Grief: A Brief Attempt to Describe Its Enormity and Complexity
Why grief became impossible to summarise
When I first decided to write about grief, I thought I knew where I would begin. I know sudden loss intimately. I also recognise grief in other forms: in aspects of a deeply troubled upbringing, in losing my father after a long illness with motor neurone disease, and in supporting and becoming the sole carer for my nan as dementia gradually altered the person and relationship I had known. These experiences were profoundly different from one another, and each carried its own kind of loss.
I know what it is to have an ordinary life divided, without warning, into before and after. I believed I could draw upon that experience and write something meaningful.
But the longer I sat with the subject, the larger it became.
Grief is not one experience. It is not even confined to death. It can follow an accident, a long illness, the ending of a relationship, a disappearance, a childhood that was never safe, or the gradual loss of someone who is still physically present. Even when two people appear to have suffered the same kind of loss, they may inhabit entirely different worlds of grief.
I cannot speak for all of those worlds. I can only speak honestly from my own, and perhaps use that experience to help us become gentler with experiences we do not fully understand.
Within a minute of beginning to brainstorm, the breadth of what I was attempting to summarise became apparent:
Sudden or unexpected death
Death following a long illness
The death of a child, including miscarriage, stillbirth and pregnancy loss
Loss through suicide, violence, homicide, accident, war or disaster
The disappearance of a missing person, where certainty and closure are absent
The ending or breakdown of a relationship
Estrangement from a child, parent or other loved one
Anticipatory grief while someone is still alive
The gradual loss experienced through dementia or serious illness
Grieving the childhood, safety or nurturing someone should have received
Grieving health, mobility, fertility, identity, employment or independence
The grief that may accompany a child’s life-changing diagnosis—not grief for the child, but perhaps for the future the family had imagined
The grief of losing a loved animal companion
Grief following migration, displacement or the loss of home and community
Grief that is private, complicated or not fully recognised by others
This list is far from complete. It is not an attempt to compare or rank suffering, but to demonstrate how many different experiences may contain grief, even when nobody has died and the loss is not visible from the outside.
What do we mean by grief?
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines grief as:
“A very sad feeling, especially when somebody dies.”
The definition is not wrong, but after considering the breadth of human loss, it feels almost painfully small. Grief may certainly contain great sadness, but it can also affect the body, thinking, memory, identity, relationships, sleep, appetite, concentration and our fundamental sense of safety. It may include sorrow, fear, numbness, guilt, anger, relief, yearning or emotions for which we have no adequate name.
Grief, mourning, loss and bereavement are often used interchangeably, but there are useful distinctions between them.
Loss is what has happened: the death, ending, absence or change.
Bereavement more specifically describes the state of having lost someone through death.
Grief is our internal and whole-person response to loss…the emotional, physical, cognitive and sometimes spiritual experience of living with what has happened.
Mourning is how grief is expressed or given form. It may be visible through tears, words, rituals, clothing, gatherings, prayer, music or art. It may also happen privately, through silence, movement, writing or even a scream released where nobody else can hear it.
These are not rigid boundaries. People use the words differently, and mourning does not have to be public or conventional. Someone who rarely cries or speaks about their loss may be grieving just as profoundly as someone whose pain is more visible.
Grief is what we carry. Mourning is one of the ways we make room for it in the world.
It is often said that grief is the price we pay for love.
There is truth and beauty in that, but grief is more expansive than love alone. We can grieve people and relationships that were complicated, unsafe or harmful. We can grieve an abusive parent while also knowing that distance from them was necessary. We can grieve the ending of a damaging relationship without wishing to return to it. We may also grieve the family life altered by separation, alongside a painful sense that we have somehow let others down. Sometimes we are mourning the person. Sometimes we are mourning what the relationship briefly gave us. And sometimes we are mourning what it should have been, but never was. Grief does not prove that something was healthy, nor does it invalidate the reasons we needed to leave. It simply tells us that something held meaning…through love, hope, attachment, longing, survival or the future we once imagined.
Grief is not a staircase
Grief did not arrive for me in an orderly fashion.
The familiar stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—are so deeply embedded in our culture that people can begin to believe they are steps that should be experienced in the correct order. But grief is not a staircase, and those emotions are neither compulsory nor sequential.
I did not experience anger, then or later. My grief was sorrow: sorrow for John, sorrow for what he had lost and sorrow for the life that had ended so abruptly. Alongside it was a fierce loyalty to his memory.
That loyalty did not require me to turn John into a saint or pretend that either he or our relationship had been perfect. I did not need to rewrite our history to honour it. My grief was raw, but it was also truthful. Love can remain fiercely loyal without becoming dishonest.
The book that gave me permission not to be okay
In the earliest months after John died, one of the resources I returned to repeatedly was Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand.
I listened to it on Audible around five times.
Perhaps repetition was part of why it helped. In the shock of grief, I could not absorb everything at once. Concentration was fragmented, memory was unreliable and even simple information could disappear almost as soon as I heard it. Each time I listened, something different reached me. I did not need to understand or retain the whole book; I could simply hear the parts I was capable of receiving at that moment.
Devine writes from both professional knowledge and lived experience. She is a psychotherapist, but she also knows the sudden death of a partner herself. That mattered to me. Her words did not feel like instructions delivered from a safe distance by someone trying to organise an experience they had never inhabited.
The central message I took from the book was that grief is not a problem to be solved. Some losses cannot be repaired, transformed into something positive or made acceptable through the right words. The task is not to remove the grief but to support the person who is carrying it.
That challenged so much of the language surrounding bereavement. We are often encouraged to heal, recover, find closure, look for meaning or begin moving forwards. These ideas may be helpful to some people at certain times, but when offered too early, or imposed as expectations, they can make a grieving person feel that their entirely human response to loss has become another problem they are failing to manage.
The book helped me understand that I was not responding incorrectly. I did not need to become less devastated to make other people more comfortable. I did not need to search for a lesson in John’s death, imagine a happier future or feel grateful for what remained. I did not need to want the pain taken away before I was ready.
What I needed was far more immediate. I needed people who could tolerate the reality of what had happened without trying to improve it. I needed practical care, food, protection and companionship. I needed permission to repeat myself, to be inconsistent, to withdraw, to cry—or not cry—and to experience whatever was present without measuring it against a timetable.
Most of all, I needed my grief to be witnessed rather than corrected.
Listening to Devine helped me recognise that the urge to fix grief often belongs to the observer. Another person’s pain makes us feel helpless, so we reach for reassurance, perspective or solutions. But reassurance can become a way of moving somebody away from what is true because we find it unbearable to remain there with them.
The title itself became a form of permission: it was okay that I was not okay. In fact, after something so profoundly life-altering, being okay would have made very little sense.
This understanding later influenced the way I thought about my cloak of grief. I did not necessarily need someone to take it from me. I needed people willing to sit beside me beneath its weight—and, when I could no longer hold it alone, to help support me without insisting that I put it down.
My own grief: held, protected and carried in the body
My grief cannot be compared with anyone else’s, not because it is greater, but because no two losses occur within the same life.
We do not lose the same person, share the same relationship or arrive at loss carrying the same history. There are differences in how someone dies; whether there was warning; what was witnessed; what remained unsaid; whether the relationship felt safe, complicated or unresolved; and whether the grieving person is surrounded by support or left frighteningly alone. There are practical differences too: money, housing, children, work, health, responsibilities and the sudden disappearance of the future we believed we were living towards.
Even two people grieving the same person will not experience the same grief.
John’s death was sudden. In one moment, the shape of my life changed completely. For a long time, the only way I could describe my grief was as a cloak. It felt as though something unbearably heavy had been placed around me without warning. I carried it everywhere. It was invisible to other people, but I could feel its weight in almost everything I did.
And yet, as painful as that cloak was, I did not necessarily want somebody to take it from me.
The people around me loved me and understandably wanted to ease my pain. They wanted to help me feel better, distract me, encourage me forwards or somehow lift some of what I was carrying. But there were times when I did not want to be moved away from my grief.
In some strange and deeply personal way, I wanted to nurture it.
Not because I wanted to suffer, but because the pain felt connected to the enormity of both the love and the loss. My grief belonged to John too. Carrying it felt, for a time, like one of the few ways I could still honour him, honour what we had shared and acknowledge that something profoundly important had been taken from my life.
My first real cry came two days after John died. I was alone in the shower when my body simply crumpled. There was no deliberate decision to allow the tears and no recognisable “stage” being completed. Privacy gave me somewhere to collapse without being watched, comforted or required to explain what was happening.
The circle around me
Within that devastation, I was also extraordinarily cared for. Food parcels arrived when feeding myself required more thought than I possessed. Friends flew in and gathered around me, protecting me when I could not have protected myself.
I had come across an unattributed passage about the way elephants protect the vulnerable members of their herd. When danger is sensed, they gather into what is known as an “alert circle”, placing the more vulnerable elephant within it while the others face outwards towards the threat.
The image stayed with me. Sometimes we are the one in the middle, unable to protect ourselves. At other times, we are part of the circle, standing guard, holding our ground and offering whatever protection we can. The roles may change, but the circle remains.
That is how I remember my friends in those earliest days. I was the one in the middle, and they formed a shield around me. They could not remove what had happened, nor could they take away the cloak I was carrying. But they could stand between me and some of what came next. They fed me, watched over me and helped me survive a reality I could barely comprehend.
Alongside that care came the inevitable platitudes. Most were kindly intended; some were excruciating to receive.
People told me not to worry because I was young enough to meet someone else. Until they said it, the thought had not even crossed my mind. I was not worrying about whether I might find another partner. I was trying to understand how John could be alive one moment and gone the next.
Even through the fog of shock, however, I recognised something. Their words were not really about what I needed. They revealed their own greatest fear: that losing a partner meant being condemned to spend the rest of life alone. They were trying to reassure me with the answer they imagined they would need.
Understanding that did not make the words helpful, but it helped me receive them with less anger. Platitudes often tell us more about another person’s discomfort with grief than they do about the person who is grieving. Faced with pain they cannot repair, people reach for hope, meaning, replacement or a promised future.
Sometimes the kindest response would simply be: This is terrible. I am here.
Amid the chaos, I also knew one thing with surprising clarity: I would not make a knee-jerk decision to abandon the rural home and life John and I had created and scurry back to the UK. I knew that staying would be difficult, but I also knew that I wanted to stay. I did not trust myself to make an irreversible decision while my entire system was still reeling from one.
There was another part of those early months that I had not anticipated: the brutal administration of death.
I had to contact utility companies and other organisations, explain repeatedly that John had died and ask for his name to be removed from accounts. To the person on the other end of the telephone, it was an administrative amendment—a name, status or account holder to be changed. To me, each alteration felt like another small removal of John from the world.
I understood that these things had to be done, but understanding did not make them less painful. A whole human life—his identity, his history, his place within our home—seemed to be reduced to account numbers, forms and the word deceased. Every completed task was supposed to make my future more manageable, yet it also felt as though I were being required to participate in his erasure.
It was brutal. I was still trying to comprehend that John was gone, while systematically removing the ordinary evidence that he had been here. His name disappeared from bills, services and the practical structures of our shared life long before I was emotionally capable of letting any part of him go.
This is another side of grief that often remains unseen. Alongside the sorrow, there can be an exhausting administrative burden: telephone calls, forms, certificates, cancellations and decisions, each one requiring the bereaved person to state the unbearable truth again. What appears from the outside to be paperwork may, from within grief, feel like the gradual dismantling of a person’s identity and a shared existence.
When the body could carry no more
Yet staying brought its own demands. I spent the first years trying to make my immediate future as practical, manageable and secure as possible. I solved problems, organised, repaired, planned and pushed myself onwards. From the outside, it may have looked like resilience. Some of it undoubtedly was. But some of it was survival through relentless overfunctioning.
My jaw became permanently set. My breathing was shallow and guarded. It took perhaps eighteen months before I realised that I was taking air in but not breathing out properly. Beneath the weight of grief, I felt completely hollowed out, as though my internal world had been removed while the outside of me continued performing the tasks of a functioning life.
At the first Christmas without John, approximately nine months after his death, my back and sciatic nerve gave way. I was confined to bed, unable to continue doing all the things I had insisted I must do. I experienced it as my body finally refusing the pace at which I had been forcing it to survive.
I also endured excruciating pain in my foot for around eighteen months. I had three injections, medication for nerve pain, Doppler examinations and other investigations, yet no doctor or specialist could identify a clear cause. The pain was real even though its source remained unexplained—and, thankfully, it has now gone.
I cannot prove that grief or prolonged stress caused those symptoms, and unexplained pain should always be medically investigated. But The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk’s work on how trauma affects the brain and body, gave me a framework through which to understand my own experience. His work also explores body-based approaches, including yoga, as ways of helping people re-engage with themselves after trauma.
I believe that my growing understanding of the nervous system, breathing practices and restorative approaches helped my body gradually soften from the state of bracing in which it had been living. I cannot isolate one practice or claim a medical cure. But as I began to understand what was happening within me—and offered my body repeated experiences of rest, safety and unforced exhalation, something began to change.
Giving grief somewhere to go
During those earlier weeks, one of the most helpful pieces of advice came from my auntie. She told me to go somewhere private and scream.
So I did.
I screamed for weeks. I screamed until I was hoarse, emptied out and physically depleted. And yet, after the scream, something changed. Reality remained—stark, unavoidable and completely unaltered—but beside it came a strange kind of serenity. Not acceptance in the sense of being at peace with John’s death, and certainly not relief from missing him. It was more like the temporary stillness that follows when the body has finally been permitted to express something too enormous for ordinary language.
I wouldn’t prescribe screaming as a necessary part of grief. Screaming is initially an intense, activating act, and what brings relief to one person may feel overwhelming or unsafe to another. But for me it involved the whole body: breath, voice, muscles and emotion, without restraint. The forceful exhalation and release of so much held tension may have helped my system move through activation and towards the quiet that followed.
Perhaps its greatest value was simpler than any nervous-system explanation: I did not have to make my grief presentable. I did not have to soften it for anyone else’s comfort, find the correct words or extract meaning from it. For those few moments, grief could be as loud, uncontained and truthful as it needed to be.
The screaming did not remove the grief. It gave it somewhere to go—outwards, briefly—rather than asking my body to contain all of it in silence.
Resting beneath the cloak
The cloak of grief did not disappear. I did not practise my way out of loving John or leave my loss behind. Nor did I need to surrender my grief in order for my body to begin resting.
Over time, the cloak became lighter—or perhaps I became more accustomed to carrying it. Its weight and texture changed, but I am not sure I would ever have wanted it removed entirely. Taking it away completely would have felt uncomfortably close to taking something of John with it.
I first came across Yoga Nidra almost by chance while browsing online. I knew very little about it, but something prompted me to try a practice. For the first time amid all the shock, chaos and relentless activity, I felt as though my whole body and mind were able to rest.
It did not take away my grief or ask me to feel differently about what had happened. It simply offered a pause from the effort of carrying everything—a brief experience of being supported rather than having to hold myself together.
That first practice became part of a much longer process of learning to listen to my body, understand my nervous system and allow rest without interpreting it as surrender. It eventually led me to train as a Yoga Nidra teacher myself.
The image of the cloak later shaped a practice I created for grief. It does not ask the listener to take the cloak off. There is no instruction to let go, move on, find meaning, think positively or imagine grief becoming lighter.
Instead, it asks something much gentler:
What if the cloak could remain, but for a few minutes you did not have to carry all of its weight alone?
Through awareness of the body, gravity and the ground beneath it, the practice offers somewhere to rest beneath what is being carried, without asking for any part of the grief to be surrendered.
In many ways, that is also what my friends offered me. They did not take my grief away. They formed a circle around me and helped support me beneath its weight until I could carry more of it myself.
My experience is not a template for grief. It is simply one account of how sudden loss lived within one particular body and life: mine. Others will carry grief differently, which is precisely why comparison serves no one.
If you are grieving, you do not have to carry everything privately or prove that you are coping. Support may come from trusted friends, family, a bereavement group, your doctor, a counsellor or someone within your spiritual or community life. The right support should not hurry you, correct you or ask you to make your grief more comfortable for other people. It should help you feel less alone within what is already true.
There is also no failure in needing more support as time passes. Sometimes it is only after the immediate practical demands have quietened, or after everyone else appears to have returned to ordinary life, that the full weight of loss becomes apparent. You remain deserving of care, whether your loss happened yesterday, several years ago or long enough ago that others assume you should no longer need to speak about it.
What we can offer each other is not a judgement about how grief should look, nor an instruction to become less sad. We can bring food. We can stay nearby. We can face outwards for a while. We can help create a place of safety beneath what cannot yet be carried alone.
Perhaps, sometimes, that is enough.
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