— How a new generation has changed grief

By Rachel Zimmerman

When my husband died by suicide in 2014, leaving me alone to raise our two young daughters, I yearned to do grief in five tidy stages.

But my “stages” didn’t resemble stages at all, and nothing about my emotional lurching — from feeling physically battered by loss to compulsively digging for answers — was tidy. Clearly, I thought, I was grieving all wrong.

hese days, it’s widely acknowledged that the five stages of grief described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — were overhyped and misconstrued. They were based on interviews with people dying from terminal illness (not those grieving the death of a loved one), packaged into a theory that got refashioned in the public imagination.

“The trouble is, what was a description of grief became a prescription for grieving,” said Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and author of “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss.”

The new grief

The grieving process is undergoing its own transformation, becoming a more public and shared experience. The shift is fueled in part by the pandemic, which forced a global reckoning with grief, and a generation of digital natives, who are at ease using social media to share virtually all aspects of their lives, including grief.

“We are becoming vastly more comfortable sharing our own stories, truth-telling through innumerable new platforms,” said Lennon Flowers, founder of the Dinner Party, a platform for people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s grieving the death of a loved one and seeking peers, community and a meal.

“Increasingly, vulnerability is in vogue,” she said. “There’s an emerging cultural currency for being able to say out loud the experiences that, in previous generations, we were asked to keep under lock and key.”

How your brain processes grief

O’Connor describes grieving as “a type of learning” that, over time, evolves into a newly integrated aspect of an individual’s identity. After years of living alongside a loved one, your brain needs time to adjust, to learn and relearn that the person is truly gone.

Evidence of grief can be seen on brain scans. In one study, brain imaging revealed that the greater symptoms of yearning for a loved one predicted greater activation in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain associated with the rewarding aspect of close relationships.

This preliminary finding emphasizes the neurobiological basis of prolonged grief disorder — intense, persistent grief that interferes with daily life — and the importance of targeted psychotherapy to address it.

The lifelong trajectory of grieving requires “throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together with our loved one and transforming our relationship with this person who has died,” O’Connor said.

DIY grief

Younger generations have pushed back on “stages-of-grief-thinking,” said Flowers, because it implies that there is a right or wrong way to mourn loss.

Flowers, who was 21 when her mother died of lung cancer, said many dinner party attendees find they’re the first in their social circle to experience a death up close. And they’re often unable to find adequate support systems that match their need to share the intimacies of grief, such as the strangeness and loneliness of it, dating difficulties and reassessing career priorities.

Covid forced grief dinner parties to go virtual, Flowers said, but the upshot was that tables were no longer geographically constrained, which allowed more people to connect. Now, Flowers said, there are virtual tables for BIPOC grievers, those who have lost someone to suicide or experienced a pregnancy loss.

A survey of more than 350 dinner party participants found that the stronger the rapport at a table, the more likely people were to experience a “normalization” of their grief experience, Flowers said. This, in turn, predicted a cascade of other positive benefits, including personal growth, empathy for one’s self and others, and a sense of meaning and purpose in life.

“We’ve taken that to mean: Design for community, and healing will follow,” Flowers said.

Coping ‘ugly’

And, more often than not, healing does follow, said George A. Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University and author of “The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss.”

Bonanno has found that the large majority of people exposed to loss “show a trajectory of resilience,” meaning they will experience sadness and pain but over time will be able to love, work and experience joy once again.

The key to resilience, Bonanno said, is cognitive and emotional flexibility. Rather than trying to manage grief or loss all at once, start by identifying the most pressing problem and asking, “What can I do to feel better right now?”

A short-term fix might be something he describes as “coping ugly.” It could be binge-watching “Grey’s Anatomy” with a pint of Cherry Garcia, or going out one night with a friend to drink.

Most people learn to cope with grief over time. Less than 10 percent of those suffering from the loss of a loved one follow a more “chronic trajectory,” he said, or become afflicted with “prolonged grief disorder” — when, even after many years, the bereaved person remains stuck, as if in the acute phase of grief, and appears unable to change. For this group, targeted psychotherapy and forms of cognitive behavioral therapy can offer relief.

How a new generation copes with grief

The wallop of grief can be particularly difficult for young adults, said Ann Faison, a Los Angeles-based grief educator, author and creator of the podcast “Are We There Yet: Understanding Adolescent Grief.”

“They are old enough, developmentally, to really feel the weight of those emotions, but they still don’t have a lot of life experience,” said Faison, who was 14 when her own mother died. “For many, it’s their first encounter with serious grief, and it’s a real shock to their system.

Olivia Bean was 22 when her brother, Nick, just two years younger, died of a heroin and fentanyl overdose. She sought solace through the Opioid Project: Changing Perceptions through Art and Storytelling, which uses personal narrative and art-making to reframe grief. The project is a collaboration between artist Nancy Marks and Annie Brewster, a physician and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. (I co-wrote a book with Brewster, called “The Healing Power of Storytelling.”)

For Bean, now 30 and a graphic designer in Plymouth, Mass., engaging in the painting project, and telling the story of her brother out loud, she said, was healing.

“I ended up loving it so much,” she said, partly because there were others her age in the group and also through the freedom art can bring. “My painting was more abstract, flowing, with lots of swirling lines, intertwined, like my relationship with my brother.”

Coping with grief can take many forms: Creating or sharing music, physical pursuits such as hiking, yoga or exploring nature, volunteering or spending time with peers “who get it” can all be therapeutic.

“Whether you want it to or not, life goes on,” said Nancy Frumer Styron, a psychologist and clinical director at the Children’s Room, a bereavement center in Arlington, Mass. “So the question becomes, how do I take this piece that has happened and integrate it into my life in a way that is part of me but doesn’t define me.”

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— After my sister died, I yearned for a word like “orphan” to name my new identity.

By Kyleigh Leddy

The first time I lied about my sister, I was sitting in a semicircle in my high school homeroom study hall. Our teacher asked us to describe one of our siblings as a class bonding exercise. Numb with grief, I almost laughed at the cruel timing.

I was 17 and my sister, Kait, had been missing, presumed deceased, for only a few days.

One by one, my classmates shared anecdotes about their brothers and sisters. When it came to my turn, I panicked and said, “I’m an only child.” The words tasted sour in my mouth.

On Jan. 8, 2014, security cameras captured footage of my sister walking to the peak of Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Bridge and not returning. She was 22 years old and had been struggling with her mental health and the effects of a traumatic brain injury for several years.

It might have been easy to deduce what had happened, but grief defies reason. My family never found Kait’s body. It took us years to accept that she had taken her life, and even longer to put the experience into words.

In the months after my sister’s suicide, every time someone casually asked me if I had siblings — on first dates; during college admission interviews; in the grocery store in the middle of an otherwise average day — I would wince. It was such an innocuous question for some, but so loaded for me. It made my chest ache each time.

Later, in college, where no one knew me or what had happened, I found it easier to lie about being an only child than to communicate the clunky but simple truth: I once had a sister but now I don’t.

In those early weeks of college orientation, full of repetitive conversations about our hometowns and prospective majors, I remember feeling surprised, guilty and sometimes even angry when people believed me. How could they not see all the ways my sister has shaped me?

I think of her when I do my makeup in the morning. I use her unique turns of phrase. I imagine her advice before I make a major decision. I don’t do this consciously. I do it because I was born a sister. When I entered the world, Kait was already in it. There is no version of me that exists without her imprint. And the qualities I like most about myself — my sense of humor, my desire for adventure — are hand-me-downs from her.

I wished there was a word to identify myself in relation to my loss. I longed for a label that would be instantly understood by others, one that would communicate both Kait’s presence and absence in my life. I wanted a word like orphan or widow — a term that says, “I once had a sibling, but I lost her.”

“There are no words,” was a phrase I heard often when I was grieving, and on some level, it is true. Death is mute. Loss steals our language. There aren’t sufficient words to convey what it feels like to lose someone you love — and even fewer to comfort those of us who know the feeling too well.

But does the inadequacy of language in the face of death mean we should silence ourselves? Grief is isolating enough. Shouldn’t we try to name what we can?

Some people may bristle at the titles of orphan, widow and widower, as they each come with their own stereotypes and limitations. But, after losing my sister, I yearned for a similar title to locate and lend legibility to my experience.

If I had a word to describe myself, perhaps I would have been more likely to mention my sister to my college classmates, rather than entirely omitting her existence. If I had a word to describe myself, perhaps I would have been more likely to meet and connect with other people who struggle to speak when asked if they have any brothers or sisters.

At the very least, I wanted a term that could serve as a metaphorical stop sign in conversation: a warning to tread carefully, a succinct and sufficient answer in its own right.

But I didn’t have that word. So I resorted to lying until, only a few weeks into college, I was caught.

A group of us were sitting on a friend’s dorm bed when a boy confronted me. I was telling a story about my sister’s brief flirtation with a famous actor.

I was bragging like a little sister, but I had previously told everyone that I wasn’t a little sister. The boy pointed out the discrepancy. “Who lies about something like that?” he asked.

As everyone turned to look at me, my cheeks burned and my heart caught in my throat. My voice wavered, but I didn’t cry. For the first time in a public setting of more than one or two people, I answered the question honestly.

That was seven years ago. Back then, there was more urgency and confusion for me about how to approach my loss. Now there is some clarity. The more I’ve written and talked about my sister’s life publicly, the more confident I feel in telling the hard, full truth.

If someone asks me if I have siblings now, I tell them that I have a sister who passed away. I tell them that Kaitlyn was rebellious, smart, beautiful, outrageously funny and sometimes outrageously defiant too. If they ask further questions, I tell them what she went through and how she died.

And yet, I still wonder if I and others whose siblings have died would benefit from having a word that names our pain — especially in the early days of mourning when telling the complete story may feel impossible.

For now, there is a word for longing, and there is a word for grief, but there are no words to describe how it feels to pull your phone out to text your sister and know that she won’t answer. There is no term for being the remaining half of a shared tradition, no label that captures a relationship that ends, but also doesn’t, like a phantom limb that still aches when it rains.

Hopefully, someday, someone will find or create an adequate term for people like me. But in the meantime, what I am, and what I will always be, is a little sister.

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