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What do you do when someone you love dies? What do you do when a friend or a family member is the one grieving? Grief is a feeling most of us were never taught to talk about, and yet it’s the one experience none of us get to skip. In this episode I sit with grief in all its forms, including the loss I’ve lived through myself, and I look at what actually helps when you’re grieving or trying to support someone who is.
Why we don’t talk about grief
We tend to treat grief like something to get through quickly and tidy away. We rush to the other side of it, or we silver line it, or we go quiet because we don’t know what to say. The problem is that grief doesn’t respond to being hurried. It’s tied to love, and the more you loved someone the bigger the grief tends to be. Naming that openly takes some of its power to isolate us.
The many types of grief
There are more types of grief than most people realise. There’s the ordinary distress that follows a death, and there’s complicated grief that worsens over time. There’s traumatic grief after a sudden loss, chronic grief that doesn’t subside, and prolonged grief that lasts twelve months or longer. There’s disenfranchised grief, the kind that sits outside socially accepted relationships or carries shame, which is common after a death by suicide in communities where that’s stigmatised. There’s collective grief when a whole community lives through the same event, and there’s anticipatory grief, the grief you feel while you’re still waiting to lose someone. Having language for what you’re feeling can be a relief on its own.
Grief and love arrive together
One of the conversations I have most often in the therapy room is about milestones. Someone is excited about a new partner, a wedding, a baby or a promotion, and then a wave of grief arrives because the person they wanted there to see it is gone. Those future events will forever be both happy and sad. Rather than fight that, I encourage people to make room for it, to find a way to bring the person they lost into the moment, whether that’s a few words, a ritual or a quiet acknowledgement that you wish they were here. Once you let yourself feel it, you can move through it.
What not to say to someone who’s grieving
Please don’t start a sentence with at least. At least you had them as long as you did, at least they’re not in pain, at least you can try again. It’s meant kindly and it lands like a door closing. The same goes for they’re with God now or God needed another angel. What it teaches the grieving person is that you can’t cope with their pain, so they stop bringing it to you. If you don’t know what to say, say exactly that. I don’t know what to say right now is honest, and it keeps you connected. What people who are grieving actually need is someone to witness their pain and let them be sad or angry without trying to change it.
When you’re the one supporting, just show up
In the first days after a loss people are in a fog, and the kindest sounding question, just tell me what you need, is often impossible to answer. Don’t make them decide. Drop off the lasagna. Stand at the back of the service. Send the card. Walk the dog, mow the lawn, take the kids to soccer, put some meals in the freezer. If you do want to offer a choice, make it tiny. I’m going to the market on Sunday, do you want fruit or a couple of pre made meals, or both. When the fog lifts, people remember exactly who showed up, and that connection genuinely helps.
Why couples grieve so differently
Some people are practical grievers. They go to the funeral, they leave a flower, they shed a tear and for them the grief feels complete. Everyone else grieves out loud and over time. When those two styles meet in a relationship, it can cause real conflict. The practical griever can find the other person’s emotions too big. The feeling griever can decide their partner didn’t care enough. Often the calmer partner is grieving hard underneath and squashing it down so there’s someone left standing. Understanding each other’s style, without judging it, changes how you show up for each other. This comes up painfully after a pregnancy loss, where one partner may be ready to try again while the other is still deep in grief.
Grief bursts are completely normal
A grief burst is the wave that hits you out of nowhere. A car that looks like your grandfather’s drives past. You hear someone at the dog park calling a name you used to call. Suddenly you’re in tears with no obvious cue. These can arrive weeks, months or years later, and they’re not a sign that something has gone wrong. Our feelings show us what we value. A moment of grief doesn’t mean you need to take the day off or call a therapist. Sometimes it just needs acknowledging. I felt a feeling, it was grief, and that makes sense.
Anticipatory grief
I lived through anticipatory grief recently with my grandmother, who had dementia and was in a nursing home before she died. The woman I knew and made food with was physically there, and so much of the rest had already gone. There was grief at every stage. The visit where she no longer remembered my name but knew I was familiar. The visit where I was a stranger. The week of end of life care where we had no idea if she could hear us. For some people this stage lasts years, slowly losing a parent, a spouse or a grandparent. They need practical support and emotional support, and they need it for a long time. Take them to lunch. Give them a break from caring. Show up for them too.
Why its bad to compare grief
People compare grief constantly. I lost a child, I lost a parent, I was with my partner for forty years, I was only with mine for two. The grief that matters most is yours. Your loss doesn’t hurt any less because someone else is also grieving, and it doesn’t take anything away from theirs. When someone tells you their loss is worse, what they’re usually saying, without the words for it, is that their grief hasn’t been witnessed enough. No grief is better or worse than another. Yours counts.
Getting support for grief
People wait far too long to get help with grief. Two years, five years, sometimes decades, still in the thick of it and still struggling day to day. Often what gets in the way is guilt, a belief that letting go of the grief means letting go of the person. It doesn’t. The love is what keeps them with you, not the pain. You can get support through friends, family, a grief group or working with a therapist, and feeling seen and heard is one of the most useful things there is. If you’re carrying a loss, or you love someone who is, you don’t have to do it on your own. You can book in to work with a therapist at marievakakis.com.au/booking
Key Timestamps
0:00 Why we don’t talk about grief
0:30 The many types of grief
2:20 My first experiences of grief
5:30 Grief and love arrive together
9:30 What not to say to someone grieving
13:00 Practical grievers and feeling grievers
17:40 How to actually show up for someone
22:30 Anticipatory grief
Related Episodes
On Inside Social Work, I shared my own experience as a therapist when I lost a client to suicide: When a Client Dies by Suicide: Reflections for Mental Health Professionals
If you’re grieving, or you love someone who is, you don’t have to walk through it on your own. You can book in to work with a therapist a www.thetherapyhub.com.au
Keep the Conversation Going
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Instagram: @marievakakis
Website: marievakakis.com.au
Read The Full Transcript
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[0:00]
What do you do when someone you love passes away? Or what do you do when a friend or family member has lost someone they love and care about? Grief is a feeling that I don’t think we talk about very often. Sometimes we try to just get rid of it or skip over it, yet it is a universal feeling. It’s something we will all experience.
Welcome to This Complex Life. I’m Marie Vakakis, and today I want to talk about grief. There are so many different types of grief, and it can be a little bit confusing.
We have normal grief, the grief we experience when someone passes away, the normal sort of distress that accompanies that. We have complicated grief, which is when grief worsens over time. There’s traumatic grief, the grief we feel after a sudden or traumatic loss of a loved one. There’s chronic grief, a grief that just doesn’t subside. And anticipatory grief, the grief you feel when you’re waiting for someone to pass away. I’m going to talk a lot about that as well in today’s episode.
[1:00]
Anticipatory grief is a big one that I’m hearing people talk about a lot lately, and it’s something I experienced fairly recently while I had a grandparent in a nursing home with dementia. So I really want to touch on it.
There’s disenfranchised grief, a grief that sometimes sits outside normal relationships, that might be difficult to talk about, that might not be acceptable or openly acknowledged or socially supported. This could be related to the characteristics of the bereaved person, or something else that might not be seen as okay to talk about.
[2:00]
And then we have so many more. We’ve got disenfranchised grief, exaggerated grief, masked grief, inhibited grief, and collective grief, where an entire community or group is exposed to the same trauma. It could be a natural disaster or a traumatic event, and there’s a whole community that goes through that grief together. There’s cumulative grief, where things build one on top of the other. There’s prolonged grief, when normal grief lasts for twelve months or longer. And there’s delayed grief and absent grief. There are so many ways we can look at grief, and I know in my experience that we don’t talk about it very well.
My first exposure to grief was, like probably most kids, through pets or animals. I used to collect bugs and insects as a kid, and I remember one of them passed away. I put them in a little matchbox and buried them in the yard, and using icy pole sticks I made a little rest in peace kind of thing.
[2:50]
Then there was an event at my primary school where we had quite a traumatic incident. We came to school one day and there were news reporters and police and a whole bunch of commotion. Two students from the school had been brutally murdered, and then their father, who murdered them, jumped in front of a truck and took his own life. It was a huge collective trauma. While I didn’t know them very well, they were in different classes to me, it left an impact on the school and on the teachers. We had a memorial, and I remember the children’s remaining parent being there. It was quite intense.
[3:40]
So my first experiences of grief were the observations of others. Then we had family members who passed away who maybe weren’t super close, and then it got to grandparents. I had a little bit more life experience before I navigated some of those, but it still absolutely floored me. Losing people that you love sends through a whole whirlwind of emotions.
I’ve been wanting to do this episode for a little while, but as you can imagine, it can be hard to talk about. Some of the times I’ve gone to press record, it’s just been like, no, I’m not in the mood. So let’s see how this goes, but I do want to talk about grief.
[4:30]
There’s another thing. It’s not a specific type of grief, but when someone takes their own life and we have a death by suicide, that can lead to a lot of complicated feelings. In some cultures, if that’s seen as not an okay thing, it can be that disenfranchised grief, where someone is grieving the loss of somebody but there’s all this shame and stigma around it. I did an episode on my other podcast about my experiences as a therapist when I’ve lost a client to suicide, and I’ll pop links to that with the show if it’s of interest to you.
They’re really big feelings. When we add in the different ways people die, if it’s out of order of life, it might be expected that I lose a grandparent, but not so expected for a parent to lose a child. There are different things that can never make it easier, but some things are sort of expected, and how we talk about that really matters. So in the flavour of This Complex Life, I want to talk about what you can do when you’re the one grieving, and what you can do, and what not to do, if you’re the one supporting.
[5:30]
Grief is part of life, and it comes hand in hand with love. The more you have loved someone, the greater the grief, and they are unavoidable. Where I see difficulty is what you do after. We talk about feeling guilty, or not wanting to move on, or anticipating something bad happening again, and that can be really hard and really holds people back.
We’ve got foreboding joy, where something lovely might happen and then straight away we think about when that might get taken away. When you have experienced loss, you know what it feels like to grieve, so the fear of it happening again is really powerful and really huge. I don’t want to discourage people from acknowledging that, because we sometimes try to wrap things up quickly and say, okay, the grieving’s done, let’s move on. And no.
[6:30]
It can also be hard to move on, or to do things and sit with the grief, and all of that can happen at once. We probably really suck at nuance, at recognising two things can happen at the same time. One of the conversations that happens quite a lot on my therapy couch is people talk about an exciting future event, and then they get struck with this little pang of grief.
It reminds me of a story I heard of somebody being excited about a new partner, thinking about what their future might look like, we might move in together and get married, and then poof, a wave of grief, because they had lost a parent. We talked about how all of these future experiences, these milestones, will forever be both happy and sad. You’ll be happy in that moment, and you’ll have a moment of sadness that the person you love isn’t there to share it with you. Make room for that, allow for it, and honour it.
[7:30]
In events where you think, that’s the kind of thing I would have loved that parent to be there for, give them a way to be there. Give them a space, a time, a way that you communicate or talk to them, whether it’s through words, or going to where they’re buried, or some other way of acknowledging that you wish they were there. And don’t judge yourself for that. Don’t be cruel to yourself, saying I should have been over this, it’s been ten years, twenty years, whatever. Just know that I wish they were here.
Once you can feel the feeling, you can move through it. Knowing that those emotions will come together, the good and the grief at the same time, can actually help normalise that experience. At particular times of the year, Christmases or birthdays, you might feel grief even more, because that’s a time where you might have gathered with those important people, and they’re no longer here.
[8:40]
For me, the first Christmas I had without my grandparents, I couldn’t cope. It didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel like Christmas. There were certain little traditions and rituals that just didn’t happen. It felt really foreign, and it has never felt the same since. That’s still ongoing, and it’s changed. There are new family members, new babies that have come along, new partners that have been introduced, and it’s sometimes really quite confronting to think there are these amazing new people in my life who will never have known these amazing people who contributed to the person I am. That just sits there. I can’t fix it, I can’t change it, and there’s nothing anybody can say that takes it away. It just is.
[9:30]
One of the problematic things I see people do is try to be too positive and silver line it. Oh, at least you had them as long as you did. I don’t want to hear that. Do not start a conversation that’s supposed to be supportive or show empathy with at least. It is terrible. I’d rather you say, I don’t know what to say right now, than say something that starts with at least. And especially any comments like, oh, they’re with God now, or God needed another angel. That’s the last thing you want to hear. There’s no greater meaning to this. There’s no God collecting angels. That stuff is so unhelpful. Do not be overly positive. It doesn’t help the person. What it actually does is make it hard for them to talk to you.
[10:30]
They don’t feel happier or better, like oh yeah, you’re right, there is a silver lining to this. They just learn you can’t cope with this. What people grieving need is someone to witness their pain, to hold space for it. Let them be sad or angry, and don’t try to change it. Don’t try to take it away. Don’t try to judge it.
People wait sometimes way too long to get support for their mental health, and grief is one of those as well. I’ve heard different data sets around how many years it takes for somebody to seek support for grief. I’m not sure which ones are particularly relevant, but you would know someone, right? Everyone listening will probably think of someone they know who needed to get help a little bit earlier. Maybe they’ve waited two years, five years, ten, twenty, and they’re still in the thick of their grief, languishing, and it’s impacting them day to day, and some support could be really beneficial.
[11:40]
This is where conversations with loved ones and people who care are really important. I talk about this a lot in some of the training I run, like mental health first aid. We look at when someone’s mental health is declining, or there’s a flare up or a crisis, and how to respond. So being able to notice if someone isn’t getting back to their day to day functioning, they’re not able to enjoy what they used to enjoy. We don’t want to diagnose that as depression. It makes sense that if someone’s grieving it takes them some time to bounce back. But we also need to know, when do we encourage them to seek some support? Or if you’re listening and you haven’t reached out, have a think about why, what gets in the way.
[12:30]
One of the things I see get in the way for people is guilt. They think the pain is what keeps that loved one alive, that the grief keeps them alive. I get the logic of that. If you let go of the grief, then it’s like letting go of them. But love is what keeps them alive. Their memory lives inside of you. So being able to let the grip you have on that grief loosen, and allow yourself to remember the love, that’s what keeps them alive.
Sitting with letting go of that grief enough to want to get some support, or to move through it, is so important. You can’t force somebody. It’s when they’re ready. No one’s going to feel supported if you say, it’s about time you did this, or you should get rid of this. They just feel unsupported and judged, and it’s unlikely to have a positive impact.
[13:20]
There are some differences in how we grieve, and I want to talk a little about that too. There are some practical grievers. They attend the funeral or the service, they show up, they do the thing, they shed a tear, they leave a flower, they might write into a guest book or a card, and for them the grief is done. And then there’s everybody else. That can cause a lot of difficulty in relationships. I’ve seen it in my personal life, where someone is a practical griever and I feel like they’re not grieving enough, and I feel that my feelings are too big for them, and that creates distance.
In the couples I work with, this can create so much conflict. Understanding that someone’s grieving style is different from yours can really change how you show up for each other. If one person is a practical griever, they might genuinely find the other person’s emotions too big, and it’s important to sit with that. If it’s your partner and they’re going through something huge, finding a way to tolerate the discomfort of sitting with big feelings, so they feel loved and supported, is really important. And if you’re the person who wants to talk about feelings and process it, find a safe person to do that with, but maybe don’t expect your partner to do the same back if that’s not how they grieve. Try to develop an understanding about how each of you likes to grieve, so there’s no judgment.
[15:00]
Where I see this go wrong is when one person’s a practical griever and the other person thinks they didn’t love them enough, they didn’t care enough. This happens a lot with a miscarriage or a stillbirth, where one partner might be super practical, like, we can just try again, we can do this, and the other parent is completely in grief, needing a lot of support and a lot of emotional comfort to get through it, and they see the other person’s practicality as a hindrance to their own recovery.
I’ve worked with many couples around this, where they read it as, well, you didn’t really want this, or it didn’t matter as much to you, or you didn’t care as much. When I speak to the other partner, often what I hear is that they grieved in their own way, or they didn’t want to add extra stress to their partner, because if they truly showed how they felt and let those feelings take over, they were scared there’d be nobody to hold them up. If they both fell apart, who would be left standing? So some of them are sacrificing their own grief. They’re squishing it all down to try and be supportive or stoic, and it creates distance. So having conversations around this is really, really important.
[16:20]
One of the things I noticed for myself when I was in the thick of grief, I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but now I know it’s called grief bursts. It was when something would remind me of that person or thing. A car might drive past that was the same as my grandpa’s, and I’d burst into tears. Or now I might be at the dog park and see a dog who looks very similar to my dog, and I’ll burst into tears. Or I hear someone else’s dog with the same name, and they’re yelling it out, and it’s just a flood of feelings. It can happen randomly and spontaneously. Sometimes I might not even be able to recognise the cue, but there was probably one there.
So we have these grief bursts, and they can happen weeks, months or years later, and that’s totally normal. Our feelings show us what’s important. They signal what we value. Having a moment of grief and sadness doesn’t mean you have to call in sick or take the day off. If it’s a student at a school and they have a moment of tears, they don’t need a referral to a therapist. We don’t need to activate a whole bunch of support necessarily. It’s simply acknowledging, I felt a feeling, and that feeling was grief, and that’s okay, that makes sense.
[17:40]
One of the areas that really interests me is how we show up for people. The last thing someone needs when they’re grieving, especially in those immediate few days when they’re in a grief brain fog, is to make more decisions. I know it’s really kind when someone says, just tell me what you need, but you can’t think of it. I definitely can’t. So show up with what you can do, or just say, I’m going to drop a lasagna off, I’m going to bring this around. If you’re not sure on timelines, there’s a level of intense support needed in those first few days, then maybe in a few weeks, then in a few months, so space it out.
Depending on the situation, they might need different supports. If it’s a spouse that’s died, I heard an analogy that losing a spouse is like losing one half of a pair of scissors. You’re the one scissor, and everything feels foreign. How do you go from a we back to an I? If that person divided up household chores in a particular way, they might need practical support. They might need someone to help cook, or mow the lawn, or walk the dog, or look after the children. So show up. You know those people need to eat. You know they need groceries. You might know they need their car serviced, their dog walked, their child taken to soccer. So don’t ask, well, what do you need, or tell me how I can help. Help. Step in. Show up. Put some food in their freezer. Do what you think you can, and offer that.
[19:50]
Show up. Send the card. Send the flowers. Stand at the back of the service if it’s a funeral. We feel connected with people, and when we feel connected and supported, it does help us heal. Afterwards, when the brain fog has gone, you remember who showed up for those moments. You remember who sent you the text or the card, or was at the back of the service comforting you, or just showing their support. Those things really matter, so show up. Bring the stuff. And if you’re not sure, maybe offer, I can bring you food or walk your dog, I’m going to the market on Sunday and I’ll get you some groceries. Would you like some fruit, or do you want a couple of premade lasagnas? Option one or two in a text message. Or, I’m bringing you both. Make the decision super easy, or take the decision making away altogether. And give them a generous positive assumption.
[20:50]
Some people grieve with sadness and some grieve with anger. I know I oscillate between the two, and we don’t cope well with anger. People get scared of anger. They think it’s aggressive, or they get reactive, and that’s really a shame. When someone is grieving and they’re feeling angry, irritable feelings, instead of seeing that as pain, we punish it, we restrict it, we tell them off for it, we say, don’t speak to me like that, and we get bigger and more intense, and we miss it. So sometimes what people need when they’re at their most prickly is softness, a hug, the benefit of the doubt, a generous positive assumption. Give them some grace. Give them some wiggle room. They might be irritable, cranky, forgetful. They’re probably not sleeping, and they might be feeling shame, guilt about what they could have done differently. That process can take days, weeks or months to work through, and they need you most.
Sometimes we have an instinct to punish people when their feelings feel too big, like that’s somehow going to fix it. So we need to check in on our own capacity, monitor it and manage it, if we really want to be effective at supporting somebody who’s grieving. And keep checking in. In the days or weeks or months later, say, I know it’s been a few weeks, I want to check in about how that funeral was, or tell me about that person, or what’s your favourite story about them? Sharing those memories, keeping that person alive, is really helpful.
[22:20]
I mentioned earlier I wanted to talk about anticipatory grief, and it’s probably enough content for another episode, so maybe I’ll do a part two. Let me know if you want me to do a second episode. Anticipatory grief is something I experienced quite recently, having a grandparent in a nursing home with dementia. She recently passed away, my last grandparent, and it was a real shock, because in one way the grandparent I knew and loved and made food with, and had all these memories with, was physically there, but none of that other stuff was there.
So her passing away was still really hurtful, but it was also really confusing, because for the last few years she was slowly slipping away. At one point she was alive but no longer coming to family functions because she needed around the clock care. There was a point where you’d go to visit and she no longer remembered your name, but recognised you as someone familiar. Another visit, you were a complete stranger. Another visit, words wouldn’t come out, she made no logical sense in conversation. So there was this grief about losing these connection points along the way, knowing what was inevitably going to happen, and also knowing she’s here now, so how do we make the most of that, while knowing the time is coming.
[23:50]
That got even sharper and more painful in the week leading up to her death. Being in end of life care, being told that we’re just making her comfortable, and having no idea if she knew we were there, if she could hear us, if she was asleep or unconscious, or what was happening. So that kind of grief is deep and profound, and it requires consideration and support. If someone is going through that anticipatory grief, that stage could last a long time. For some people, I’ve seen them slowly lose a spouse or a grandparent or a parent over a decade, and they might need emotional support as well as practical. They might need someone to take them out for lunch, to give them a break from carer responsibilities, to be shown that little bit of extra kindness, and that could be for quite a long time, so it’s also really important to show up for.
So I’m going to leave you with that to think about, how you show up, what support you can provide, and how you might help yourself. There’s a lot in that depending on what’s happening. But we don’t do this alone, we can’t go through this alone.
[25:20]
The final bit I really want to talk about is comparison, and what people will say. Well, which grief is worse? I lost my son. I lost my parents. I lost my partner. I was with my partner for two years, I was with mine for forty. The grief that is the most important is yours. Your grief is what hurts you, and it doesn’t hurt you any less because someone else is also grieving, and it doesn’t take away from their grief that you’re grieving. People can really struggle with this, and sometimes what I think they’re trying to say, without saying it, is, my grief hasn’t been explored enough, it hasn’t been held enough, it hasn’t been witnessed enough. So if someone says, oh well, I don’t know what you’ve got to complain about, I lost my whatever, that’s probably them, in a really unhelpful, unhealthy way, saying, I need more support, I need someone to really listen to me, I don’t feel like I’ve healed properly.
[26:50]
That’s really tricky. So no grief is better or worse than another. Your grief is important. Your grief matters, and you don’t have to walk through it alone. You can get support through friends, through family, through counselling or a grief group. There are books and resources, but I think being with other people and feeling seen and heard is so helpful.
I like to use this saying, with family, with parents, with kids, hug, heard, help. So ask the person, do you need a hug? Do you need something practical, like help? Or do you just want to vent? Offer that, and maybe be really clear. I can take you to a smash room if you want to break stuff and get your anger out. We can go for a long walk in silence. I’ll pick you up and take you to the beach, and you don’t have to talk to me. Or I can come over and we can binge watch Lord of the Rings, one of my favourites, and we don’t have to talk. Which one of those sounds good? So you can offer the different options of what that person might need.
[28:00]
Thank you for listening. If you’re in grief, or you have someone you love who’s grieving, I hope this provided a few ideas of what you could do and things to try. For more personalised support, reach out to a therapist in your area. And if you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer on the podcast, or a topic you’d like to explore, there’ll be a link to that in the notes, and I hope to hear from you.
