Why Grief Is So Lonely

“Grief is so lonely, right? It’s such a lonely experience.” These words come from a recent interview I did with psychotherapist Tim Jones of New City Counseling. He speaks from experience. He counsels people dealing with the loss of a loved one, and in 2017, he lost to cancer his own wife, mother of their four young children.

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Jones’s comment about loneliness came while we were discussing unhelpful ways of relating to the bereaved. One problem, he noted, is when we use phrases like “I understand what you’re going through,” or “you must be feeling [whatever].” Though well-intentioned, such “presumptive” talk, he said, fails to express a personal connection or show an interest in the deceased. Its effect is to distance us from the actual and unique experience of the grieving person. It can also inadvertently make our condolences about ourselves, he added, when what is needed is primarily listening and “coming alongside” the other in their time of pain.

Still, Jones insisted, taking the “risk of encounter” is essential. Yes, we say things that are “not quite right.” But missteps can be recognized and repaired. In fact, in his own experience, he found himself drawn closer to those who had the courage to address mistakes and try again.

More distressing for the bereaved, Jones observed, is our tendency to just stay away. Avoidance, he said, often reflects our uncertainty about knowing the right thing to say or do, and our discomfort with suffering and unpredictable emotions. Being around the grieving can also be anxiety-producing for another reason. It reminds us of our own frailty and potential losses, he suggested, both aspects of our humanity that are never easy to face.

Death and grief are difficult to acknowledge and talk about. More so in an age in which most of us—thankfully—have little direct familiarity with death. And harder still, as Jones stressed—like the other grief counselors and chaplains I interviewed—in a time when many of the community rituals and customs that once provided rules and orientations to grief have waned or disappeared. With little in the way of a script about how to speak and behave, we are thrown back on our own limited resources to navigate these challenging life situations.

Grief can be lonely (as much research confirms¹) for other reasons as well. I want to briefly touch on three everyday realities that inhibit communication in grief.

The Moral Duty to be Happy

Death is not a cheery subject. Perhaps talking about it has even become taboo, as the social historian Philippe Ariès proposes in his book Western Attitudes Toward Death, and for a reason that is just as relevant to mourning. In contemporary society, we have a “moral duty” and “social obligation” for happiness. Each person, Ariès continues, "must contribute to the collective happiness by avoiding any cause for sadness or boredom, by appearing to be always happy, even if in the depths of despair. By showing the least sign of sadness, one sins against happiness, threatens it, and society then risks losing its raison d’être."²

Patrick O’Malley, another psychotherapist I interviewed, from over 40 years of experience, has reached a similar conclusion. He drew my attention to a chapter in his book Getting Grief Right, where he explored how suffering had “become shameful.” The main culprit, he argued, was our “culture of positivity.” The norm, according to a psychologist he quoted, is to always “think positive,” “put on a happy face,” and eliminate any “attitude and utterance that doesn’t have an uplifting effect on one’s mood” and that of others. This mandate, according to O’Malley, recently retired, was a common issue with his clients, and singularly unconducive to openness about grief and its “sadness, pain and confusion.”³

Individual Grief, Not Group Mourning

Academic books often highlight isolating features of grief in our society by using comparisons with the bereavement practices of traditional societies. But after tragedies, like school shootings, we can witness our own moments of communal mourning: an outpouring of grief, joined in by the whole community. On these occasions, such as we had here at the University of Virginia in November 2022, there are large assemblies, packed funerals, public memorials, open displays of emotion, and, especially among those who knew the deceased, a great deal of talk and sharing of stories about them and what they meant. That talk is ongoing.

In communal events like this, notwithstanding the obvious differences, we can see what is often missing for bereaved persons in everyday life.

In the first place, we might simply notice that in our society, most urban, middle-class people—with exceptions to be sure—are not part of tight-knit communities or extended kinship networks. A person’s death, which is typically at an advanced age, after retirement and when children are grown, is therefore unlikely to have a significant impact on a group or disrupt its functioning. Of course, there may be friends, old colleagues, and relatives, but these are likely to be geographically dispersed and numbered among those who seek to comfort the bereaved rather than those who are themselves deeply affected. Under normal conditions of life today, there is generally a small number of the grieving, and then everyone else. The burden is felt as private and psychological.

No One to Talk To

In the second place, we can see that even among the small number of bereaved, there may be limited opportunities to share memories with those who knew the deceased. As noted above, conversation may be hindered by geographical dispersion. Living all over, family members and friends have little regular face-to-face interaction. A funeral or memorial service, if held, may be the one opportunity they have to hug and reminisce together, and that may come months after the death. While the phone and other means of communication can certainly help, the mourner may still be left surrounded by people who, not knowing the deceased, do not feel their grief.

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The fact is our social worlds—from home and work to the tennis club and church—don’t often overlap. Those we know in one setting are often different from those we know in another. If someone close to us dies, many of those we interact with will not have known them. While these people can certainly share their condolences, they cannot talk about the person who died or contribute to the story about them.

Our social worlds are also fragmented in other ways. Consider, for instance, divorce/remarriage or blended families. In these situations, persons affected by a death may be separated, reluctant to talk with one another, or unwilling to talk about the deceased. The growing division of families by the estrangement of children from their parents would be another example of closely related people unable to join together in mutual support.

Lonelier and More Challenging

Avoidance and other obstacles to conversation can have a profound impact on the experience of grief. These impediments make it lonelier, which would be bad enough, but isolation can also inhibit moving forward.

In our time of more privatized grieving, everyday conversation and storytelling have grown in importance as coping rituals. As the counselors I interviewed confirmed, these are now primary means to reconstruct a sense of order, find meaning, and reorient identity following the life disruption and loss of the social bond that death brings about. Yet, at the very time when “our need to talk about the dead may be increasing,” to quote the British sociologist Tony Walter, the “chief resource” may be disappearing—those who knew the deceased and with whom a biography can be jointly produced, the story that “enables the living to integrate the memory of the dead into their ongoing lives.”⁴

Much in our situation is what it is. Yet, we can help. Even if we don’t know the deceased or know them well, we can still play an important role. We can listen to the bereaved, acknowledge what they are going through, and encourage them to share their stories. We can, following counselor Jones, take the risk of engagement.