Why We're Taught to Believe Grief Means Moving On

One woman once wished for an imaginary friend as a child, but her imagination never stretched that far. She envied children who could conjure someone else's presence, certain they were never lonely, always had a playmate and confidant close by.

She didn't understand what it felt like to keep company with someone invisible to everyone else until she was twenty-four, the year her mother died. After a lifetime of loving only people she could see and touch, she learned how to love someone who no longer existed in the physical world.

For a while after her mother died, she grieved what felt like a total and final loss. Then, after about a month, she began to notice her mother's presence everywhere. Unlike before, that presence wasn't tied to one place. It was everywhere and nowhere at once, and she found she could still talk to her mother and keep her near.

That ongoing presence didn't erase her grief, but it did bring a comfort she hadn't expected. She used to assume a person was either here or gone. She hadn't imagined an in-between, or that her mother would leave an endless echo behind after death.

Making room for a different kind of bond

In the 1950s, developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described assimilation and accommodation as ways children make sense of the world as they grow.

Piaget's theory is complicated and usually applied to childhood development, but the core idea holds up well beyond it. It can help explain how people adjust to new realities throughout life.

Piaget argued that people build mental frameworks, which he called schemas, to understand their surroundings. When something new or unfamiliar comes along, a person first tries to fit it into an existing schema. That's assimilation.

When the new experience doesn't fit, the person has to adjust or expand their understanding to make room for it. That's accommodation. Through this process, the mind stretches and the world gains a new layer of nuance. Something similar seems to happen after a loss. Once a person realizes that people who have died aren't entirely gone, they rebuild their understanding of the world to make space for that truth.

To make room for an ongoing relationship with her mother, one griever had to rethink what she knew about love, attachment, family, and connection. Only after loss forced her to redefine these ideas could she understand how such a relationship was possible.

So why do we assume grief ends in moving on?

People often ask why so many of us assume grief means eventually moving on. There are a few possible answers, but one is simply that many people only learn the truth about grief once they've lived through a loss themselves. Before that, their mental framework may have no room for an ongoing relationship with someone who died, partly because they've been taught otherwise.

For much of the last hundred years, grief theory told us that moving on was the goal. Through most of the twentieth century, the dominant idea was that grief unfolds in stages or phases, ending in concepts like detachment, recovery, acceptance, or a new life. Whether or not it was intended, the takeaway many people absorbed was that healthy grieving means letting go and moving forward.

Until you've lost someone, you have little reason to question what you've been told. It's only once a person wants to keep thinking about, talking to, and loving someone who has died that the idea of moving on starts to feel illogical.

It's worth noting that some people do want to move on after a death, and for good reason. A relationship that was difficult while someone was alive can remain difficult after death. In those cases, staying connected may feel harmful rather than comforting.

Could grief be understood differently from the start?

Nothing about human nature stops us from believing grief and love continue, even before we've experienced loss ourselves. A person doesn't need to know exactly what it feels like to love someone who died in order to understand that ongoing grief and connection are normal. The trouble is that most people simply aren't taught to see it that way, and grieving people don't always speak up about what's true.

Looking back on life before her own loss, one griever wondered whether she'd missed any signs pointing to this reality. Her mother, for instance, showed glimpses of continuing to love her own mother, who had died before the daughter was born. But were there real signs of an ongoing bond? Probably not.

Many people keep their relationships with deceased loved ones private, for a range of reasons. Chief among them may be a fear of being misunderstood by a culture that still treats ongoing bonds as strange, or a worry that others will make them feel wrong for holding onto a relationship they treasure.

Grieving people already carry heavy burdens. Should they also be expected to spend their limited energy teaching others about grief? Should they risk judgment or misunderstanding in the process? There's no single right answer, and whether to talk openly about your grief and your loved one is a personal choice. Still, when someone does share their experience, it can shift how the rest of us understand grief.

Want to read more about continuing bonds?

• A Grief Concept You Should Care About: Continuing Bonds
• 16 Tips for Continuing Bonds With People We've Lost
• Continuing Bonds: Shifting the Grief Paradigm