What I Wish You Knew About Life After Loss
After someone you love dies, you are suddenly thrown into a timeline when it feels like no one understands you—and maybe you don't understand yourself either.
Together, let’s talk a little bit about the ways that grief can arrive in your world—from death to the other kinds of loss in life—before getting more specific about the things that those left behind after loss wish others knew.
Before you begin, remember that our professionals are always here to help
Is it normal to still be grieving after… ?
Honestly, you can stop the question right there—the answer is yes. No matter how long it has been, it is normal to still be grieving. It could be 5 minutes or 5 decades, and you will still be moving through the world with a permanently erased space where your loss once lived. Grief is not a temporary stop on the journey of life for most people.
There’s more than one type of grief
When you think of loss and grief, do you immediately associate these experiences with the death of a loved one? That’s the most common concept of grief that’s presented to us, but it’s only one part of a much bigger picture.
You may feel grief when your identity changes, when your job changes, after a major weather event, when your future plans change, when friendships change and so much more.
Outside of death, two of the most common grief experiences we see at Luna Joy are grief in infertility as well as the grief that comes with the end of a romantic relationship.
There are names for many of these kinds of grief- but even if you’ve never heard them, you’ve likely felt a few of them in your own life.
Grief can even come alongside positive transitions and changes in our lives. It can feel weird and almost alien to acknowledge these losses as grief, and particularly to identify and accept the emotions they bring up in you.
In grief outside of death, we tend to go without support or acceptance which can cause the grief to linger.
The impact of every grief can be huge. Your life may change whether you want it to or not, and it’s difficult to navigate that.
These living griefs deserve their own space, so we will return to them in a future blog.
Today, let’s talk a little more about what happens in the lives of those of us left behind after death.
Here’s what I wish everyone knew about life after someone you love dies
I want you to know what I wish the world knew about living with grief, and I hope that if you’re living in grief’s world, you see something of your own story reflected here. Grief educator Megan Divine talks about grief and the loss of someone you love by referring to them as “my person”.
It’s a fitting and succinct way of defining the gaping hole that many types of grief by death leave in your life without identifying the relationship that person had with you. So for the duration of this blog, I’m going to share with you in a candid way by referring to my person.
To respect these differences, I want to be clear that these expressions are both my own and those of the people I have supported. Grief is both entirely unique and somehow universal. These are the things I wish people knew about life after someone you love dies.
How long does grief really last
This is the biggest, most overwhelming piece of information that I wish I could infuse into the minds of every person trying to love someone who has lost someone. Losing someone you love is permanent and grief is too. Grieving doesn’t end when the casseroles stop arriving or the supportive friends go home. It doesn’t relent on holidays or leave me for an afternoon off.
They don’t come back, and you don’t stop wishing for them to return. You might feel differently 2 years after then you did 2 weeks after, but it will never go away entirely.
That I’ll never be who I was before
When grief makes itself an unwelcome intruder in your life, it changes the landscape of who you are and how you interact with the world. You become someone else and in a lot of ways, you’re a stranger to yourself. A guest in your life that’s been taken over by grief.
I won’t ever experience the world the way I did before I lost my person.
Why there will always be a “before” and “after”
Time is now marked in an entirely new way. My life passes in two distinct periods- before my person left, and after they died. These periods of time mark the end of everything and the beginning of an infinite ending. While each may hold hurt, happiness, and change, they’ll never share the presence of my person.
That I wish they weren’t afraid to ask about my person
There is no greater theme or reasoning for this one.
Nothing more that I can say beyond this simple plea: please, ask about them. Say their name. Share your memories with me. I miss them and, sometimes, it feels comforting to know that I’m not the only one that remembers what it was like to have them here.
When you love someone who has lost someone (or if you’ve lost someone yourself), it can be difficult to know where to begin in navigating their grief in this world. Your own experience with grief is as unique as your thumb print, and every person will have had a unique relationship with the person who has died as well.
When you love someone who has lost someone (or if you’ve lost someone yourself), it can be difficult to know where to begin in navigating their grief in this world. Your own experience with grief is as unique as your thumb print, and every person will have had a unique relationship with the person who has died as well.
