Grieving the intangible losses

Lately, I’ve been stumbling upon a lot of articles about grief–and our culture’s discomfort and difficulty with feeling and facing it. A recent Time article discussed our difficulty in recognizing grief where it shows up; the article focused specifically on grief in the context of the pandemic. Folks around the world not only faced the tangible losses of loved ones but also the intangible loss of life as we once knew it. The author of the article, Claire Bidwell Smith, wrote about her understanding of anxiety being a frequently experienced emotion when loss occurs; she wrote about grief being an emotion that requires space and support. When not provided with these, grief instead takes other shapes and forms, like anxiety or anger. 

Our culture & grief

In our culture, grief isn’t often provided the space it requires. The experience of grief is often unpredictable, comes in waves, and is triggered at unexpected moments. It’s not always neatly contained to the limited periods we give it. When I lost each of my parents, my employer at the time gave me three days for bereavement leave; I wish I could have known what whoever selected that time period was thinking. Was my grieving supposed to fit in that period? Was that supposed to be enough for my grief, my traveling across the country to attend a service, my needing to clean out their home when my second parent died? Three days may be more than other employers give their employees, but three days barely seemed sufficient for the socially-recognized loss that a parent’s death is. 

When we grieve the death of a person, there’s often a ceremony or ritual to bring people together. However, our culture doesn’t necessarily allow for space to grieve after that collective ritual. Friends and family show up immediately following the loss and often through the ritual, but grief doesn’t end after a funeral or celebration of life. If you’ve lost someone, you probably know how messy your own grieving process was. Transitioning from a grief ritual one day to returning to being a productive member of our capitalist society the next is not an easy thing to do. And though many of us may want to check in with our loved ones after they’ve experienced a loss, it’s hard to know when and how and with what frequency to do that. Afterall, none of us want a colleague to cry in the office because we asked them how they’re continuing to cope, and this isn’t necessarily a conversation you want to bring up at a party or social gathering. Many of us weren’t taught what to say or how to say it; loss isn’t exactly normalized, even though it’s a normal experience we’ll all go through multiple times over our lives.

Unrecognized & intangible losses lead to disenfranchised grief

Not all losses or all grief is recognized–or, though losses may be recognized, not all are afforded the respect or space to be honored they deserve. For example, we may experience grief for the innocent lives lost in Palestine and Israel, but we may be told those aren’t our losses to bear because we don’t know the individuals who starved, were denied medical care, or were killed. Other lives, like those of a four-legged family member, may be acknowledged, but not everyone recognizes the degree of heartbreak caused or the unbearable void left by the death of a furry family member. Just as the pandemic changed how many of us live and work and convene in our communities, we all experience other intangible losses that impact us differently. Some other losses are those following a break-up or divorce or after being laid off from a job. We may lose identities as well if or when we make a career change or a health issue prevents us from engaging in an activity, such as running, for a definite or indefinite period of time. We might experience loss because we had envisioned our life being different than it currently is–and that loss of expectation is real.

Ecological losses are ones that lead to sadness and grief, but not many of us give these felt losses more than momentary space. Such losses might include loss of species, loss of ecosystems, loss of landscapes, loss of our homes (if forced to migrate because of erosion or rising sea levels or other causes of inhabitability). Panu Pihkala, a professor at the University of Helsinki, published an article in early 2024 about ecological losses. Pihkala, like Bidwell Smith, wrote about disenfranchised grief, a type of grief that involves non-obvious (to others), intangible loss. These are losses for which there isn’t typically a ceremony or ritual in which those grieving may find community and collectively express and feel their loss together. Pihkala (2024) describes “ambiguous losses” and “nonfinite losses,” in the ecological/climate space; these losses are losses that are in-progress, not yet complete, and somewhat ambivalent. Many of us probably see changes in beloved landscapes, but these occur bit-by-bit, year-by-year. We observe the loss as it progresses.

Likewise, there may be political intangible losses that require grieving. As an example, the day the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (aka the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade), I put up an away message for my email and took the day off to feel my feelings. Even though Roe had been gutted over time and never was the decision I would have wanted–a topic for an entirely different type of blog–I needed to grieve. I needed to grieve for folks with uteruses; I needed to grieve the state of the Supreme Court; I needed to grieve the erosion of stare decisis (i.e., the respect for precedent in following prior court decisions). 

Therapy for grieving intangible losses

When we think about therapy for grief, we often think about a counselor helping a person grieve the loss of a significant person in their life. There are also some therapists who specialize in the loss of four-legged family members. But therapy can also help with grief for these intangible or ambiguous losses–the losses that we may not want to talk about with others because we fear they’ll think we’re too sensitive or fear they’ll judge us. Or we fear they may try to tell us to move on from the loss before you’ve fully attended to it. These intangible losses often lead to the same range of emotions and need space to be processed and honored. Know that messy grief doesn’t just need to be for a tangible loss, and–like tangible losses–we may need to work through various stages, emotions, fears, and thoughts before we’re able to accept our experience.