Most of us use the words grief and bereavement as though they mean the same thing – I certainly did.
It wasn’t until I lost one of my closest friends, and later completed Death Walker training with Zenith Virago, that I realised they describe very different parts of the same journey.
Understanding that difference changed how I think about loss, how I support grieving families, and even how I understand my own experience.
Three Words, Three Different Experiences
During Death Walker training, we spent time reflecting on definitions of loss, grief, and bereavement, drawn from the San Francisco Suicide Prevention Project. Rather than simply reading them, we were encouraged to sit with them and notice how each one felt.
The differences are subtle, but profound.
Loss is the severing or breaking of our attachment to someone or something that results in a changed relationship.
It’s a surprisingly neutral definition. It simply describes what has happened. It doesn’t speak about emotion, only the fact that life has changed.
Grief is the emotional response to loss, the complex amalgam of painful effects including sadness, anger, guilt and despair.
This is the part most people recognise. It’s the ache in your chest. The tears that appear without warning. The anger, confusion, exhaustion and longing that accompany the death of someone you love.
It’s also the part our culture tends to focus on.
But then comes the definition that stopped me.
Bereavement is the total reaction to a loss and includes the process of recovery or healing. Although there are similarities in people’s responses, there are also marked differences. Each person will grieve and adapt to loss in their own way.
I remember reading those words and feeling something shift.
Bereavement wasn’t describing an emotion, it was describing the whole experience.
Not just the pain, but everything that follows – every change, every adjustment, every difficult day, every unexpected moment of peace.
It made room for something I hadn’t previously considered.
Bereavement Makes Room for Joy
The next page of the training manual contains something that has stayed with me ever since.
An adapted passage from Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are begins:
Whether it is connecting with the genuine heart of sadness… or connecting with vision and expansion and openness… what is real is all included in well-being; it is all included in joy.
Then comes the sentence that I still find myself returning to.
Joy is not about pleasure as opposed to pain, or cheerfulness as opposed to sadness. Joy includes everything.
Not happiness, not pretending everything is okay, not “moving on.”
Joy. A joy expansive enough to include sorrow, that doesn’t erase grief, but grows alongside it.
That idea felt completely different from the messages many of us receive about grief. We’re often led to believe that healing means leaving grief behind, as though one replaces the other.
But perhaps it isn’t like that at all, perhaps bereavement simply becomes spacious enough to hold both.
What I’ve Witnessed
Over my time as a funeral director, I’ve come to realise that grief isn’t something to be fixed or hurried along.
Every family experiences loss differently. Some express every emotion openly. Others carry it quietly. Some find comfort in stories and laughter from the very beginning, while others can’t imagine smiling for a long time.
Watching people navigate those first days has reinforced something the Death Walker training first taught me: grief is only one part of bereavement.
Bereavement is larger than the sadness itself. It’s the unfolding experience of learning to live in a world that has changed. Over time, it makes space not only for tears, but for memories, gratitude, connection, and eventually, moments when life begins to feel expansive again.
My Own Experience
When my friend died, grief arrived with a force I wasn’t prepared for.
There were days when it felt as though the world had been divided into two parts: before, and after – nothing about that was beautiful. Nothing about it was something I would ever have chosen.
But as the months passed, something unexpected appeared alongside the sadness. I became more intentional about the people I loved, conversations mattered more, time felt more precious, ordinary moments carried a depth they hadn’t before. There was a gratitude simply for being alive that I don’t think I had fully known.
The grief never gave me those things, the loss never became a gift.
But bereavement, the whole experience of living with that loss changed me in ways I couldn’t have imagined while I was in the middle of it.
If You’re Living Through Loss
If your loss is recent, none of this is an invitation to search for meaning or to force yourself towards healing.
Grief has no timetable, there is no right way to do it. There is no moment when you’re supposed to start feeling better.
But if, somewhere down the track, you find yourself laughing unexpectedly, feeling close to someone, noticing the warmth of the sun, making plans for next year…
Please don’t mistake those moments for a betrayal of the person you’ve lost. Love doesn’t disappear because life begins to grow around it.
Perhaps that’s what bereavement really is.
Not the absence of grief, but the gradual widening of life until it can hold grief, love, sadness, gratitude, hope and joy – all at the same time.
With gratitude to Zenith Virago and the Natural Death Care Centre, whose Death Walker training continues to shape how I understand death, grief and the care of bereaved families.
