One of the biggest themes of grief in my own life has been death.
From a very young age, I experienced the deaths of family members and friends. Before I graduated from college, I had attended about a dozen funerals.
I thought that was normal.
Turns out, it wasn’t.
But eventually, every one of us will experience the death of someone we love. And over the years, I’ve noticed some things about the way we respond to death and grief.
Now, as a Grief Recovery Specialist, I have a different lens through which I see those experiences. I can recognize some of the harmful messaging that often shows up around grief and loss, and I’ve learned how important it is to replace those myths with healthier ways of understanding and processing grief.
One of the things I’ve noticed is the difference between acknowledging grief and trying to explain it away.
I’ve attended memorial services where faith wasn’t a significant part of the person’s life, and sometimes there was a surprising freedom to simply acknowledge how awful the loss was.
People could say:
I am devastated.
I miss them.
This isn’t fair.
I don’t know how I’m going to do this without them.
They could share the beautiful things about the person they lost and the complicated things too. They could sit in the sadness without needing to immediately make it better.
I’ve also attended many faith-based services that were beautiful, meaningful, and filled with genuine hope.
And yet, faith communities can sometimes unintentionally slip into spiritual bypassing—using religious or spiritual beliefs to avoid, minimize, or rush past the raw pain of grief. Instead of feeling the loss, we can begin to intellectualize it. We reach for statements like:
“At least they’re in a better place.”
“At least they knew Jesus.”
“At least we know we’ll see them again someday.”
“We rejoice that they’re with God.”
As a person of faith, I may genuinely believe those things.
But something can be intellectually true and emotionally unhelpful at the same time.
When someone we love dies, especially when their death is unexpected, tragic, or much too young, there is a very real emotional reality that needs to be acknowledged:
They are gone.
We miss them.
We are heartbroken.
Our future with them has changed.
There may be anger, shock, disappointment, fear, regret, or things we never got to say. Faith doesn’t require us to pretend those things don’t hurt. In fact, I think we do ourselves a disservice when we rush too quickly toward the hopeful part without allowing ourselves to acknowledge the devastating part.
We can believe that someone we love is with God and say, “I hate that they’re gone.”
We can believe we will see them again and desperately wish we could have more time with them now.
We can have hope for what comes after this life and be completely brokenhearted about the life we wanted with them here.
Both can be true.
And this is where some of the grief myths we’ve inherited from our cultures, families, and faith communities can become especially harmful.
Two of the biggest are:
Don’t feel bad.
Be strong.
“At least” statements and spiritual bypassing can become part of the don’t feel bad message.
And even something as simple as saying, “I’m so sorry I’m crying,” (which I STILL do) can reveal how deeply we’ve been taught that being strong means holding our emotions in.
I once heard someone say, “I haven’t cried yet because I just rejoice that they’re in heaven.”
That may have been completely sincere. But I couldn’t help thinking about how those two myths—don’t feel bad and be strong—can sometimes get wrapped up together.
Crying doesn’t automatically mean we’re grieving in a healthy way. And not crying doesn’t automatically mean we’re avoiding grief. But when we only allow ourselves to focus on the spiritually positive aspects of a death, we can unintentionally minimize the very real grief of losing someone we love.
Grief requires emotional honesty.
We have to be willing to acknowledge what hurts.
To name it.
To feel it.
To stay connected to what is happening in our bodies and hearts rather than trying to solve everything with our minds.
We cannot heal from a loss we refuse to acknowledge and feel.
And I want to be clear: there is no one right way to grieve and no universal timeline for grief.
Some people cry. Some don’t.
Some experience intense grief immediately. For others, it takes weeks or months to fully understand what they’ve lost.
There isn’t one correct way to grieve.
But there are ways of responding to grief that can make it harder to process—and pretending we’re okay when we’re not is one of them.
I’ve also witnessed something beautiful in memorial services over the years.
I’ve seen people cry without apologizing.
I’ve heard people say, “This is devastating.”
I’ve watched people tell funny stories, share complicated memories, acknowledge regrets, express anger, and talk openly about how much they miss someone.
And I’ve also seen people hold onto their faith and hope.
Those things don’t have to compete.
We can hold sorrow and hope in both hands.
We can grieve the life that ended while believing in what comes after this life.
We can miss someone desperately and still experience moments of joy.
We can be grateful for the time we had and devastated that it wasn’t enough.
That’s the reality of grief.
Joy and sorrow often coexist.
And because grief is a journey, there will be days when one feels much stronger than the other.
Maybe that’s the greatest thing I’ve learned from all those funerals:
We don’t have to choose between faith and grief.
We don’t have to spiritualize our pain to prove that we have faith.
We don’t have to suppress our sadness to be strong.
And we don’t have to abandon hope in order to be honest about how much something hurts.
Sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is simply tell the truth:
This hurts.
I miss them.
I don’t understand.
And I’m going to let myself grieve while I carry the hope I still have.
There is room for all of it.