(September 2025)
The Weight of Grief
the weight of grief sculpture by celeste roberge
Recently, a high school student passed me in the hallway and called out, “That’s the death lady!” I knew what they meant. I’ve spent more time than most people talking and teaching about grief, dying, and the complicated way we humans try to keep living through it. Some of that comes from being raised as a mortician’s kid. Some of it just comes from being alive in the world right now. Death is everywhere. You don’t have to look hard.
Recently, two people I knew died—both younger than expected, both leaving behind families who are completely shattered. I keep thinking about how we’re supposed to move forward after something like that. How do you even begin? Is it possible to find meaning again? Or joy?
When I was working on my master’s capstone, I researched the importance of writing about grief in fiction. In my research I found this quote from Megan Devine exposing one of the underlying issues of grief: “We don’t talk about the fragility of life: how everything can be normal one moment, and completely changed the next.” There are an estimated one million words in the English language, but none of them seem to be enough to understand and express grief.
Grief takes over more than just our emotions. Sigmund Freud of all people was studying this back in the early 1900s, and even then, he recognized how far-reaching grief can be. It touches everything—our physical health, our relationships, our spirituality. Modern researchers like Joanne Cacciatore have backed this up with science: grief impacts the immune system, our nervous system, our heart. So when people say they feel like grief has taken over their entire body, they’re not being dramatic. They’re being accurate.
And if it’s hard enough for adults to carry that kind of weight, just imagine what it feels like for kids or teens. It’s messy and awkward and full of questions adults often don’t know how to answer—so most of the time, we just don’t bring it up. But we need to. Because here’s the reality: the National Alliance for Children’s Grief reports that 1 in 12 children in the U.S. will lose a parent or sibling by the time they turn 18. That’s six million kids. By the time they hit 25? That number more than doubles. Death—and grief—is not something reserved for later in life. It shows up early and often.
But in Western culture, we’re trained to avoid it. We don’t know what to say, so we say nothing. Someone else’s loss makes us uncomfortable because it brings about mortality salience, the acute awareness of the fragile nature of mortality, both to us and our loved ones. And so, intentionally or not, we leave grieving people to carry their pain alone.
Meaningful Melancholy Created by Albert Gyorgy
So what do we do with all this? When someone we love dies, the loss isn’t just individual—it ripples through families, schools, churches, neighborhoods. But even though grief is communal in its impact, the actual experience of grieving is deeply personal.
That’s why it matters so much that we talk about it. Megan Devine says, “When grief is made visible, a doorway into acceptability and openness comes, inviting others to consider and discuss their grief.” And she’s right. Something shifts when we stop pretending we’re okay and start telling the truth. We start to realize we’re not the only ones walking around with broken hearts.
George Bonanno put it this way: “If we understand the different ways people react to loss, we understand something about what it means to be human, something about the way we experience life and death, love and meaning, sadness and joy.”
And isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? Be a little more human with one another. Hold space for both joy and sadness. And remind each other that even in the thickest fog of grief, we’re not actually alone.
