How to Stop Comparing Your Grief to Someone Else's
A woman once told me she felt like she was failing at grief. Her sister had lost her own husband two years earlier and had described dreams so vivid and so frequent that she seemed to be in constant contact with him. This woman, sitting across from me, hadn't had a single dream about her own husband since he died, and she'd started to wonder what was wrong with her.
Nothing was wrong with her. But I understood exactly why she felt that way. (I experienced the death of my son differently than the majority of other parents. And that's okay.)
We live in a world that shares everything now. Grief included. Someone posts about a vivid visitation dream, and suddenly it feels like a benchmark the rest of us are supposed to meet. Someone describes an unmistakable sign, and quietly, without meaning to, we start measuring our own experience against theirs. When ours looks different, or looks like nothing at all, it's easy to conclude we're somehow doing this wrong, or that we weren't loved as deeply, or that our loved one has simply moved further away than someone else's did.
I've sat with hundreds of grieving people over the years, and if there's one thing I want more of them to hear, it's this. Comparison is one of the cruelest things grief does to us, and almost none of it is fair.
Every relationship carries its own history, its own language, its own rhythm. Some people process loss through dreams. Others through memory. Others through a slow, quiet sense that their loved one is somehow still nearby, without any dramatic event marking that feeling. None of these experiences are more valid than the others, and none of them prove anything about how deeply someone was loved.
I asked the woman with the guilty conscience to tell me about her marriage instead of her sister's dreams. She described a quiet, steady kind of love, the kind built more on comfortable silence than big romantic gestures. Her husband wasn't a man of many words. He showed love by fixing the car before she noticed it needed fixing, by leaving her half of his dessert without being asked, by simply being there, dependable and constant, for over thirty years.
It made sense to me that her connection to him after death might look quieter too. Not because it was smaller. Because it matched exactly who they had always been together.
If you've been comparing your own grief to someone else's story, I hope you'll set that comparison down. Grief was never meant to be measured against anyone else's experience. It was only ever meant to reflect the relationship you actually had, in all its particular, unrepeatable shape.
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Continue Reading? You might also like Why Some People Don't Receive Signs From Loved Ones Right Away, where I talk more about why every experience of loss looks different, and why that's completely normal.
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