July 2026

Linda Favero
4 days ago
5 min read

Meadow with Black Butte in the background. "Grief is the difference between where your life is and where you thought it would be." - Dr. Lucy Hone

3 Ways We Experience Grief: Death, Work + Relationships.

I don’t think we talk about grief enough and the different ways we experience it. Most of us begin to learn about grief when someone close to us dies. But there are other forms as well, including grief after being laid off or overlooked for a promotion, and grief when relationships end, whether paternal or romantic. Let’s talk about the grief you never gave yourself permission to feel.

1. Grief in Death

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In my last issue, I shared how my women ancestors impacted me. If you missed it, here’s a link. My first true grief experience was my mom’s death. She died at 60 after a 5-month illness with cancer (I don’t like saying battle). The title of my eulogy was “The Cruel Gift”, because there was so much beauty during those five months. Ever since that moment, I embrace conversations with people after their loved ones have died. If I can help plan a gathering or write an obituary, I’m your person. I attend memorial services when I’m in town and read the Sunday Oregonian obituaries, so I don’t miss someone I loved or who was loved by someone I care about.

According to Jamie Anderson, the author of “Dr. Who”, “Grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” It reminds me of the prophetic interview with Andrew Garfield and Stephen Colbert in 2021, after his mom's passing. "I hope this grief stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her. And I told her every day. We all told her every day. She was the best of us."

If you are dealing with grief now or want to lean into a past grief, I find David Kessler’s work to be the most impactful for me. He expanded Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief and added “meaning” as a sixth. Meaning is not a way to avoid or bypass the pain of loss. It comes through the pain, not around it. As people allow themselves to feel and move through their grief, meaning can gradually emerge. Meaning does not remove the pain. It can, however, soften how the pain is carried and tends to unfold over time, sometimes long after the initial intensity of grief.

2. Grief at Work

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I have also experienced grief at work but didn’t associate grief with the experience. I touched on some of this in my career journey newsletter when I made pivots after hospital moments. I didn’t know that was grief when it happened or afterward. I have been passed over for job titles and raises, let go without understanding why, and reached ceilings with no place to go. All these experiences left me sad and alone in my feelings, not knowing how to name them.

There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost someone to death. The rest of us are supposed to just get on with it. Dr. Lucy Hone is a resilience researcher, an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury, and the author of “How Will I Ever Get Through This?”

She offers 5 practical ways to ease grief immediately backed by research:

Dial Back the Guilt — Feeling relief or moments of shame after a job loss or setback is a normal emotional response.
Press Pause on Unhelpful Relationships — Professional relationships often shift under career disruption; this strain is common and typically not permanent.
Identify the Help You Actually Need — Career support is multidimensional — emotional, practical (e.g., job search), and informational (e.g., financial/legal) — and rarely comes from one colleague or mentor.
Approach Grief in Manageable Chunks — Alternating between engaging with the career loss and stepping back to focus elsewhere is an adaptive coping strategy, not avoidance.
Lower the Bar — Career disruption carries a real cognitive and emotional load; reduced productivity during this period is expected, not a personal failing.

If you want to explore more of her research, she appeared on The Good Life Project.

3. Grief with Relationships

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When you live a long life, many relationships come and go. Friendships, aging parents, children leaving home, and romantic partners. People change, or don’t, and you do. It is challenging to navigate these shifts. Some of us choose to say so long to these relationships or “ghost” them. And it’s harder if they are “ghosting” us. This is another form of grief that we rarely discuss or give the attention it needs or deserves.

When a relationship ends or changes—whether a family relationship, a friendship, or a romantic partnership—the grief that follows is often real but rarely recognized. Psychologists call this disenfranchised grief: loss without a funeral, a card, or permission to take a day off work. Researcher Pauline Boss adds that this compounds the ambiguity of loss — the person is still alive, perhaps still visible in your life, making closure harder to find. There's no fixed stage model here, no "right" way to feel, and no set timeline. The same compassion we extend to the bereaved deserves to be extended here too.

Name It as Loss — Labeling a faded relationship or unexplained ending as grief — rather than dismissing it — is often what allows the healing process to begin.
Release the Need for Closure — Explanations or "final conversations" aren't always available; healing doesn't require them.
Grieve Regardless of Who Left — Whether you initiated the distance or were left without warning, the sense of absence is valid and worth acknowledging either way.

Grief touches every part of life—including death, career, and relationships alike—yet we rarely give ourselves permission to name or talk about it outside the context of losing someone. Unacknowledged grief—whether from a death, being passed over at work, or watching a relationship fade—doesn't just disappear; it lingers, unprocessed, until we name it. The path forward starts with recognition: allowing space for grief after any kind of loss, releasing the need for tidy closure, and extending the same compassion to these losses, visible or invisible, that we'd offer anyone who's been bereaved. Talking openly about grief, in all its forms, is what makes healing possible.