We all know what grief is. It’s the sense of loss that someone experiences when they lose a loved one. The death of someone close causes us a powerful anguish, and we call this emotion grief. The act of experiencing this is called grieving, and it is something all of us will go through at some point in our lives.
Simple, right?
Not quite. Grief as an emotion is one of deep sadness over the loss of something. We most often see it portrayed, as mentioned above, when a person dies. But this feeling can also come from other types of loss. If a person works hard and saves for years in order to finally fulfill their dream and open their own restaurant, for example, only to go out of business in the first year because of a global pandemic, the emotion the person experiences is likely to include elements of grief. They have lost something deep and meaningful to them, something for which they have put in a huge amount of work, and that loss could be no less real than the loss of a loved one.
But the grief itself can be even more complicated than this. For the above entrepreneur, a big part of the grief may come from the loss of their dream for the future. They worked hard for years, dreaming of the payoff when they could be their own boss and control their own destiny. They would become financially independent, win respect, and end up as a pillar of the community. When this falls apart, the feeling of loss would be immense. It would force the person to re-think their sense of self and their place in the world. Severe grief often involves this intense re-appraisal of self.
Or take the example of a soldier who is discharged for medical reasons. This person has just lost something that might have been very important to them, but it’s not a physical thing. It’s a part of their identity that has disappeared suddenly. The very way they think about themselves has to change, they have to accept that a part of their life has just ended.
Even when thinking about the more characteristic portrayal of grief, that of the loss of a loved one, it is generally more complicated than it seems. Let’s think of a 30 year-old who loses their spouse unexpectedly. Of course part of the grief would be over that person no longer being in their life, but it would almost certainly also involve the loss of the life they had imagined. No longer would they be able to expect to grow old with their partner, to experience the ups and downs of life together. The reality of their life has lost the shape they expected it to take, and it is easy to see the deep anguish this could cause.
Grief is about loss, not just in the physical sense, but in the metaphysical sense as well. When we lose something or someone important to us, we are forced to contend with the fact that we can no longer be entirely the same person. The entrepreneur is an entrepreneur no longer, the soldier is suddenly a civilian, and the devoted husband becomes the grieving widower. Some aspect of who we are changes or disappears. This can lead to physical symptoms, feelings of confusion or yearning, constant dwelling on the past or anxiety about the future (Angood, 2023). It is anything but simple.
So if you yourself are experiencing grief right now, try not to be too hard on yourself. It can take time to come to grips with a loss, whatever that loss may be. Adjusting to a change in your sense of self can be hard. And if you are trying to comfort someone who is grieving, have patience with them. Their loss may be deeper than you can know or they can explain.
Angood, P. B. (2023). Grief, Grieving, and Grievance — Growth to Move Forward. Physician Leadership Journal, 10(4), 6–8. https://doi.org/10.55834/plj.5358173944
