Talking About Death: Why It Matters and Why It’s So Hard

Death is the one experience that will reach every single one of us. We will all lose people we love. Most of us will face our own mortality. And yet, as a culture, we have become skilled at talking around it rather than about it.

This week is Dying Matters Awareness Week, run by Hospice UK, with the theme ‘Let’s Talk About Death and Dying.’ For many people, conversations about death are among the hardest to start. Feelings get bottled up, needs go unspoken, and the conversations that matter most are often the ones that never happen.

This blog is an attempt to open some of those conversations. It covers what grief is, why it takes the forms it does, and what it means to find support.

Why Don’t We Talk About Death?

The reluctance to talk about death is not simply awkwardness. It is cultural and it runs deep. Over the last century, death has moved progressively out of the home and into medical settings. Mourning practices that once lasted months have contracted to days. The expectation to return to normal has accelerated, while the social permission to grieve has narrowed.

It is worth saying that this is not a universal experience. Many cultures hold death and mourning very differently, with rich traditions of communal grieving, open acknowledgement of loss, and ongoing relationships with the dead. The death-avoidance described here is largely a feature of contemporary Western culture, and not the only way human beings have approached dying.

Anthropologists and social theorists refer to this as death denial: the cultural tendency to avoid, minimise, or euphemise death as a way of managing existential anxiety (Becker, 1973). We say people ‘pass away’ or are ‘lost’ rather than die. We cross the street rather than mention a bereavement. We stay silent not because we don’t care, but because we are frightened of saying the wrong thing, of making it worse, of bringing something painful to the surface.

The result is that people who are grieving, or dying, or frightened of death, are often left to carry that alone. And isolation, as the research consistently shows, compounds grief rather than protecting anyone from it (Stroebe et al., 2007).

What Grief Actually Is

Grief is the natural response to loss. It is not a disorder, a phase to be moved through efficiently, or a sign that something has gone wrong. It is what love looks like when the person or thing it was directed at is no longer there.

Grief affects people physically as well as emotionally. Fatigue, difficulty concentrating, changes in appetite and sleep, a physical ache in the chest: these are all recognised grief responses, not metaphors. The brain processes social loss in some of the same regions it processes physical pain (Eisenberger, 2012), which is why grief can feel so bodily, and why telling someone to pull themselves together is not just unhelpful but neurologically uninformed.

We tend to associate grief with bereavement. But grief is the response to many kinds of loss: the end of a relationship, a diagnosis that changes what the future looks like, the loss of a role, a home, or an identity. The loss of someone to dementia, where the person is still present but changed. Grief does not require a death to be real, and the tendency to reserve it only for bereavement leaves many people without a framework for what they are experiencing.

There is no correct way to grieve. The five stages model associated with Kübler-Ross (1969) is widely known, but it was never intended to be prescriptive, and Kübler-Ross herself said as much. Grief is not linear. It does not follow a timetable. Some people cry; some cannot. Some feel relief, and then may feel guilty for it. Some feel anger, numbness, or an urgent need to keep moving. All of these are normal responses to a significant loss.

Grief is a natural response to loss.

Grief That Isn’t Recognised

Not all grief receives social acknowledgement, and the grief that goes unrecognised can be some of the hardest to carry. Doka (1989) coined the term disenfranchised grief to describe losses that are not openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.

This can include the loss of a partner in a relationship not recognised by family. Grief following a miscarriage or termination. Grief for an estranged parent. The death of a friend, a pet, or a colleague, losses that do not always receive the same social weight as the death of a spouse, parent, or child.

Grieving a death by suicide is often complicated by intense feelings of guilt, anger, and unanswered questions. Unlike other types of loss, the “why” behind the death can become a central focus. It is common to experience a range of conflicting emotions, and the social stigma surrounding suicide can sometimes make people feel isolated in their pain.

Disenfranchised grief is not lesser grief. The absence of social recognition does not reduce the loss; it simply means the person is left to process it without the rituals, acknowledgement, and community support that bereavement can sometimes bring. Naming it as grief is often the first step towards being able to grieve it.

When Loss Arrives Without Warning

Some grief arrives suddenly and without warning. A phone call, a message, a knock at the door. A moment in which everything changes in an instant. There may have been no indication, no time to prepare, and for some people, no way to un-see what they have witnessed. The world that existed before that moment and the world that exists after it are not the same world.

Sudden and traumatic loss has a particular psychological profile. Because there is no preparation, the nervous system receives the news as a shock, and the grief and trauma become entangled. Intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, difficulty functioning, physical symptoms of high arousal: these are not signs of weakness or of grieving badly. They are predictable responses of a nervous system that has been asked to absorb something it had no time to prepare for (Worden, 2018).

There is sometimes an assumption that sudden loss, because it was not anticipated, should be easier to bear. It is not. The absence of any possibility of preparation or goodbye can leave people with unfinished relational business that becomes part of what needs to be processed, alongside the grief itself.

Anticipatory Grief: Grieving Before the Loss

Anticipatory grief is the grief that begins before a death. It can arrive with a terminal diagnosis, a prognosis that changes everything, or the gradual recognition that someone you love is approaching the end of their life. However it begins, it is grief that exists alongside the person still being here.

Rando (1986) describes anticipatory grief as involving not one loss but many: the losses already experienced as the illness or situation progresses, the ongoing losses of the present, and the losses that are yet to come. It is a layered process, not a single response to a single anticipated event.

It is often unacknowledged, partly because the loss has not yet happened, and partly because anticipatory grief can feel disloyal, as though grieving is a betrayal of the time that remains. But grief does not wait for permission, and the attempt to suppress it tends to add exhaustion to an already depleted person.

Talking about death does not make it worse. What it does, often, is begin to release the pressure of carrying it alone.

Moving Forward Without Moving On

For a long time, the dominant model of grief was one of detachment: the idea that healthy grieving meant gradually withdrawing emotional energy from the deceased and reinvesting it elsewhere. The goal, in this framing, was to let go.

That model has been substantially revised. Research by Klass, Silverman and Nickman (1996) introduced the concept of continuing bonds, which argues that maintaining an ongoing inner relationship with the person who has died is not a failure to grieve but a normal, healthy, and often sustaining part of it. Talking to the person who has died, feeling their presence, carrying them forward in how you live: these are not signs of being stuck. They are signs of love finding a new form.

Tonkin (1996) offers a related idea through her model of growing around grief. Rather than grief shrinking over time, life grows around it. The grief itself does not diminish, but as life expands, it becomes a smaller proportion of the whole. This reframes the experience for many people: the goal is not to feel the loss less, but to build a life that can hold it.

Both of these frameworks challenge the pressure many bereaved people feel to reach a point of closure or to stop being affected by a loss. Grief changes over time, but for most people it does not end. What changes is how it is carried.

The Difference Between Fixing and Being Present

Most people who say the wrong thing to someone who is grieving are not being unkind. The impulse to reassure, to find a silver lining, or to move the conversation somewhere less painful comes from genuine care. But it can also come from discomfort with grief itself, and the two are not always easy to tell apart.

The result is a familiar set of phrases. They’re in a better place. At least they had a good life. Everything happens for a reason. You need to stay strong. I know how you feel. These are attempts to fix or resolve something that cannot be fixed or resolved, and however well-intentioned, they can leave the bereaved person feeling that their grief is too much, too inconvenient, or something that needs to be tidied away.

This is sometimes called rescuing in counselling: the urge to make the discomfort stop, which serves the person doing the rescuing more than the person in pain. True empathy does not try to take the pain away. It sits alongside it. It tolerates the discomfort of witnessing someone else’s grief without needing to resolve it.

For bereaved people, the experience of having grief minimised or redirected can add another layer of isolation to an already isolating experience. It can create the sense that their feelings are a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be witnessed. Over time, some people learn to hide their grief to protect others from discomfort, which means they end up carrying it alone.

What Happens When We Talk

Talking about grief matters. When loss is spoken aloud and received by another person, something shifts. Not because it is resolved, but because it is no longer carried alone. Social support is one of the most significant factors in how people move through grief (Stroebe et al., 2007).

Talking about death does not make it worse. What it does, often, is begin to release the pressure of carrying it alone. It can also help with meaning reconstruction: the process, described by Neimeyer (2001), by which people rebuild the sense of the world that a significant loss has shattered. Grief does not only hurt; it disorients. The story we had about who we are, what our life looks like, and what we can expect from the future needs to be renegotiated. Talking is often how that renegotiation begins.

The conversations do not have to be long or perfectly formed. Sometimes the most significant thing is not to change the subject. To say the name of the person who has died. To ask how someone is really doing and stay with the answer.

A bouquet of hydrangeas symbolising sympathy and support.

A Space to Bring All of It

Counselling can offer something that is hard to find elsewhere: a space where you do not have to manage your grief to make it more comfortable for the person you are talking to. Where you do not have to be further along than you are, or feel a particular way, or have reached any conclusions. In a person-centred approach, whatever you bring is welcome, and there is no right way to grieve here.

If you would like to explore any of this in counselling, you are welcome to get in touch and book a free 20 minute introductory call. My approach is person-centred and non-directive. There is no right way to grieve, and you will not be told there is. 🌻

This article reflects general themes in grief and bereavement and does not draw on or describe the experiences of any individual client.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Doka, K.J. (1989). Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Eisenberger, N.I. (2012). The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(6), pp. 421–434.

Klass, D., Silverman, P.R., & Nickman, S.L. (eds.) (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Washington DC: Taylor & Francis.

Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan.

Neimeyer, R.A. (2001). Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Rando, T.A. (1986). Loss and Anticipatory Grief. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Stroebe, M., Schut, H., & Stroebe, W. (2007). Health outcomes of bereavement. The Lancet, 370(9603), pp. 1960–1973.

Tonkin, L. (1996). Growing around grief: another way of looking at grief and recovery. Bereavement Care, 15(1), p. 10.

Worden, J.W. (2018). Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. 5th ed. New York: Springer.