The so-called five stages of grief gave us labels, but ask anyone who
lives with grief and they’ll give you fifty — and even then, they
don’t tell the whole story. Grief is too vast, too strange, too
personal
personal to be contained in just words. Many people describe their grief with
their own language — words that capture the nuances the stages never could.
These words don’t define grief — they help you give it a voice.
At the end of this chapter, you’ll find a collection of words people have used
to describe grief. It’s remarkable to see how many can capture the layers of
emotion that accompany loss.
Use this page as an invitation to give your own grief a voice — a gentle
exercise in healing that can help you begin to understand and process what
you feel.
And then there are the metaphors. Because grief is so hard to explain, people
often reach for images that do what words alone cannot.
One that resonates with me is the feeling of being fully submerged under
water, breathing only through a straw.
Another well-known image is grief as waves. If you are grieving, you may
know this one well. If you are caring for someone who is grieving, it may help
you understand a little better.
Imagine you are swimming at the beach — not so deep that you can’t touch the sand
below, but deep enough to feel the waves pass on their way to the shore. You’re simply
enjoying the splash against your body and the rhythm of the waves rolling in.
A wave breaks in front of you. You dive beneath it, trying to regain your balance, but
your mouth fills with saltwater. Other times, you rise over the swell as it passes. Then
there are the rogue waves — the ones that crash right on top of you, knocking the
breath from your lungs. If you’re lucky, you only end up with sand in your pants; if
you’re unlucky, a stray surfboard smacks you in the face, and you come up coughing,
saltwater stinging your nose and mouth.
Over time, the waves still come. They can still crash violently. But slowly, they
become less frequent, less chaotic, and a little easier to survive — mostly because
you’ve become more familiar with them, and you’ve learned to recognise how they’ll
break.
One more familiar metaphor is grief as a stone in your pocket — you carry it,
fiddle with it all day, until one day you notice the edges have been worn
smooth from constant handling and rubbing. For me, I also say it’s like a stone
in your shoe — sharp and unbearable with every step until you finally stop to
remove it, leaving behind a bruise in the sole of your foot that lingers.
Others say a piece of their heart is missing — that you both died that day, but
only one of you stopped breathing.
A video was once posted on the @family_threadz Instagram page, where a
celebrity described the death of her mother this way:
“It feels like your entire universe has been ripped apart — like you’re untethered from
the earth and hurtling through space, hoping someone will grab the string and pull you
down.”
Thousands of comments poured in from people saying, “This is the perfect
explanation for how I feel since my mother died.”
Personal whispers of grief…
“Grief is leaving your house and always feeling you forgot something at home .but like all day,
everyday”
“Grief brain is like running on 1% battery .But life keeps demanding 100%”
“Grief is like having broken ribs.” No-one can see it. But every breath hurts like hell.
“Grief feels like life goes on around you, but not with you”
“Grief is a full-time job with no off switch”
“People grieving be like a suburban lawn on the outside and tsunami survivors on the inside” On the next page you will find almost 100 words we gathered from people who have
felt the weight of loss. As you read through them, see which ones echo your own grief
— and let them give a voice to what you are feeling Grief is a language with no single dictionary. It borrows from sensations,
metaphors, and moments that only you can define. The labels others give may
never fit, but the words and images you claim for yourself can. They are proof
that your grief is real, that it matters, and that it deserves to be expressed in
the only way it can — your way.
