Grief finds its way to your door in countless forms. Losing a person, losing a job, losing a part of yourself, and each of those can happen in so many different ways. There's one flavour of grief when a child dies, another when a sibling does, another when you lose a parent while you're still young, or a partner. There's a whole different flavour for suicide, for sudden and shocking deaths, for accidents and other tragedies, as there is for the long, slow, drawn-out ones, including losing someone before they've died, as with Alzheimer's. And for every kind of loss we've named here, there are hundreds we haven't.

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The human heart is meant to break, and the longer you live, the more times it will. This is one of the truths of being alive and getting to live a long life. 

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But grief isn't meant to be carried alone. 

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It needs witnesses, people who are able and willing to sit with you in it and not look away or try to fix things. When it is carried in private, grief tends to go brittle, and brittle grief sets in one of two ways: into a numbed sort of living, where the joy of being alive stays just out of reach, or into bitterness. 

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Grief witnessed by others isn’t less painful, less sad or somehow easier but it does move and flow and change shape over time. 

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Grief isn't practical, or linear. It's messy. It doesn't make sense or get resolved. You don't get over grief, and you don't move through it, you learn to live alongside it and make a place for it in your days.
 
So find a place where your tears are welcome,  ideally a mixture of people and the living world. Being out in nature helps so much more than most people expect and the generosity of trees, the ocean, birds and hawthorn bushes can be a balm for a broken heart.

 

Find people to be alongside. Reach out and ask for company. Find people who know grief and walk, eat, sing, dance, knit and cry together. 
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Supporting Children in Understanding Grief and Loss

 

Children are often more aware than adults expect, and shutting them out of what's happening usually makes things harder, not easier. Including them, in age-appropriate ways, tends to help more than protecting them from the reality.

Use honest, direct language. It helps to use the words "died" and "dead" rather than "passed away," "lost," or "gone to sleep." Softer phrases can genuinely confuse children, a young child told someone is "lost" may wonder why no one is looking for them, or become afraid of falling asleep themselves. Give information in small, honest chunks, and answer their questions directly, even the difficult ones.

How children understand death changes with age. Very young children don't grasp that death is permanent, they may ask when the person is coming back, sometimes repeatedly, and that's normal rather than a sign they haven't understood. When children start to understand that death is final and happens to everyone, varies a lot between individual children. There's no need to explain everything at once, understanding builds gradually, and children often return to the same questions as they get older and see things differently.

Children generally do better when they're given a real choice about attending the funeral, seeing the body, or taking part in rituals, rather than being automatically included or excluded. Explain honestly what will happen: where it will be, who'll be there, what people might do (cry, hug, tell stories), and roughly how long it will last. Adults who were included as children rarely regret it, the more common regret is having been kept away.

Children tend to grieve in bursts rather than continuously, seeming fine one moment and distressed the next, which can look confusing but is a normal pattern rather than a sign they're not coping. Grief in children often comes out sideways, as behaviour changes, anger, clinginess, sleep or appetite changes, or physical complaints, rather than the more recognisable sadness adults expect to see.

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For further support, please see our Wider Resources page. 

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Social Media & Grief

 

Social media raises its own set of decisions after a death, both practical (what happens to their accounts) and emotional (how to handle grief playing out somewhere so public and persistent). It can be very distressing to see people talking about the death of a loved one online, particularly if you have not yet managed to share with everyone you would want to tell in person. It can also be comforting to see the outpouring of love and missing from people far and wide. These things are rarely perfect and you might need to make direct requests of people or stay offline to manage what shows up. 

Facebook and Instagram both let you request that an account be memorialised rather than deleted. Facebook adds "Remembering" before the name and creates a space for friends to share memories. You'll usually need to submit a copy of the death certificate as proof, unless the person set up a Facebook or Instagram Legacy Contact in advance, in which case that person can manage the memorialised page (approving friend requests, moderating tributes) without needing to prove anything after the fact.  Both platforms also let you request the account be deleted instead, if that's what the family wants. X (formerly Twitter) doesn't offer memorialisation, only deactivation and eventual deletion, requested by an immediate family member or the estate.

If this is something you want to think about for yourself in advance, both Facebook and Instagram Legacy Contacts can be set up any time in your own settings. 

"On this day" memories, birthday notifications, and old messages can resurface without warning, and for some people this reopens grief unexpectedly. Most platforms let you turn off memory notifications, hide someone's birthday reminder, or mute specific people, worth doing if these are catching you off guard rather than helping.