The American path for what is socially accepted in grief is narrow. There’s the perceived need for a brave face, the getting over it, the worry of becoming a burden. There’s the Sisyphean pursuit of closure. There’s the frequently misinterpreted “five stages”—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—which were neither meant as a prescription for how to grieve nor, originally, even really about grief at all. (In her 1969 bestseller On Dying, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who coined the term, wrote about the “stages” a terminally ill person goes through as they grapple with their own death. Only much later did she also apply it to that of a person grieving another.)
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Then there’s the business of getting back to work, back to life while grieving. After a one-off memorial, Western social norms ask us to keep it quiet—keep it private.
No one has ever wanted to live the pain of loss, but it’s only in the past century or so that silence amid grief has become so deeply standardized in the U.S. Even into the early-20th century there was a time for wearing mourning clothes and corresponding on black-bordered mourning stationery. By the 1960s, discussions of grief had become “a morbid self-indulgence,” according to the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer—infringing, he wrote, on the “enjoyment of others.” I’ve seen this shift unfold in my own life, too. After my mother died of metastatic melanoma, I struggled with others’ expectations of my grief. I don’t blame those around me. But a tension undoubtably existed: How far should they reach into my life, and, conversely, how much was it reasonable for me to ask?
No doubt we need a better, more empathetic way to support those who are grieving. It starts by flipping the private-public paradigm of grief.
Read More: 21 Ways to Help Someone You Love Through Grief
Part of that will come from reframing how we think about loss. For instance, I currently live in a house divided into a few apartments. I’m relatively close with my neighbors. Even so, I was barely able to find my words once I learned that a neighbor’s parent was in hospice. My first impulse: Would it be too much to say something?
What if, however, I reframed my deliberation as basic decency? Too often I find myself believing that asking about another’s loss or emotional pain is akin to requesting their bank account info, a hyper-intimacy. What if instead I—and I might broaden here to an American “we”—considered opening up a conversation about grief not as a social overstep but as friendly decorum? The underlying assumption is that people are reluctant to discuss loss. If the goal is closure then you’re more helpful not opening the wound. But, in my experience, I’ve found something of the opposite to be true.
While researching my book The Grief Cure, I traversed the U.S. to meet with scientists, technologists, and scholars, and explored the new ways people are facing and trying to overcome loss. This meant spending evenings alone in strange cities. Sometimes, I went out to bars to read, just to be around others, where I often ended up speaking openly about my mother’s death. I wasn’t pushing it, but I wasn’t bashful either. It tended to come up naturally when I explained why I was in town. What I found came as a shock: strangers lit up in shared recognition. In even mentioning my mother’s death, many felt like they too could speak about their own experiences with loss. Moreso, almost everyone was dealing with something. Grief boils beneath so many interactions yet, in a grief-repressive culture, its discussion requires a mutual permission-giving.
One middle-aged woman in San Francisco told me her husband had recently passed away and she was struggling both with grief and the guilt of whether she should begin dating again. She said she’d hardly spoken to a soul about it. A young man in Mexico City told me about his dead younger brother and how he’s still the first thing he thinks about waking up and the last before bed. Many people, I believe, want to talk about their loss. They may even want to wear it as conspicuously as one might have before Gorer’s time. Yet in our individualistic culture where grief lives mostly in the shadows, many of us need to know our conversation partner is open to it, too.
Social attachment and trust have fallen off a cliff in the U.S. over the past few years, making this kind of connection even harder. Only 54% of American adults report feeling connected to their local community, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center poll. The numbers drop for younger generations. For adults over 65, 73% say they feel “very” or “somewhat” connected to their community; ages 50 to 64: 64%; 30 to 49: 56%; and, for those younger than 30, only 45% say as much. (The pattern holds even after controlling for the length of time people have lived in a community.)
Loss and the grief that follow are typically understood as an individual’s cross to bear. In part, this is due to the aforementioned weakening of community. But more precisely it may be attributable to the societal atomization in which we each increasingly exist in our own worlds, with our own views, interpretation of facts and understandings. Who knows how someone might react to a bent ear? Better, many conclude, to not broach a perceived thorny topic at all.
The ethical task, then, in grief today is to overcome this idea, and to make room for people to be open about their bereavement. What really is the worst that could happen if, coming from a place of care and vulnerability, you ask about someone’s loss? Because helping someone in grief is not about pushing them along a slender, isolating path toward “closure” or getting “over” it. It’s about being with them, even just available for them, as they transform loss into reflection.
