Four Ways to Make Grief More Bearable
Losing a loved one inevitably brings pain. But how you respond not only affects your own healing but can also enable you to help others.
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In 2010, a Japanese garden designer named Itaru Sasaki, who was grieving the death of his cousin, created an unconnected telephone booth in which he had one-sided “conversations” with the dead relative. He found it comforting to do so. A year later, when the earthquake and tsunami that overwhelmed the Fukushima nuclear power plant killed almost 20,000 people in his country—including about 10 percent of the population of his own town—Sasaki opened his kaze no denwa, or “wind phone,” to the public. The booth has received more than 30,000 visitors to date, initially those who used it to “talk” with their family and friends who’d been killed in the disaster but now almost anyone grieving the loss of a loved one, including tourists.
Grief can create a psychological, even physiological, disequilibrium so great that even a simulated phone connection can provide relief. And yet, grief is the most natural kind of suffering. We love others, and we will lose some of them. That’s part of life: Given that nearly 3 million people die in the U.S. every year, and each leaves, on average, an estimated five people bereaved, almost 15 million Americans annually are experiencing fresh grief. Scholars believe that a more severe form, known as prolonged grief, afflicts about one in 10 bereaved people a year; this describes a condition in which the mourner’s suffering remains high over an extended period.
Grief does not have to be a private misery and net harm to our lives. We can learn to comprehend it, manage it, and grow from it. And in understanding our own grief, we can help others heal and thrive as well.
We often use bereavement and grief synonymously, but they aren’t the same. Bereavement is the experience of losing a loved one to death, whereas grief is the physical, psychological, and social response to that experience. This sort of sadness comes to every one of us, yet the experience is still shrouded in mystery. For many, the only thing they know about the science of grief is that it is thought to involve passing through five predictable stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And this conventional wisdom, based on the work of the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her colleagues dating from the late 1960s, has been largely abandoned by experts in recent decades.
Nevertheless, medical providers do see fairly common symptoms of grief, especially in the period right after a person learns of a loved one’s death. The effects that typically occur are part of the “separation response,” which includes yearning, longing, and sadness but also commonly involves benign hallucinations of the loved one. This can also entail confusion about your sense of self and of your relationship to others, if they emerged through deep intertwinement with the deceased, and even disorientation about what is past and present. For this reason, acute grief can resemble mild dementia, though of course it is not the same. Rather, the condition occurs because another person can be such a part of ourselves that when they disappear, we are temporarily destabilized in our sense of time and space.
Neuroscientists are learning about the brain’s response to grief, which involves (among other regions) activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain associated with the experience of pain, both physical and psychological. One way researchers measure physical arousal caused by grief is by how well the skin conducts electricity (known as “skin conductance response”), which indicates the intensity of emotion and attention. Researchers of a small neuroanatomical study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 2003 reported that this response was highest among the bereaved when grief-related words were accompanied by a photo of the deceased loved one, and much higher than if the subject was prompted by just one reminder or the other.
Given how debilitating grief can be, especially early on, it might seem like some sort of evolutionary glitch. Yet evolutionary biologists believe just the opposite. Staying close to kin was a survival imperative until relatively recently, so the pain of separation from someone very close was an important inducement to close that gap; failing to do so could mean dangerous isolation. Unfortunately, the death of a loved one means that that pain of separation cannot be relieved immediately and lessens only with time, as our brains become more accustomed to life without the person who has died.
For most people, that pain does decline with time. One way that researchers have measured this is by looking at the prevalence of depressive symptoms in successive months after the death of a loved one. One 2019 study of widowed women found that depression was present in 38 percent within the first month; through the next two months, it was present in 25 percent; a year to a year and a half later, it was affecting 11 percent. Notably, there was a great deal of heterogeneity in the samples studied—everyone has a different experience of grief. Yet the data show that although people never forget their lost loved ones, most of the bereaved recover significantly in a matter of months.
As difficult as things can seem early on after the loss of a loved one, you can be happy again. In fact, a large body of research shows that over time, bereavement can even be an impetus for what psychologists call post-traumatic growth, including greater appreciation for life, improved relationships, recognition of new possibilities, personal strength, and spiritual development. Here are four ways to make grief more bearable early on, and to allow more pronounced growth down the line.
1. Look for meaning
In the 1990s, researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst interviewed college students who had recently lost a parent. The scholars asked the students about, among other things, their sense of meaning in the world: how just the world is, how random, how controllable. The researchers found that bereavement was significantly lower among the students who scored higher in their belief in a world with meaning. This suggests that a good course of action in a time of grief is to use the experience as an opportunity to ponder your beliefs and look for answers about life’s coherence, purpose, and significance. So it also makes sense that spiritual and religious progress are a common source of growth after bereavement.
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2. Make changes to your identity
When a loved one dies, that changes who you are—at a minimum in a purely factual way. For instance, the loss of a spouse means that you are now single. More than that, though, when you lose a loved one, it brings a change in your own identity, along with all sorts of behavioral changes. Single people, after all, do different things than married people. A 2013 review of older adults who’d experienced bereavement found that after they’d lost someone, an essential factor of recovery included consciously embracing a new identity and making life changes. The lives they made involved going out more with friends, for example, or getting into new activities. Although grief is painful, it is also an opportunity to become a new person.
3. Adopt rituals
One way of reestablishing a sense of control after the loss of a loved one is to create mourning rituals; even trivial-seeming ones can be effective. Researchers demonstrated this in an experiment published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in which people who had lost an important relationship through a breakup or death were asked to recall rituals related to the loss. For some, the rites were religious, such as sitting shiva; others played a favorite song on particular days or wrote letters to the loved one that they never sent. Those who remembered a ritual experienced 10 percent less grief than those who did not. When the researchers induced grief in a laboratory through randomly losing a lottery and then testing the impact of rituals in isolation regardless of belief, they found that these behaviors reduced grief intensity by 28 percent. The right practice for you will depend on your beliefs and circumstances, but it will help to do something systematic that acknowledges your loss and puts you in charge of your response.
4. Let yourself be happy again
Specialists in the subject commonly point out that grief can be accompanied by guilt when grief starts to subside, as if this were a signal that you didn’t care so much after all about the person you lost. Similarly, people can feel a paradoxical sense of loss for the grief itself, as if the public longing for the lost one honored their connection to others too. Although grief is healthy and normal, it is important to remember that happiness is as well. We have evolved to suffer when separated from our loved ones, but not to suffer forever. Allow yourself to recover.
So far, I have been writing about one’s own experience of grief and how to manage it. But what about another person who has had a loss and is suffering? We may struggle to help others in this situation, because the tendency is to avoid bereaved people when we don’t know what to say or we think they want to be left alone. And perhaps their suffering frightens us. Grieving people can also pull away from us in an effort not to burden us with their sadness.
Avoiding those who are grieving is a mistake. Obviously, there are better and worse things to tell a person who has experienced a loss, and coming up with the right words might reasonably worry you. Many experts suggest that the best approach doesn’t rely much on your words at all; it’s best to simply be present and listen.
Just listening can be the best analgesic you can offer for the pain of others. It can even heal. As the psychologist Carl Rogers put it, “When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to reperceive my world in a new way and to go on.”
The Japanese wind phone simulates a healing listener. Your attentive silence can be the real thing.