We have ideas about what grief should look like, how intense it should be, how long it should last, which losses deserve the strongest response, and what somebody’s behavior after a death supposedly tells us about the relationship they had with the person who died. Cry too much and someone worries you’re not coping. Cry too little and someone wonders whether you really cared. Start laughing again too soon and it can look disrespectful. Remain visibly devastated for too long and eventually people start wondering why you haven’t moved forward.
Apparently there is an appropriate grief setting somewhere between “concerningly fine” and “making Thanksgiving uncomfortable,” and we’re all expected to locate it without being given the instructions.
The problem is that grief doesn’t work that way because relationships don’t work that way.
Two people can love equally deeply and respond completely differently to loss. One person may cry immediately and often. Another may become extraordinarily practical because somebody has to call the funeral home, feed the dog, locate the paperwork, tell the family, cancel appointments, and figure out why death somehow generates seventeen administrative tasks before you’ve even processed what happened. Someone else may feel numb for weeks before the reality of the loss arrives. Another person may feel almost normal most of the time until a song plays in a grocery store six months later and suddenly they’re standing next to the canned tomatoes trying not to fall apart.
None of those responses gives us a reliable measurement of love.
Grief isn’t a receipt showing how much somebody mattered.
That’s important because we’re remarkably good at turning grief into evidence, particularly when we’re looking at someone else’s. We notice who cried at the funeral. We remember who didn’t attend. We judge how quickly someone returned to work, started dating again, cleared out a closet, laughed at a joke, changed their relationship status, adopted another animal, took off a wedding ring, or posted something cheerful online.
Then we build stories around those observations without knowing what is happening inside the person we’re observing.
Sometimes we even do it to ourselves.
If I loved them enough, shouldn’t I be more upset today? If I’m still hurting this much, does that mean I’m not healing? If I enjoyed myself tonight, am I forgetting them? If I don’t want to keep all their belongings, does that mean they didn’t matter? If I don’t cry on the anniversary this year, have I somehow lost part of the relationship?
We can make grief perform an astonishing number of loyalty tests if we let it.
I don’t think the dead need us to prove our love by suffering correctly.
Different Relationships Create Different Grief
Part of the problem is that we talk about grief as though the primary variable is the fact that someone died. But the relationship itself matters enormously, and relationships can contain almost anything.
The death of someone you spoke to every day is different from the death of someone you loved but hadn’t seen in years. Losing someone suddenly is different from watching an illness progress for a long time. Losing a parent you adored is different from losing a parent who harmed you, although both can be devastating. The death of an estranged family member can reopen questions you thought you’d settled. The death of someone who was suffering may bring relief alongside sorrow, and then guilt may arrive because relief doesn’t fit the story we’re taught about what loving grief is supposed to feel like.
Even loving relationships aren’t emotionally simple.
You can miss somebody and be angry with them. You can love them and feel relieved that caregiving has ended. You can grieve the person who actually existed while also grieving the relationship you hoped you might someday have. You can be heartbroken by a death and still know that the relationship was unhealthy.
When someone dies, possibility dies with them. Sometimes part of what we’re grieving is that there will never be another conversation, another apology, another chance to repair something, another opportunity for the relationship to become different.
That’s still grief.
It doesn’t become less legitimate because it isn’t tidy.
There Is No Grief Olympics
We also have an odd habit of ranking losses.
People rarely say outright, “Your grief is less important than mine,” but we have cultural hierarchies around which deaths are supposed to hurt most. Certain family relationships are automatically understood as devastating while others require explanation. Friend loss can be minimized because “you weren’t related.” Chosen family may not receive the same recognition as biological family. An ex-partner may be someone you’re apparently no longer entitled to mourn. Community losses can affect thousands of people who never personally met the person who died and then be dismissed as parasocial nonsense.
And grief for animals is still routinely treated as somehow lesser than grief for humans.
I have opinions about that one.
An animal can be woven into the physical structure of your day in ways many human relationships aren’t. They’re there when you wake up. They know the sound of the food container, the car, the leash, the cabinet, or whatever household object has inexplicably become the Most Important Thing Ever. You step around them in the hallway. You know where they’ll be at certain times of day. You automatically check whether they need to go outside. You reach down without thinking because there is supposed to be a body beside your chair.
Then one day the routine continues and they don’t.
The house changes shape.
Telling somebody “it was just a dog” or “it was just a cat” doesn’t describe the relationship. It describes the speaker’s inability to understand it.
The same is true when we dismiss grief because we don’t understand why a particular relationship mattered. We don’t have to understand another person’s attachment in order to recognize that the loss is real.
Time Isn’t a Love Meter Either
Anniversaries can make all of this especially weird.
There’s an expectation that grief should become progressively smaller with time, as though every year should produce a measurable percentage decrease. Year one is terrible, year two somewhat less terrible, and eventually the anniversary should become a tasteful moment of reflection before we continue with our day.
Sometimes that happens.
Sometimes the fifth anniversary hits harder than the fourth.
Sometimes you forget the date completely and realize three days later.
Sometimes your body seems to remember before your conscious brain does and you spend a day wondering why everything feels wrong until you look at the calendar.
Sometimes an anniversary that once flattened you becomes an ordinary day.
That doesn’t mean the person mattered less.
It means time passed.
Memory changes with us. Our relationship with the dead changes because we keep changing. The version of you who experienced the loss isn’t frozen somewhere in the past, responsible for maintaining the exact emotional intensity you felt then. Life keeps adding experiences around the loss. New people arrive. Other people leave. Bodies change. Homes change. Families change. You become somebody who has lived another year.
Love doesn’t require emotional stasis.
If anything, expecting grief to remain unchanged would require us to stop living.
Joy Is Not Betrayal
This may be one of the hardest inherited ideas about grief to shake: the suspicion that feeling good after someone dies means we’re leaving them behind.
The first laugh after a major loss can feel almost obscene. For a moment you forget you’re grieving. Something is genuinely funny, your body reacts before you think about it, and then suddenly you remember.
There can be guilt in that return.
How can the world still contain something funny when this person is dead? How can food taste good? How can I enjoy a movie? How can I flirt with somebody, dance, travel, celebrate a birthday, get excited about a project, or have a perfectly ordinary good Tuesday?
Because you’re alive.
That’s not a philosophical answer. It’s a practical one.
Living bodies keep encountering living experiences. Hunger happens. Pleasure happens. Attraction happens. Curiosity happens. Somebody tells a ridiculous joke. The dog does something stupid. The weather is beautiful. A song comes on that makes you want to dance.
None of those experiences erases grief.
We have room for more than one thing.
I don’t think honoring someone requires preserving the emotional conditions of their death. If I love someone, I don’t need to maintain a certain amount of pain to keep that love legitimate. Pain may remain because loss hurts, but suffering is not proof of devotion.
The relationship was real before the grief existed.
The grief isn’t what makes it real afterward.
Neither Is Suffering Forever
There is another side to this, because rejecting the idea that grief proves love does not mean people should hurry through it.
Nobody gets extra credit for recovering quickly either.
Sometimes grief remains enormous for a long time. Sometimes it becomes tangled with trauma, depression, anxiety, complicated family dynamics, financial instability, caregiving exhaustion, or a complete restructuring of someone’s daily life. Sometimes a death changes almost every practical detail of a person’s existence, and rebuilding takes far longer than the people around them expect.
There is nothing noble about suffering without support. There is also nothing shameful about needing support for a long time.
Therapy, grief groups, spiritual practice, medication when appropriate, community care, ritual, rest, movement, creative work, and plain old human companionship can all have places in grief. Seeking help doesn’t mean someone loved too much or isn’t strong enough to handle loss independently.
We were never meant to prove the significance of our relationships by seeing how much pain we could endure alone.
That is not devotion. That’s isolation wearing ceremonial robes.
Let Love Be Love
Maybe this is why I’ve become increasingly resistant to using grief as a measure of anything except the fact that something changed.
Grief tells us there was a loss. It doesn’t give us a clean measurement of the relationship that preceded it.
Love lived in the relationship itself.
It was in the phone calls, meals, arguments, inside jokes, care, annoyance, rides to appointments, terrible birthday presents, shared music, routines, nicknames, ordinary conversations, reconciliations, and all the completely unremarkable moments nobody thought to photograph.
With animals, it was in food bowls and walks and medication and fur on absolutely everything you own. It was moving your feet because somebody was sleeping there. It was knowing which sound meant “I need something” and which meant “I have decided you need to wake up for reasons I will not be explaining.”
With friends, it may have been years of messages nobody else will ever read.
With family, it may have been traditions, arguments, caregiving, distance, reconciliation, or simply the strange intimacy of knowing someone for most of your life.
With complicated relationships, love may have existed beside things that hurt.
Grief doesn’t need to simplify any of that.
And it certainly doesn’t need to prove it.
As we talk about honoring the dead this week, I think that’s something worth remembering. Devotion isn’t measured by how miserable we remain. Remembrance doesn’t require us to keep a wound open. Continuing to live doesn’t mean somebody has become less important, and having a hard day years later doesn’t mean we’ve failed to heal.
We don’t need to compare our grief to somebody else’s, or today’s grief to the grief we felt five years ago.
We can let the relationship have been what it was.
We can let the loss be what it is.
And we can stop asking pain to provide evidence that love existed.
Love already did that. 🔮💜