Am I Grieving Normally? When Grief Doesn’t Look How You Expected
Maybe you thought you knew what grief would feel like. You knew you would miss them. You expected sadness, tears, perhaps that hollow feeling of waking up and remembering all over again that they’re gone.
But perhaps what you’re actually feeling is harder to make sense of.
Maybe you haven’t cried much at all. You’re getting up, going to work, talking to people and doing the things that need doing. Other people tell you how well you’re coping, while inwardly you wonder why you aren’t more upset.
Or perhaps you can’t stop crying. Something tiny can undo you — a song, something they would have laughed at, going to automatically pick up their favourite things in the supermarket. You thought you were doing a little better and suddenly you’re back on the kitchen floor wondering how it can still hurt this much.
You might feel angry, anxious, numb, irritable, relieved.
You might even have moments when you forget. You laugh at something. Get absorbed in a film. Have a genuinely lovely afternoon. And then you remember that they are dead and guilt arrives alongside the grief.
How can I be enjoying myself when they're not here?
Perhaps you find yourself typing something into Google that you would never think to ask anybody else:
Am I grieving normally?
Sometimes “is this normal?” really means “is there something wrong with me?”
Grief can make us question ourselves in ways we didn't expect.
If you aren't crying, you might wonder whether you loved them enough.
If you feel relieved after a long illness, you might feel guilty for even allowing yourself to think it.
If the relationship was difficult and your feelings about their death are complicated, you might look at other people's expressions of uncomplicated love and loss and wonder why yours doesn't feel like that.
And if you're still struggling when everybody around you seems to have returned to ordinary life, you may start wondering whether you should be further along by now.
There are so many unspoken and implied rules about grief.
That we should be devastated, but not for too long. That we should talk about the person, but not make other people uncomfortable. That certain dates will be difficult. That the first year is the worst. That eventually we should find some sort of acceptance and begin to move on.
But grief has very little interest in following rules.
You might not recognise yourself for a while
Grief isn't only sadness. It can be forgetting why you walked into a room. Reading the same paragraph three times and still not taking it in. Feeling exhausted after doing something that used to take very little effort.
It can be lying awake at night even though you're desperate to sleep. It can be feeling strangely detached while everybody else cries. It can also change how safe the world feels.
When someone dies, particularly if their death was sudden or traumatic, you may become much more aware that other people can die too. A headache that you would once have ignored, now frightens you. Someone doesn't reply to a message and your mind immediately goes somewhere terrible. You notice ambulances. You check that people have arrived home safely.
Or perhaps none of that happens. Perhaps you feel almost normal — and that is what frightens you.
There isn't one emotional response that proves somebody mattered to you.
Grief can hold feelings that don't seem as though they should belong together
You can love somebody and be angry with them.
You can miss them and feel relieved that something difficult has ended.
You can wish they were here and know that parts of your life are easier now that they aren't.
You can be devastated by the death of someone with whom you had a painful or complicated relationship.
Sometimes we don't only grieve the person who actually existed. We grieve what we wanted the relationship to be. The apology that will never come. The conversation there is no longer time to have. The hope that perhaps one day things between you would be different.
Death can leave love unfinished. It can leave anger unfinished too. And sometimes grief is having to live with both.
“I thought I was doing better”
There can be a particular kind of fear when grief becomes intense again after a period in which life had begun to feel easier. Perhaps six months have passed. Or two years. Or ten. You've learned how to live around the absence. You think about them, of course, but not constantly. Life has filled with other things.
And then something changes.
You become a parent and suddenly understand your own parent differently. You get married and they aren't there. Your relationship ends and you want the person you once would have called. You reach the age they were when they died. Something wonderful happens and, for a moment, the person you most want to tell is the one person you can't.
The grief can feel new because, in some ways, you are new.
You're meeting the loss from a different place in your life, with experiences and an identity you didn't have when they died.
That doesn't mean you've gone backwards. It doesn't mean you failed to grieve properly the first time. A loss can become part of us and still mean something different as our lives change.
So how long does grief last?
There isn't a point at which somebody you loved becomes irrelevant because enough time has passed.
But that doesn't mean grief will always feel the way it does now.
It can move closer and further away. There may be periods when it occupies almost everything and periods when it sits much more in the background of your life.
You may discover ways of remembering the person that feel comforting rather than unbearable. You may find yourself laughing when you tell stories about them. You might notice that you can miss them deeply and still want things for your own life.
And sometimes grief will surprise you again. Not because you are back at the beginning, but because life has moved and your grief has moved with it.
When does grief become something I need help with?
There isn't a level of suffering you have to reach before you're allowed support. You might seek therapy because your grief feels overwhelming, because you're struggling to function, or because the circumstances of the death keep replaying in your mind.
But you might also come because you feel lonely with it. Because everyone else seems to have stopped asking. Because there are things you don't feel able to say to the people around you. Because your relationship with the person who died was complicated. Or because carrying your grief mostly by yourself has become tiring.
There are also times when grief exists alongside depression, trauma or other mental health difficulties, and some people experience persistent and debilitating grief that may need more specialist support. If you're worried about how you're coping, you don't need to decide for yourself whether what you're experiencing is “normal enough” before reaching out.
Perhaps your grief doesn't need to be “normal”
When we ask “Am I grieving normally?”, sometimes what we're really asking is:
Is it okay that I feel this way?
Does this mean I'm coping badly?
Does this mean I didn't love them enough?
Should I be further along by now?
Is there something wrong with me?
But instead of asking whether your grief looks the way grief is supposed to look, maybe there are gentler questions we can ask.
What did this person mean to you?
What has their death changed?
What are you missing now?
What feels hardest to carry at this point in your life?
What does your grief need now?
Because grief isn't a test of how well you loved somebody. There isn't a correct amount of crying, a correct collection of feelings, or a point on a timeline you need to have reached. Your grief belongs to the relationship you had, the person you are, and the life you are living now. And all three can continue to change.
If someone you love has died and you're finding it difficult to make sense of how you're feeling, you don't have to work it out on your own. I offer online counselling for bereavement, grief and loss, with space for whatever your grief actually looks like — including the feelings that may be harder to say out loud.