The significance of the death of someone important to you cannot be underestimated. People who are grieving often wonder, ‘Am I grieving properly?’. To help us navigate our grief, it helps to understand grief and how it may show up for us personally. It can also help to be able to distinguish between grief-related myths and reality. We will explore this and more in the sections below.
Bereavement
When someone is bereaved, it means someone important to them has died. Bereavement is often used to describe the experience of having someone we care about die.
Mourning
Mourning is often described as the public part of how people react to the death of someone important to us. It is the outward expression of grief that includes rituals, customs and behaviours that help people acknowledge their loss. Examples of mourning include attending funerals and memorial services, creating physical memorials or shrines, wearing special clothes, and/or candle-lighting ceremonies.
Grief
Grief is the reaction we experience in response to the loss of someone or something that has a significant meaning in our lives. Grief is our natural and normal response to loss and includes a variety of physical and psychological reactions.
In the period immediately after the death of someone important to us, many will experience an intense period of sadness and longing. This is referred to as acute grief. During this period many people describe feelings of shock, disbelief, anger, anxiousness, relief or numbness. People may also have physical symptoms like heart palpitations, butterflies in their stomach, nausea, lack of appetite and tiredness.
People also describe insistent and distracting thoughts about the person who died, as well as brain fog and trouble focusing, including increased forgetfulness. Some people may withdraw and feel disconnected from others, not wanting to engage in the everyday motions of ongoing life.
The way people experience, process, and express their grief is uniquely personal. It is important to know that there is no right or wrong way to feel. Some people express their grief through crying and find comfort in sharing their grief while others may prefer to express their grief in private, withdrawing from others. As author and grief and loss expert, David Kessler explains, ‘each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint’.
How we grieve is a function of who we are, who we lost, how we lost them and what supports we have. Together each of these elements combine and influence how grief will show up for us.