You Don't Have to Let Them Go

A woman I worked with told me, about eight months after her husband died, that she had a problem she was embarrassed to bring up.

She talked to him. In the car, mostly. Full conversations, out loud, about the kids and the yard and what the neighbor had done now. And she had recently mentioned this to a friend, who got a careful look on her face and asked whether she had considered that this might be holding her back.

She spent the next three weeks trying to stop.

I want to be clear about what happened there. A woman who had found, on her own, one of the most well-documented healthy grief practices in the research literature was talked out of it by someone who meant well and had absorbed a theory that the field abandoned thirty years ago.

Where the letting-go idea came from

For most of the twentieth century, the working assumption in grief theory was that the point of mourning was detachment.

Freud’s 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia described grief work as the gradual withdrawal of emotional investment from the lost person, so that it could be reinvested elsewhere. That framing was enormously influential. It filtered down through generations of clinicians and then out into ordinary language, which is why your aunt may tell you it is time to let him go, and why people describe a widow who still wears her ring as not having moved on.

The trouble is that it was not built on much observation of actual bereaved people over time. When researchers went and looked, they found something else.

What they actually found

In 1996, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman published Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, drawing together work across different kinds of loss and different cultures. The central finding was straightforward: bereaved people who were doing well were not the ones who had detached. They were the ones who had found a way to keep a relationship with the person who died, in a changed form.

Widows described consulting their husbands about decisions. Bereaved parents described a continuing sense of their child’s presence and identity. Children who lost a parent kept objects, held conversations, drew on remembered advice.

They were not confused about whether the person was dead. That distinction matters and I will come back to it. They knew. They were maintaining an inner relationship with someone they knew was physically gone, but very much present in their hearts and memories.

Klass and his colleagues also pointed out how culturally narrow the detachment model was. In Japan, the household Buddhist altar, the butsudan, is a site of ongoing daily interaction with the dead, and it is entirely normal to speak to them there. In Mexico and other Central and South American communities, Día de Muertos is built around the assumption that the relationship continues and food offerings are made once a year. Whole civilizations have organized around continuing bonds. It was mid-century Western psychology that was the outlier.

Worden changed his own model

The clearest evidence that the field moved is that J. William Worden revised his own task.

His original fourth task, in the first edition of Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, used the language of withdrawing emotional energy from the deceased and reinvesting it in other relationships. In later editions he rewrote it to encompass the idea of finding an enduring connection with the person who died in the midst of building new ones and moving forward with your life.

That is close to a reversal, and he made it because the earlier version did not match what mourners did. My colleague Lindsey Robertson wrote an introduction to the four tasks that lays out the whole model, and it is the framework a lot of our grief work here runs on.

The word Worden uses is relocating. The relationship does not end. It moves to a place where you can carry it and still have a life.

When a bond is helping and when it is not

I am not going to tell you every form of connection is fine, because that is not true either, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of unhelpful.

The question I ask is about function, not form. Two people can do the same thing for opposite reasons.

Keeping his side of the closet full because opening it and deciding is too much right now, and you would rather it be there, is a bond. Keeping his side of the closet full because if you clear it out then he is actually dead, and you are not able to be in a world where that is true, is avoidance.

Talking to your mother while you cook her recipes is a bond. Setting a place for her at dinner every night and becoming distressed when someone sits in it is worth looking at.

Signs a bond is working: it brings some comfort or warmth alongside the ache, it coexists with the knowledge that they died, it does not require other people to participate, and your life is slowly widening around it. That widening is the growing around grief pattern.

Signs it is worth bringing to a therapist: you are organizing your days around it, you cannot tolerate any reminder that they are dead, the connection is mostly around guilt or bargaining, or a year or more has passed and you are still fully unable to function. That last one has a name now. Prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR in 2022, and it is treatable, which is the main reason it is worth naming rather than enduring.

Ways people actually do this

None of this is prescriptive. Take what fits and ignore the rest.

Talk to them. Out loud in the car, silently on a walk, at the grave, wherever. This is the most common one and the one people are most ashamed of.

Write to them. Not about them. To them. Some people write once. One man I worked with wrote every Sunday for two years and then stopped when he noticed he no longer needed to.

Cook the food. Make the thing she made. Feed it to people who never met her and tell them whose recipe it is.

Ask them. When you are stuck on a decision, ask what they would say. You already know. That knowledge is a real part of what the relationship left you.

Keep something in use. Not in a box. His jacket you actually wear, her chipped mug you actually drink from. Objects that are used stay connected to a living present.

Carry something forward. Donate where she volunteered. Learn the instrument he played. Take the trip you were going to take together, and take it for both of you.

Say the name. To your kids, to friends, to new people. Being the person who keeps their memory alive is a real job and it matters more the further out you get.

Mark the dates. Birthdays and anniversaries are going to hit whether or not you plan for them. Planning something small tends to go better than pretending it is an ordinary Tuesday.

Why this matters for the grief that is coming

There is one more argument for this, and it is a longer one.

If you believe that healing means severing, then every future loss is also a future severing, and part of you starts protecting against it in advance. I see this in people who have had several losses close together. They begin holding back from the people still alive, because loving them is now understood as signing up for another loss.

If the relationship survives the death in a changed form, that calculation changes. What you build with people is not erased at the end. It gets harder to reach and it costs something to keep, but it persists. That belief makes it possible to keep investing in the living, which is, in the end, most of what grief work is trying to protect.

If you want help with this

Some of this is straightforward. Some of it is not, especially when the relationship was complicated, when the death was traumatic, or when what you feel most is relief and you cannot say that to anyone.

That is the material I work with. I see adults for grief and bereavement in Carlsbad and online across California, in English, Spanish, and French. I also lead a small grief process group at our Carlsbad Village office on Thursday evenings, where people say these things out loud to a room that does not think they are strange.

A free 15-minute call is the way in. Fees, insurance, and superbill details are on our Cost and Insurance page.

If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, free.