Grievers keep secrets. Living in a culture that all but refuses to talk about the impacts of loss, we’ve learned that we have to.
We don’t tell you about the sick feeling of envy and disdain we feel when we learn you were celebrating your parent/child/partner/sibling/best friend’s birthday on Saturday, even though we lost ours years ago.
We decline holiday invitations and say no to coffees and dinners because we know you want us to be “over it,” or at least not to talk about it and dull the celebratory mood.
We have been distanced from countless friends and even family who simply can’t understand why we have taken it so hard.
We have learned to keep our grief to ourselves, which, for many grievers, means stepping back from society and into a life of isolation and loneliness. In 2023, The U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek H. Murthy, published a report on loneliness and isolation and declared the growing phenomenon a major public health concern. Citing an association with increased cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, anxiety and premature death, the negative health impacts of isolation were compared to “smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” To remedy this crisis, Murthy suggests increased efforts toward connection. If our health depends on Americans’ ability to create community, we need to get specific and clear about everything driving disconnection in the first place — and the conversation needs to include grief.
Grief is the energy created in the body on account of loss — all loss. With any change, proactive or reactive, there is loss. While grief is a universal human experience, many grievers find themselves feeling profoundly alone when it happens to them. Loneliness is defined as the gap between one’s desire for social connection and experience, while isolation highlights a sense of separateness from others. While this is a subtle distinction, it’s important to note, especially if we’re serious about solving for disconnection.
By the time the U.S. Surgeon General’s report came out, I’d been working as a trauma therapist in the field of grief and loss for nearly two decades. I was also six years into grieving my father after his death from small cell cancer and four years grieving my mother, who had died suddenly in her sleep while I was on vacation with her. Though I had long understood the power grief can have on a person, it was the profound confusion and pain of these personal experiences that spurred me to advocate for more education and support grievers.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a time of astounding disconnection, change, and loss. We mourned lives lost globally and lived our days with a pervasive fear of impending loss. Our office lives pivoted to work from home, and while many companies folded or experienced extensive staff changes, others were marched on with something like normalcy. Meetings started on the hour, absent the first ten minutes of the vital chit-chat that has always made us feel connected as humans. Rapidly, our whole lives moved online — school, hobbies, support groups, music, art and even church came into our homes with limited connection.
Many of us seemed not to miss a beat — “seemed” being the operative word.
To survive, we ignored and minimized our compounding losses — understandable behavior for a society just trying to function. We expected the grief to follow suit. For some, this worked for a while, but once vaccines rendered COVID less lethal and the instinctive fear and survival responses lessened, people began to feel. As is often the case, this included the hard, pent-up emotions that we’d compartmentalized during the time of acute crisis.
That’s the sneaky thing about grief. Initially, there are tasks within the immediate future that require our focus — funeral planning, obituary writing, etc. For many of us, busy is good. It gives us purpose and keeps us moving, but it’s not internalized the same way for everyone. Grief researcher Ken Doka and his team identified two different inclinations toward grief: Intuitive Grief and Instrumental Grief. The former is more in-line with the widespread expectations around loss. It focuses on emotion and an outward visible expression of the pain of loss. Instrumental Grief, on the other hand, tends to be more focused on getting things done. Both are needed, common grieving behaviors, and both can prove challenging for people supporting grievers.
Much like the distinction between isolation and loneliness, recognizing the nuances of both forms of grieving is key. For example, for the emotional or intuitive griever, support from others might feel overwhelming, and they often report feeling “too much” for others. This may lead to the griever downsizing the expression of their pain, if not the experience altogether. The functional or instrumental griever is often judged as unfeeling or may appear unaffected altogether; however, the lack of visible pain and capacity to function can be misleading, casting an illusion of health and well-being that doesn’t exist.
We lack even a basic grief fluency as a nation.
Neither form of grief is consciously chosen. Much like our instinctive fight, flight, and freeze responses, so too is our inclination toward a specific grieving style automatic. During COVID, our fight response looked like people determined to better themselves by learning to bake sourdough bread, practicing a second language, or taking on a plank challenge. By April 2021, we saw what “flight” looks like when a record number of people left their jobs during the Great Resignation before succumbing to the “freeze” response deemed “Quiet Quitting”: not being able to flee the stress by leaving work, so instead they sat steady at their desks, anxious and unmotivated trying to wait it out the threat. These innate responses originated as a safety mechanism, keeping us safe from existential threats, extreme stress, loss and harm. Just as our activating events have changed (i.e., an overbearing boss has replaced a saber-tooth tiger), so have we evolved in our awareness of this acute stress response. We know what it is and understand that it’s a hard-wired part of the human brain. It’s time we understand grief in the same way.
I recognize that it won’t be easy, especially since we lack even a basic grief fluency as a nation. But, as Covid taught us, we’re a resilient lot, and with intention and desire, we can learn many things, even another language.
Like all things in life, speaking about grief will be easier for some than others. That’s OK. Because just like language immersion in a foreign land, the more we hear the language of grief articulated, the faster we’ll gain fluency. In doing so, we not only understand our own grief, but we grow better equipped to recognize and support the grieving among us. Until we do, I suspect more and more lonely grievers will continue to disconnect and isolate, ultimately furthering the epidemic of loneliness.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s talk about grief and loss. Let’s learn together, and let’s create space to listen. Until we do, grievers will continue to keep secrets, not because we want to, but because so few speak our language.
Meghan Riordan Jarvis, MA, LCSW is an author, podcast host, two-time Tedx Speaker, sought after key note speaker, psychotherapist, educator, and consultant specializing in trauma and grief and loss. She is the Founder of the Grief Mentor Method. Her bestselling memoir The End of The Hour published with Zibby Books in November 2023 and her latest book, Can Anyone Tell Me?: Essential Questions About Grief and Loss, is out now.
