Death is visible and final: it has a body, a date, a medical certificate. The other losses are blurrier: they have no physical object, no clear beginning or end, no tangible proof they happened. We also have an infrastructure for death: funerals, condolence cards, flowers, casseroles, bereavement leave – a whole social script. Perhaps the infrastructure defines what counts: if there is no social and cultural scaffolding to digest the experience, it must not be real grief.
The prime reason for the single-minded focus on death loss, however, must be that bereavement is simply the most striking instance of a broader emotional phenomenon that comes in degrees. But restricting grief to bereavement is like restricting pain to cluster headaches, anxiety to panic attacks, sadness to depression, or pleasure to ecstasy – it is taking the most extreme instantiation of something and making it the essence of that thing.
What sets grief apart is how deeply the loss reaches into the fabric of your life: grief begins where your identity is disrupted. What is lost in the case of grief is not just some concrete, historical object, but a cluster of (future) possibilities that are tightly woven into your sense of identity, life structure or experiential world. When they go, you don’t just lose something: you lose a version of yourself, your life is turned upside down, and you come to inhabit, in a real sense, a different world. This is why death is grief’s most extreme instance, rather than its only one. When someone we love dies, every possibility – not only our own possibilities with them, but their possibilities too – is wiped out. As Matthew Ratcliffe and Louise Richardson, academic philosophers at the University of York, put it in their paper ‘Grief Over Non-Death Losses: A Phenomenological Perspective’ (2023):
When we lack the concepts to name what it is like to be us, what it is we are going through, we suffer what the philosopher Miranda Fricker calls a ‘hermeneutical injustice’ – an inability to make our own experience intelligible to ourselves and to others. This is not because we are confused, but because the shared language or conceptual apparatus – the frameworks we use to make sense of ourselves – hasn’t caught up.
Your grief tells you that you had the courage to love, that you allowed someone or something else to enter ‘the core of [your] being and find a home in [your] heart’. If you deny someone the right to grieve, you deny them access to what they loved and valued, which is to say that you deny them access to themselves. You don’t just rob them, then, of their love; you also rob them of self-knowledge.