Could the Word “Grief” Be Exhausted?

How can we let it rest and find more and better words?

*Detail of Harmonie jaune [Harmony in Yellow], Henri Matisse, 1927-28

Grief as Fear

Here is the single most oft-repeated phrase I encountered in memoirs about loss:

I never knew grief felt so like fear.

Nearly every author I read borrowed the line, using it as a touchstone while they groped for language to describe the emotional terrain after loss.

The line comes from C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, his account of the first year after his wife Joy’s death. Writers far and wide borrowed it—Christian and secular, young and old, men and women alike. Everyone seemed to resonate with this idea.

At first, it felt like the grieving community’s secret handshake. Yeah, grief is terrifying. But when I kept seeing it, another thought occurred to me:

This word grief must be oddly feeble if it takes a completely different one—fear—to explain what it feels like.

And once I had the thought, evidence began to gather in support of it.

‘Complicated’ Grief

Another sign the word is flagging is how we often we qualify it.

Years after my mom and sister died, I learned that Columbia University, ten blocks from my apartment, had a Center for Complicated Grief. For a moment, I was beside myself that such a resource had been so nearby and I hadn’t known. Immediately I jumped on their website and started scrolling.

On the homepage there was a quiz inviting visitors to assess their response to a recent loss and determine whether they might be experiencing this ‘complicated’ thing.

After taking the quiz and investigating a little further though, I ended up crestfallen. It felt so clinical and detached. It immediately made me want to run across town to a museum. And their timeline was almost absurd; you had about six months to be a wreck. After that, your situation was considered complicated.

I closed my laptop. I was sitting at the same kitchen counter where I had baked non- stop during the first year after my mom and sister died, hardly leaving the house. It wasn’t until the second year that I was even capable of getting help.

I thought to myself: Dear Lord, isn’t all grief complicated?

And I swear I heard back: Yes.

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One place that reliably offers nuance when depicting grief — scripture. The Bible thoroughly resists any attempt to compress or simplify the pain related to loss and refuses to settle on a single word.

Instead, it describes the facets of grief and its postures, and along with that offers a sprawling vocabulary: mourning, lament, anguish, pain, distress, bitterness, affliction, humiliation, and the word for broken, as in both “not working” and “brokenhearted.”

And these English translations are themselves only approximations of the richer and more numerous Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic words.

Here’s just a taste:

I am utterly bowed down and prostrate; all the day I go about mourning…I am feeble and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart. Psalm 38:6-8

For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears; for a comforter is far from me. Lamentations 1:16

And the one that made me cry while writing:

Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty. Ruth 1:20-21

Here we are brought into the realms of sound (groan), physical reaction (tears, tumult), posture (bowed down), isolation (a comforter is far), identity (so lost as to require a new name). And perhaps, the one we’ll keep our eye on most keenly in this letter, time.

Grief is a Verb

In scripture, grief has no expiration date; in fact, human pain and loss are often described using the present participle, a continuous verb tense. This includes the summa version of Jesus’ grief in the garden: weeping, groaning, sweating, bleeding, pleading, falling, waiting, praying.

Like the rhythms of life itself, grief is happening, hurting, healing — and then happening again.

Grief is an ‘ing’, not a thing.

But our word grief is a noun. Remember from grade school — a person, place, or thing. Nouns tend to have edges and finite shape. We often act upon them: we drive a car, we eat our food, we buy a new bag on eBay. (I just did that! I’ll post a pic.)

But you cannot drive, eat, or buy grief any more than you could drive, eat, or buy a rushing river.

It’s unfortunate too, and not grief’s fault, that it ended up monosyllabic, which, on top of everything else, gives it an almost truncated, administrative feel. There’s nothing ebbing or flowing about it, nothing mellifluous either. In this bluntness, it always strikes me as too eager for transcendence. Hasn’t it been a year now — with the grief?

I can almost hear ‘grief’ protesting: But I never applied for this job! This is all such a big misunderstanding…

Good ‘Grief’ — Staggering Off the Field

This much seems clear: the word ‘grief’ is exhausted.

Can we agree that it’s simply been asked to carry the weight of too many other words for far too long? My vote is to give it a break.

Here are two hacks: first, I use the word ‘grieving’ instead of ‘grief’ whenever sentence structure allows. It might just be the case that the word grieving gives someone you love the permission they need and crave — to just let things be what they are in that day or moment. And the sense too that they are in process and moving forward — albeit in some mysterious way.

Second, I started a list with my friend Kari Jo a few months ago at a coffee shop of different words that capture better the wild and changing nature of deep loss. I found it so satisfying. Among the words on our list that morning: freezing, blind, hobbled, disoriented, blank.

Spring has sprung, my friends. It’s time for new things. Let’s consider giving ‘grief’ some electrolytes and a couple minutes on the bench.

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What word or words top your list to capture the experience of grief?

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The File

All There Is with Anderson Cooper: Guest Stephen Colbert — on how his grief changed over many decades. Colbert lost his father and two older brothers in a plane crash when he was a child. This is an extraordinary interview.

I’m Grieving As Fast As I Can: How Young Widows and Widowers Can Cope and Heal, Linda Feinberg, 1994. I love the title for obvious reasons. This book was waaaay ahead of it’s time. It was apparently on my neighbor’s bedside table for years after she lost her husband suddenly in her mid-forties.

Kitchen Dancing: The Bright Side of the Road, Van Morrison.

p.s. Here’s a noun: the toiletry travel bag I bought on eBay. Decent.

*They’ve since changed the name to Center for Prolonged Grief (And I think you get a whole year now to fall apart. Thanks so much!). The new name reflects the same change to the official diagnosis in the 2022 DSM. Sigh. The DSM. More to share on that in another letter. In the meantime, I asked my therapist what the whole thing might even be about — ‘cause it doesn’t seem to be about grief. And she had one word: funding.

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