What is Grief, Really?
Grief is something we think we understand, until we are asked to sit with it, to feel it, or to recognize it moving through our bodies and lives.
If you are anything like me, you may have been taught, through spoken and unspoken lessons or subtle social cues, that grief enters our lives only when someone dies. That it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That it is something to process, to move through, or eventually “get over.”
But if grief were truly defined and experienced in this way for everyone, far fewer people would feel so confused when it enters their lives beyond the boundaries of the death of a loved one, or when it lingers under the weight of identity shifts, social or environmental uncertainty, or harm.
In fact, when grief arrives in these forms and remains unacknowledged, many people may not recognize their sorrow as grief at all. And without that recognition, they are often denied permission to pause, to name what they are carrying, and to receive the community care that their grieving bodies and hearts require.
So let’s take a moment here to slow down, to recognize, and to ask ourselves, with curiosity rather than certainty, the question: What is grief, really?
To this question, our bodies and spirits may collectively arrive at one simple but profound conclusion: Grief is not a concept or theory we can fully analyze with the mind. It is not something we can master through neatly defined clinical language, diagnoses, or problem-solving alone. To know what grief really is, we must move beyond explanation and into embodied exploration, allowing ourselves to feel it, to notice it, and to encounter it as it lives within us.
Through embodied exploration, we collectively come to realize that grief is a deeply human, embodied response. Long before we have words to fully describe what we are feeling, grief manifests not only in response to the experience of losing a loved one, but also in response to many other sensations and lived experiences. We grieve people, yes. But we also grieve futures that never arrive or are denied. We grieve the loss of versions of ourselves we can no longer return to. We grieve relationships that have ended, or those that remain fractured. We grieve faith in bodies that weaken or falter. We grieve the loss of safe communities, and of a better tomorrow, eroded by broken social contracts, disappearing promises, and the reality that safety was never guaranteed in the first place.
In all the ways grief shows up in our lives, our experiences remind us that, however it arrives, grief is not confined to death or endings. It is also a form of embodied, relational testimony. A truth that something that mattered to us is broken. That something we once loved is no longer what it was. That something we once held dear, meaningful, or once trusted as a promise of hope no longer holds that promise for us.
This is an understanding of grief that psychology and neuroscience support. Research shows that grief affects the brain, nervous system, immune function, and sense of identity, not only after death, but after many significant ruptures in attachment or meaning. Contemporary mental-health research recognizes grief following experiences such as divorce, job displacement, migration, chronic illness, and collective or systemic trauma.
Grief, then, is not only what appears at death, as an exception to life, but something woven through many aspects of our lived experience.
And yet, because grief is most often acknowledged only during times of bereavement, many lived experiences of grief remain unacknowledged and unnamed.
Leaving many of us walking around in the world oblivious to our grief: grieving quietly while still working, parenting, studying, organizing, or simply surviving. We may not cry. We may not stop functioning. But we are grieving in ways that are not always expressed through words; instead, showing up in us as exhaustion, numbness, irritability, or a sense of being “out of sync” with the world.
This is the grief we don’t talk about enough. It is the kind of grief we explore in our ON Grief podcast, where stories, reflection, and shared presence create space for what has too often gone unnamed.
Here is Your Invitation to Continue the Conversation
If grief is present in your life right now, whether from loss, transition, disillusionment, or change, you are warmly invited to listen in to our “On Grief” podcast, or join me and other community members in a future conversations.
Grief does not have to be carried alone, and sometimes the most healing thing is simply sitting in circle with others who understand.
We invite you to pause and reflect on what you are mourning right now. To reflect on, what has changed in your life that you did not consent to? To reflect on, what you are still carrying not because it works anymore, but because it reminds you of who and what you have survived.
In either case, please know that you are not alone in what you carry.
~ written by Mario ‘Mai’ Gross
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