Grief: there is no right way to live through absence

A death turns everything upside down: schedules, family ties, sleep, sometimes even the meaning of one's own life. Yet very quickly, those around us expect us to “feel better”. At work, a few days off are granted, then life is supposed to resume its course. For many bereaved people, that is precisely when the hardest part begins.

The “five stages”, a persistent myth

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: everyone knows these five stages. They were described in 1969 by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross… about patients facing their own death, not bereaved people. Specialists have since pointed out that grief does not follow a straight line: emotions come and go, mix, return on an anniversary, with a song, a smell. There is no catching up to do and no right way to do it.

Grieving is not forgetting, but finding another place for the one who has gone.

The “work of mourning”

It was Sigmund Freud who, in 1917, first spoke of the “work of mourning” in “Mourning and Melancholia”. The word is apt: it is real psychological work, slow and costly, through which we gradually detach from what is no more, while keeping alive what the person who died passed on to us. For psychoanalysts, the aim is not to forget, but to find another place for the one who is absent.

When grief does not pass

For most people, the pain gradually eases, even if it never completely disappears. Sometimes, however, the suffering stays intact for many months and prevents one from living: overwhelming longing, inability to resume activities, the feeling that life no longer has meaning. Since ICD-11, the World Health Organization has recognised a “prolonged grief disorder”. This is no reason to “medicalise” sorrow, but a marker: when the pain no longer moves, it helps to talk to a professional.

The griefs we rarely talk about

Some griefs remain in the shadows: losing a baby during pregnancy or at birth, the suicide of someone close, the death of an animal that shared one's life for fifteen years, or the “ambiguous loss” of a parent with dementia, still there but already absent. Because they are less recognised, these griefs are often lived in solitude. People bereaved by suicide can also call the 3114.

Talking about the person who died, about what could not be said, about the anger or guilt that sometimes come with loss: this is often what allows grief to start moving again. A space for listening, in person or by video, can help, at your own pace.

This article is for information only. It replaces neither a consultation nor a diagnosis, which is a doctor's role.