as I walked the treadmill, and said, “I am so sorry to hear about your son’s passing.” That alone would have been acceptable. But it was followed by questions, then requests for details about how Ben died.

It was not the place, not the moment, and perhaps it never could have been, to explain my son’s death to an acquaintance. With each question, my heart pounded harder until I abruptly stopped the treadmill along with the interrogation. Wiping the sweat from my brow, I said, “I’m on my lunch break, trying to get some exercise and a bit of peace. If you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk about our loss right now.”

They looked taken aback and replied, “I was just telling you how I feel.”

I was stunned. In that instant, my grief over our son had been dismissed by someone’s curiosity.

The Private Labor of Grief

Another grieving person might have handled that moment differently. Why didn’t I? The answer is simple and profound: There is only one me on this earth, and I grieve in a way shaped by my personality and my soul. Each person is an exquisite amalgam of these two fluctuating facets of being, and from their union emerges a one-of-a-kind creation: a unique self. There is no other being like us. Therefore, no one else ever has or ever will experience life and grieve like us.

I grieve most intensely when I am alone. I grieve through reflection. I grieve by revisiting the past and reliving moments with the one I have lost. I grieve by searching for meaning in my dreams. I grieve by recalling conversations, by sorting through what was said and unsaid, done and left undone. I need time for regret, self-compassion, conscious self-forgiveness, and for acknowledging lost hopes. These inner labors require emotional energy and protected space.

I allow myself time to cry and, when necessary, to scream into a pillow or inside my tightly locked car. Unlike many people, I do not grieve well by looking at photographs. To this day, I avert my eyes when I pass photos of Ben or of our only other child, Lauren, who died 15 years after her brother, also far too young. Images pull me inward so quickly that before I realize it, my heart is sinking. And yet those same photographs, lovingly placed throughout our home, bring great comfort to Lark, Ben and Lauren’s mother and my life partner.

Given all this, whether healthy or unhealthy, typical or not, I accept that my grief is complicated. But as a psychologist who has had hundreds of intimate professional conversations with others walking this path, I have discovered something essential: There is no template for grieving.

I am continually struck by the singularity of each person’s sorrow. Personality and soul combine to create unique needs, fantasies, avoidances, passions, and temperaments that shape not only our perspectives, but our responses to life itself. My particular combination needs firm boundaries around intrusion. To ignore the way I need to grieve would be to dishonor my own soul’s passage.

Sacred Grief and Necessary Boundaries

Though no two people grieve alike, there are commonly shared elements. As a process of personality and soul, grief is always a deeply personal mixture of desire and fear, regret and love, joy and devastation—and the stark reality of learning to live without someone who once was essential to our world.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., a pioneer in death and dying studies, outlined stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, because we are all so different, we do not necessarily go through all these stages, nor in a prescribed sequence. Of note is the fact that it is possible to reach the stage of acceptance but never reach the end of the grieving process.

Couples often fall into the trap of expecting their partner to grieve as they do. A quiet tug-of-war can escalate into conflict and sometimes contempt. The answer is space. Sometimes this means physical space as well as emotional and mental space. Partners give each other permission to follow their souls’ private wanderings, even if for a time they must walk slightly apart.

Granted, there are some who deny grief, repress its emotions, and do not progress through it. But in my experience, the overwhelming majority of us engage in this sacred and laborious work. We simply do it differently.

When Others Try to Grieve for Us

Because of the uniqueness of our personality and soul, no one can grieve our grief for us. Even those who have lost the same person, animal, or cherished thing cannot experience the loss as we do. No one can crawl inside another’s body, mind, and heart to feel their particular devastation.

We can sympathize. We can commiserate. We can weep together and recount the cherished times, even laugh together. But we cannot fully inhabit another’s grief.

Yet some people believe they can. In their desperation to help, they assume they know how the grieving person should grieve. They offer directives: books to read, activities to try, spiritual paths to follow. They suggest a trip to the mountains, the desert, the beach. Their intentions may be honorable, but many of their ideas do not apply to the grief at hand. Private grief doesn’t respond well to a prescription for a type of ailment we do not have. And it doesn’t respond well to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Others do the opposite and distance themselves from grief altogether. A phrase I often hear, usually spoken with kindness, is, “I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.” Sometimes it expresses genuine sympathy. But even with good intentions, it unconsciously creates distance.

If a person “cannot imagine” it, they may believe it will be less likely to happen to them. In truth, most of us can imagine such a tragedy. We see it briefly in our mind’s eye and that very image terrifies us. So we turn away. The phrase “I can’t imagine” is a well-meaning method of gaining distance from the griever and the grief.

Time Does Not Heal

Though our son, Ben, died several years ago and our daughter only a few years ago, some people have said to us that the passage of time must have healed us. They are wrong. Time in and of itself doesn’t do the work of healing. The loss may diminish in intensity, but at any time, its emotions may arise from our depths like a volcano.

Others indicate, ever so gently, that it is time to put our losses behind us. In their sympathy, they say things like, “By now, you must be over the terrible grief.” But they are totally unaware that in my and Lark’s grieving processes, there is no end. Regardless of the passage of time, we are still in the grief process and will always reserve the right to weep anytime we need to.

From my experience with the hundreds of griefs I have been honored to participate in, I know that for a vast number, grief never declares “The End” like a movie or book.

Companions Who Hold Space

Though grief belongs to us alone and must be honored in its uniqueness, most of us are strengthened by the presence of those who listen without judgment and allow us to grieve in our own way, at our own pace.

These companions place no expectations on us. They do not rush us or correct us. They may be close friends, spiritual directors, ministers, priests, rabbis, imams, or spiritually attuned mental health professionals.

Their gift is simple and sacred: They hold space without steering us. They are receptive and open to whatever needs to be expressed. Instead of saying they can’t imagine our grief, they say things like, “My heart is with you” or “We stand beside you in this loss” or “I am here for you.”

Loss as a Spiritual Pilgrimage

In the spiritual life, profound loss tears holes in the soul. These lacerations must be healed if we are to be whole again. Just as no one can grieve our grief for us, no one can go through the healing process in our place.

This realization often brings unspeakable loneliness, even lethal isolation. Yet even at our lowest, the voice of love speaks life into us, reconnecting us to the divine presence, the only thing in the cosmos we can never lose. This presence is the ground of our being to which we are forever tethered. Our sacred relationship with the Divine heals those holes in our soul.

Grief as Teacher

Like our body, mind, and heart, the soul is ours alone, and it longs for the fulfillment of its destiny. Whatever obstructs our ascent on the spiral of spiritual growth must eventually be burned away.

Loss, more than anything, accelerates this process. When the soul meets loss with self-compassion, we rise. When the ego seizes control, it hijacks the journey, offering promises of fulfillment that mimic wholeness but lead us away from the deeper work of the soul.

Embracing our grief and living it authentically provides a more conscious way of being alive and a more conscious way of dying.

Listening Inward

Finally, grief calls us inward. It is not a journey to a geographical location but a pilgrimage into the Holy of Holies of the soul. This journey must be walked alone, though companions may help carry the weight.

If we can refuse to compare our personal movement through grief to the grief of others or to external standards, we grant ourselves permission to discover our own places of peace. We remember that pain is a teacher, and that healing comes through surrender.

In the end, grief asks something very simple and very demanding of us: to listen inwardly and to notice how sorrow lives in our body, our heart, our soul. We then move at our own individual pace. When we honor the particular shapes our grief takes, we step out of comparison and refuse to let anyone tell us how to grieve. We begin to trust what is unfolding within us, however painful or lonely it may feel. Grief is not a precipice, but a pilgrimage.

In that quiet turning inward, we may discover that grief itself, when met with patience and compassion, becomes not only an ache we endure but a teacher guiding us toward a deeper, more conscious way of being alive.