From www.ourheartsofhope.org:
When Nick lost one of his close friends to substance use, he knew that the deep pain and sadness he felt came from his grief over his friend’s death. But as he started to heal from his own struggles, he also noticed himself missing the communities he left behind and the routines he had become familiar with. Even as he found himself feeling healthier, stronger, and happier, Nick still imagined what a life with the friends who knew him in some of his most challenging times could have been like.
“I learned that you don’t just have to grieve for the loss of a family member or a loved one,” Nick said. “You can grieve actions that you used to take. You can grieve an old life that you used to have. There’s really no limit to what grief can take you to.”
Nick shared his story about something so relatable yet so difficult to name–the grief we feel for people, things, and experiences that we’ve lost but that haven’t died.
We are so used to thinking about grief as something connected to death. And though we feel the pain of our loved ones’ deaths over many, many years, we also grieve other losses in life. It can be difficult to understand and express those feelings, because our social systems typically don’t acknowledge this type of grief. But it is real–it even has a name. Disenfranchised grief is the term for grief that society doesn’t see as legitimate.
There are many reasons your grief might be disenfranchised. It could be that your relationship to the person who died isn’t deemed “close enough” to justify mourning. Maybe you lost something that others consider insignificant, like a new opportunity in your career. And often, the things we mourn aren’t even viewed as losses in society at all.
There are many events that can cause grief: diagnosis of an illness, job change/loss, retirement, financial loss, health changes, relationship changes, moving, home loss, leaving home, loss of a dream, and others. Tell us about your experience with disenfranchised grief.
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