Grief Doesn't Go Away. You Grow Around It.

Somewhere in a first grief session, usually around minute twenty, people ask me some version of the same question.

When does this stop?

They ask it in different ways. Sometimes it is a genuine request for a timeline, because they have a wedding in four months and they need to know whether they will be able to cope. Sometimes it is an accusation aimed at themselves, because it has been nine months and they thought they would be further along. Sometimes it is quieter than that, and what they actually mean is please tell me I am not going to feel like this forever.

I am not going to give you a schedule, because I do not have one and neither does anyone else. But I can tell you the thing that has been most useful to the people I sit with, which is that the question itself is built on a picture of grief that is probably wrong.

The picture most of us inherited

Most of us grew up with the idea that grief is a flood that drains. You start out full of it. Time passes. It empties out. One day you reach the bottom of it and you are, in the language people actually use, over it.

If that is the picture in your head, then every wave that arrives in year three is evidence of failure. You are behind. Something in you is broken or self-indulgent or stuck. People I work with describe lying about how they are doing at work, at church, at family dinners, because the calendar says they should be fine and they are not.

In 1996, a grief counselor and educator in New Zealand named Lois Tonkin published a short piece in the journal Bereavement Care describing something she had noticed in her clients that did not fit that picture. She drew it as two circles.

In the first drawing, a circle of grief nearly fills the whole container of a person’s life. That is early loss, and it is accurate. In this circle, grief is most of what there is.

Most people expect the second drawing to show a smaller circle of grief inside the same container. What Tonkin actually drew was a grief circle exactly the same size, sitting inside a much larger container. The grief had not shrunk. The life had grown around it.

Why that distinction matters so much

It sounds like a small reframe. In practice it changes almost everything about how people treat themselves.

If grief is supposed to shrink, then your job is to feel less, and every strong feeling is a setback. You end up managing your grief the way you would manage a symptom, which means avoiding whatever sets it off. People stop driving past the hospital. They stop playing the music. They pack the photographs into a box in the garage and then feel guilty about the box.

If life is supposed to grow, your job is completely different. Your job is to build, slowly and without rushing it, a life large enough to hold what happened. That includes ordinary everyday things like work you can concentrate on again, a body that sleeps, friendships that are not entirely about the loss, some appetite for a future, a loving connection with the person you lost.

The grief still arrives. On the anniversary, in the grocery store, in the middle of a good day for no traceable reason. But it is arriving into a bigger room. It takes up a smaller share of the day, not because you feel it less intensely, but because there is now more day and more life to fill your heart and your mind.

The paradox at the center of it

Here is what I want to say plainly, because I think people wait a long time to hear it and often never do.

The pain is not separate from the love. It is the same thing, measured from the other side.

The reason this loss hurts is that the relationship was real and it mattered. Grief is what love does when the person it was pointed at is not physically there to receive it anymore. It can feel like it has nowhere to land, so it turns back on you, and it hurts exactly in proportion to what it was.

This is why I get uneasy when people talk about grief purely as a problem to reduce. If you successfully made yourself stop hurting, you would have had to make yourself stop loving, and almost nobody actually wants that trade. The people I sit with are not trying to feel nothing. They are trying to feel it without it destroying their ability to function. Ultimately, grief doesn’t exist without love. And a person who grieves is a person who loves.

Layers of value inside the pain

Something else tends to show up, usually later, and it surprises people.

The grief carries information. It tells you, with more precision than almost anything else in life, what actually mattered to you. What you miss most specifically is rarely the big obvious thing. It is the way he said your name on the phone. It is knowing there was one person who remembered your childhood house. It is having somebody to call at 6pm.

People find, months in, that this knowledge changes what they do. They call their remaining people more. They quit jobs that were costing them time they now understand to be finite. They become noticeably less patient with things that do not matter and noticeably more patient with people who are struggling.

I want to be careful here, because this idea gets misunderstood constantly. Nobody’s loss happened in order to teach them something. There is no lesson that was worth this. What I am describing is not a silver lining and it is not a reason the death occurred. It is something you build afterward, out of what you have and out of the loss, because you are the one still here and you get to decide what to do with it.

David Kessler, who co-wrote On Grief and Grieving with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and later lost his own twenty-one-year-old son, calls this stage meaning, and he is direct about its limits. Meaning is personal. It takes time. It does not require you to understand why the loss happened, and finding it will never make you feel the loss was worth it. I wrote more about the sixth stage here.

So what actually grows?

If the work is growing a life around the grief rather than shrinking the grief, it is fair to ask what specifically grows. In my experience it is four things, and each of them is a separate piece of work.

Being witnessed. Grief that is only ever felt privately tends to calcify. Something changes when another person sees it and does not flinch or try to fix it. Kessler’s version of this is that grief needs a witness. It is the single most reliable thing I see that can help, and it is also the thing most people have the least access to, because the friends who showed up in week two are gone by month five. More on why witnessing does what it does.

A changed connection, not a severed one. You do not have to give the person up in order to heal. That was an old idea in the field and the research moved past it decades ago. The task is finding a form the relationship can take now. More on continuing bonds.

Permission. Most grieving people are running a quiet audit on themselves about whether they are doing it correctly. Getting rid of that audit frees up an enormous amount of energy. There is no right way, and the five stages were never a sequence you were supposed to complete. More on that, including where the stages actually came from.

A body that can carry it. Grief is physical. The exhaustion, the fog, the getting sick constantly, the sleep that does not restore anything. People think they are failing when they are mostly just depleted. More on the physical side.

Where therapy fits

You do not need a therapist to grieve. People have done this for as long as there have been people, mostly with the help of family, community, ritual, and time.

What a therapist offers is a place where the grief does not have to be managed for anyone else’s comfort. Where you can say the ugly parts, including relief, including anger at the person who died, including the thing you have never told anyone about the last conversation. Where somebody is tracking it with you week over week, so you are not the only one holding the thread.

Some people want that one to one. Others find that what they most need is to be in a room with people who are also grieving, which does something that individual therapy cannot replicate. There is a particular relief in not having to explain. I lead a small grief process group at our Carlsbad Village office, Thursday evenings from 5:00 to 6:30, capped at eight people, and it is often the first place someone has said the person’s name out loud in months.

You can also read about how we work with grief individually, or start with my colleague Lindsey Robertson’s series on Worden’s four tasks of mourning, which is the framework a lot of our grief work sits on.

One last thing

If you are early in this, weeks or a couple of months, and someone hands you the growing around grief idea, it can land as an insult. Great, so it never ends. That is a reasonable reaction and I am not going to argue you out of it.

What I would say is that the model is not a sentence. It is a description of how it actually goes for most people, offered so that you stop measuring yourself against a shrinking circle that was never going to shrink. The grief you are carrying is the size it is because of what you lost. The part that changes is you, and the life you build around it, and that part is genuinely possible even when it does not feel like it from inside week six.

If you want help doing that, start with a free 15-minute call. You do not have to know what you want from therapy before you make it. 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.