Good grief!
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What is grief? For this discussion, grief can be understood as the process of handling certain kinds of losses – typically the loss of someone close, or perhaps a friendship, a job, an opportunity, or youth itself.
Some losses are permanent: the death of a loved one, the end of a profession or company, even the disappearance of a country such as the Soviet Union. Others are temporary or partial: friends drifting away through distance and new commitments, changing companies within the same industry, or simply misplacing your keys and feeling the sudden frustration of absence.
Some initial questions: Does the nature of the loss change the grieving process? Would you call the sadness at the loss of a cherished possession grief, or something else? How would you distinguish mourning from grief?
And is there such a thing as good or bad grief? Some argue that such labels are unhelpful, that grief is entirely personal and beyond comparison, yet perhaps there are patterns worth examining.
What might healthy grief look like? What might destructive grief become? Consider two widowers who lose their spouses at the same time.
Widower 1 struggles with all the tasks his wife once handled: driving, changing lightbulbs, taking out the rubbish. Yet he persists. He leans on an expanding social network and rediscovers interests he had neglected. He thinks often of his wife, believing she would be glad to see him living fully while carrying her memory with him.
Widower 2 faces the same challenges but gives up. He spends his time telling others how much he misses his wife and lamenting the decline of him home. Lightbulbs burn out, the car stops starting, rubbish piles up. Friends gradually withdraw, and he becomes isolated. He too thinks constantly of his wife, wishing above all for her return.
How should these paths be described? Rather than good or bad grief, perhaps limiting grief and growing grief are more useful terms.
Prolonged grief is recognised as a psychiatric disorder, yet this raises difficult questions. How long is too long, and how can grief be disordered if every path is said to be unique?
The five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are often presented as a sequence. But is grief really so linear? Models such as the grief continuum [1] add a sixth stage, meaning and purpose, while allowing movement back and forth between stages over time.
For an alternative perspective on grief, the philosopher Michael Cholbi proposes that we grieve for those in whom our practical identities have been invested [2]. The more central another person is to our practical identity (whether or not we have actually met them), the greater cause we have for grieving them upon their deaths. Our grief thus focusses not the loss of the deceased but on the transformation of our relationship with the deceased. This provokes a kind of identity crisis, in which a re-examination of the relationship involves our values and beliefs. So for Cholbi there is a particular value in grief: it is a process by which we can reformulate our identities, through which we can gain self-knowledge.
We all experience loss, and there may be many paths through grief.
## Resources
- Phil Cohen’s The Grief Continuum: Transforming Grief – When I Lost My Only Child https://youtu.be/irvSnfYNquc?si=OBjr4foiaVYHHzNM
- Michael Cholbi on Grief, Identity Crisis, and What We Learn from Loss https://philosophybreak.com/articles/michael-cholbi-on-grief-identity-crisis-and-what-we-learn-from-loss/
- Three responses to grief in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Camus: ‘We have the religious turn of Kierkegaard, the existential carpe diem of Heidegger, and the laugh-until-you-die of Camus.’ https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/philosophy-grief/