Grief
Grief is what happens in you when you lose someone or something you love. It can bring sadness, yearning, anger, numbness and guilt, along with a heavy tiredness, and it tends to arrive in waves.1 Most people feel it after a loss, and it keeps no set order or timeline, whatever the five stages suggest.2
Five shapes it takes
People expect tears. What turns up is stranger, and it changes by the hour. Every example line in this section was written for this page.
Blank
The first reaction is often a kind of blankness.1 You plan a funeral, answer forty messages and feel almost nothing, then lie awake wondering why you haven't cried.
"I made all the calls that first day. It was like watching someone else do it."
Yearning
Missing them can be a physical ache, a pull to hear the voice once more. Of the painful feelings tracked in 233 bereaved people from 1 to 24 months after a death, yearning was the strongest at every point.3
"I saved his voicemail. I play it when the house gets too quiet."
Angry, and guilty about it
Anger can land on anyone, the person who died included. Guilt can fasten onto what was said, or left unsaid.1
"The last thing I said to her was about the dishes. I can't stop thinking about it."
Tired all the way down
Grief is exhausting.1
Sleep can break into pieces, meals get skipped without anyone deciding to skip them, and a trip to the shop for milk can take the whole afternoon.
"I slept nine hours and woke up exhausted. Getting groceries took everything I had."
Grief nobody brings a casserole for
Some losses get no funeral and no days off: a pet, an ex, a pregnancy, a friendship that ended. Kenneth Doka's 1989 book gave that a name, disenfranchised grief, meaning sorrow for a loss the people around you don't openly recognize or back.4
The ache is real. The sympathy is smaller.
"Everyone says it was only a dog. I haven't slept properly since she died."
A good afternoon, then a hard night
Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut's dual process model has grieving people swinging between two jobs: facing the loss, with the photos and the crying and the name said out loud, and dealing with all it changed.5 That second job holds the paperwork, the new routines and the plain need for a break.
In their model the swinging is part of the coping.5
A Saturday spent fixing the fence, or a film that holds your attention for two hours, is part of it. The stages of grief page draws the model next to the five stages.
How it usually goes
Many people grieve while still working, parenting and laughing, and that steady pattern turned out to be more common than experts long believed.6 For most, the intensity lessens with time, though reminders can bring it back.1
For a smaller group it doesn't let up. About 1 in 10 adults bereaved by a non-violent death develop prolonged grief disorder, by the estimate of a review of 14 studies.7 More on that below.
How to deal with grief, day to day
- Let it come and go. Time away from grief belongs to coping, in the dual process model.5
- Ask one person for one thing. "Can you come with me to clear out his flat on Saturday?" gets a yes faster than "let me know if you need anything". The NHS also suggests talking, and names a friend, a relative or a professional as people to try.1
- Keep the basics small. The NHS suggests regular meals, some movement and a small goal for each day, and steering clear of alcohol or drugs as a way to cope.1
- Mark the hard dates in advance. A birthday or an anniversary can bring a wave. Decide now who you'll be with, or what you'll do for one hour of it.
- Write to them. Steps below.
Write an unsent letter
An unsent letter goes to the person you lost, or to whatever you lost, and nobody else ever has to read it. Five lines is a letter.
- Start with their name: Write "Dear" and the name you called them, not the formal one.
- Say what you didn't get to say: The thank you, the apology or the goodbye that didn't happen.
- Write what you miss, specifically: Their laugh at a certain show, the way they answered the phone.
- Write what you're carrying: The anger, the guilt or the "if only", in plain words.
- End however feels true: A goodbye, "I'll write again", or just your name.
Afterward you can keep it, read it aloud, burn it or read it to Joy. Stop if it opens more than you can hold tonight; the letter will still be there on another day.
What we can and can't promise about it
We won't tell you a letter lifts grief. Bereaved people who were asked to write freely about their feelings mostly did no better than time alone would have left them.8,9
Writing aimed at making sense of the loss, or at what it changed, looked more promising in one small trial with 68 bereaved students, though even there the groups weren't clearly different once other factors were accounted for.9 The American Psychiatric Association notes that online programs in which mourners write notes to the person who died have reduced prolonged grief symptoms.10 Letters on their own, outside those programs, haven't been tested.11
What a letter does do is give the unsaid things, and every "if only" you've been carrying, somewhere to live other than your head. The letter page has 30 prompts if one blank page is too much.
Write an unsent letter to the person you lost. Start with "Dear" and the name you called them, then tell them one thing that has happened since they've been gone.
Answer this with JoyA year on and no lighter
Prolonged grief disorder has had its own entry in the DSM-5-TR, the American Psychiatric Association's manual, since 2022. The marker is intense yearning for the person, or preoccupation with them, nearly every day at least 12 months after the death (6 months for a grieving child).10
At least three more symptoms have to be there too, such as feeling that part of you died with them, avoiding reminders, or a loneliness that won't shift.10
Only a clinician can make that call; it's not a checklist to score at home. Therapy built on cognitive behavioral methods has brought those symptoms down.10
If the person who died was in a Medicare-certified hospice, that hospice has to make bereavement support available to the family for up to a year after the death.12 Ask them. Bereavement groups are another place to start, and the APA lists them as a way to feel less alone.10
Joyful is an AI journaling companion, not therapy or a grief counselor.
Questions people ask
What is the best way to deal with grief?
No single way wins. What the research supports is moving between facing the loss and taking breaks from it, with neither one done all the time.5
How do you take care of yourself after losing a loved one?
Pick the smallest version of each basic: a meal at the same time each day, a ten-minute walk, one task. If even that is too much, let someone else hold one of them for a week.
What do you say to someone who lost a loved one, over text?
Say you're sorry, use the person's name, share one memory if you have one, and add "no need to reply". Follow their lead, says Psychology Today's guide, and offer practical help instead of pushing for closure.13 The page on helping someone grieving has lines you can borrow.
How do you support someone who is grieving and angry?
Let the anger be there without arguing with it, and without judging whether their grief has gone on too long.13 If it turns into talk of harming themselves or anyone else, use the crisis resources above.