Understanding Grief

What does this resource cover? 

• Why the grief associated with the death of a baby or child differs from other forms of grief;
• Some of the theories to explain grief.

How is it helpful?

• Sometimes when we are experiencing something for the first time, especially something as profound as the death of a baby or child, it is helpful to understand why we may be having certain feelings; 
• Understanding grief can make it less scary;
• Understanding grief can make it feel less isolating. 

Where does the information come from? 

• Academic research;
• Theories from Psychology and Sociology and related fields; 
• The experiences of hundreds of bereaved parents. 

How is the death of a baby or child unique to other types of grief?

When anyone dies at any age, it is of course sad. However, there are some specific aspects of grieving a child which can be unique to other forms of loss. 

• It is traumatic – Dr Joanne Cacciatore, a Psychologist, bereaved mum and expert on grief and loss deems the death of a child, at any age, due to any cause to be traumatic;
• It is profound – We structure our lives around our children, so when a child dies it impacts every single part of our day. This is the case also when a child dies before, during or shortly after birth because we prepare to structure our whole lives around them. So when a child dies, their loss is felt in every single moment;
• It is smalltalk- Despite the prevalence of pregnancy, infant and child loss, speaking about children is a common and acceptable topic to discuss with strangers such as asking how many children a person has; 
• It is taboo – people are comfortable to discuss living children but our society is not comfortable with this kind of loss, often bereaved parents suffer stigma and isolation;
• It is out of order – we are not supposed to outlive our children, it is against the natural order of things, no one could possibly anticipate that this would happen, whereas, the death of older relatives is more expected; 
• It lacks vocabulary – there isn’t a word for being a parent whose child has died, ‘Vilomah’ is an ancient sanskrit word for a mother whose child has died but most people won’t know that. We understand words like, ‘orphan’ or ‘widow’ but often even ‘bereaved parent’ is used in contexts to describe a parent who has experienced the loss of another relative like a spouse.  

Understanding grief 

Each person’s grief is unique. However, there have been attempts by academics to theorise grief to help to explain it. There are a wide number of theories of grief but below I discuss the one which feels most appropriate and relatable for me:

‘Growing around grief’ -Lois Tonkin’s Theory of grief ¹

Dr Lois Tonkin describes an analogy of a ball in a jar. This theory describes how our grief does not get smaller over time but instead time can change our grief. 

When a person dies, in the immediate aftermath and for sometime after our grief is all consuming. To picture this, imagine a glass jar with a large black ball inside it which takes up the whole of the jar. In this analogy, the ball is grief and the jar is your life, so your grief takes up almost all of the space in your life. 

If you imagine there are particular pressure points on the edges of the jar and when the ball touches these, you feel intense pain. Well, as the ball takes up so much space, it is almost constantly touching the edge of the jar and you are experiencing intense pain. 

Over time, the jar which represents your life slowly gets bigger – you might start to partake in social events, hobbies, go to work, on holiday, get a puppy – slowly, your life begins to grow around your grief. Slowly, you might experience joy from time to time. The ball does not shrink. You still miss you child just as much as the day they died but you have learned to somehow incorporate their loss into your life. 

The ball still moves around in the jar and occasionally hits the side of the jar, when this happens it feels just as intense and just as painful as when our child first died. However, it tends to hit the side of the jar less often because the jar is bigger now. This explains why even years or decades on bereaved parents can still feel intensely sad about the death of their child. However, they are less likely to have prolonged periods of this intensity of feeling. 

Sometimes, things will happen to cause the ball to move more and hit against the side of the jar more frequently . Some of these things are predictable, sometimes they seem to come out of nowhere. When this happens the ball will hit against the side of the jar more frequently. This explains why when something happens to unsettle our grief we can have a period of time where we feel we are going ‘backwards’ or when we are particularly struggling. Grief is not linear. 

Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of grief ²

If you have heard of any theories of grief, you will likely have heard of this one as it is the one most people commonly cite. This model is also widely criticised by those experiencing grief, especially grief associated with the death of a child. However, this model was never supposed to be applied to grief, it was initially theorised to describe the process of coming to terms with a terminal illness NOT grieving the loss of a person who has died. It can have some degree of relevance, in that people will likely experience the different aspects of the model but the idea of set ‘stages’ in grief has largely been rejected.  

The 5 ‘stages’ are Denial (for example being in disbelief), Anger (at the injustice of losing a child), Depression (feeling intensely sad, unmotivated), Bargaining (‘what if’ thoughts), Acceptance (realisation that your child has died).  As bereaved parents we may feel all or some of these at some point. Others who have not experienced loss may have heard of this model and expect you to move through these stages – if these don’t feel at all relatable, you aren’t doing grief ‘wrong’ it was just never meant for these purposes. 

We never move on from the death of our children, we can only hope to incorporate their loss in our lives, to live in their honour and to move forward in our lives with them in our minds and hearts. 

No theory of grief is perfect, partly because grief is so unique. Does anything in this post resonate at all with you? Do you think that child loss requires its own specific theory of grief? Do you think this is helpful to share with family and friends to show how time is a changer rather than a healer in grief? Please comment below. 

This resource was produced using funding from the National Lottery.

1. Tonkin, L. (1996). Growing around grief—another way of looking at grief and recovery. Bereavement Care, 15(1), 10-10.
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2. Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (2014). On grief and grieving: Finding the meaning of grief through the five stages of loss. Simon and Schuster. ↩︎