What Are Grief Surprises?
- Elena Lister, MD,
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Knowing what grief surprises are helps you and your child.
There is no one right way to grieve—we all do it our own way, but some experiences happen to everyone.
Landmark dates such as birthdays often activate intense grief. These can be planned for.
Grief surprises are those unexpected times you confront reminders of your loss that are extra challenging.
Naming those times gives you and your child a sense of steadiness and a way through the intensified pain.
When someone you love dies, you grieve deeply whether overtly or not. We each do that in our own way and on our own timeline. There is no one way to grieve and certainly no one right way to do so. One thing that is universal, though, is that landmark days – birthdays, important holidays, graduations, etc., tend to activate intensified feelings about the loss. This is talked about enough that most people expect that it is a possibility. So, we wanted to reflect on those moments during grieving that can take your breath away as they come unexpectedly with no chance for preparation. We propose a new term for them: “grief surprises”.
Jack is a teacher in his late 40s with 2 children, Lisa, age 6, and Mark, age 10. He began therapy with one of us when his wife Leah died a year and a half ago after a year-long struggle with an aggressive cancer. All 3 of them responded to her death differently. Jack felt numb for weeks, and only after the kids seemed to be more settled back in school did he begin to sob. Lisa cried a lot and would not sleep alone for months. Mark stomped around the house and acted up mildly at school. At the one-year anniversary of Leah’s death, each of them re-experienced these reactions in an intensified way. Jack had learned in therapy that this might happen and was able to talk with his children about it and respond with compassion for all three of them.
He had also learned with us about the “grief surprises” and came in one day to tell us about one. He was on the phone making a routine appointment with a doctor when the receptionist asked to review his profile and went over his emergency contacts. Without any recognition of his loss, she read aloud his list, which had Leah at the top. On some level, of course, Jack had known she was his first contact if there was an emergency, but he thought he had taken care of changing that for all of his doctors. He felt that “grief surprise” as a punch in the stomach, an inability to think clearly for a minute, and the beginning of tears. He apologized and went on to give her a replacement name. Why we feel the need to apologize for showing natural human emotion is a whole other issue we will write about in the future. It overshadowed the rest of his day as he felt plunged into overwhelming sadness. It took him until sometime late the next day to re-equilibrate. It helped to know what it was, why it had happened, and that he needed to seek the things that comforted him in tough moments.
One way to understand why “grief surprises” occur is that grief is a learning process. You do know the person you love died, and you experience that loss throughout the day and sometimes the night. But the way our minds work is that, with very difficult things, we know them and also don’t know them. In order to function, we don’t let ourselves know it for a minute or an hour or a day. And then along comes something that pushes its reality unavoidably in front of us, and we have to learn it all over again. While deeply painful, this process is also part of healing. In that re-learning is adaptation, allowing us to let it sink in in smaller bits til eventually we can tolerate it in all of its fullness. As we had talked about with Jack, when those grief surprises inevitably occur, we recommend naming them as such. This helps us to feel a sense of agency about them, and then do the things that give the comfort we need — whether it's getting outside for a walk, putting on music, calling someone, or writing in a journal. Note what works best in a “tough moments list” to help you remember what you can do when you are most immersed in it. We recommend you do this with your children as well.
Grieving is never easy. And we believe that, after you lose someone that you loved dearly, you will carry that grief in evolving form as it becomes part of the fabric of who you are. While we cannot take away the pain of your losses, we hope that understanding some of the process can make it less overwhelming for you. You can support your children by helping them to understand it too.
