in death’s presence
After injury or trauma—whether physical or psychological—we instinctively ask: How do we heal? What steps must we take to restore our health? How long before life feels normal again?
After writing about my daughter’s death, I received countless messages: “How did you heal?” Several who had lost children wanted to know what the recovery process was like for me, and how I resolved my grief.
These questions presume that healing is inevitable—that life resumes, the bereaved return to a former state, or at least reach a new equilibrium where loss is absorbed. But is it realistic to assume that people do, in fact, recover? Do we, in actuality, heal after suffering a permanent loss?
Perhaps healing is not about restoration but about preservation—building a temenos, a sacred inner space where the beloved remains.1 We return to that sanctuary whenever we need to, but someone—or something—is always missing. It may be a beloved person, yes, but just as often it’s a place or a path: a homeland left behind by war, a community shattered by disaster, a career that once defined identity, a marriage that held decades of hope, or a home—dreamed of and planned for—now lost, along with the life it once made possible.
Tragedy does not only take people from us; it steals the ground we stood on, the shape of the life we imagined. And even if we believe that all will be made whole in another world, in this one, we are left to live with what cannot be returned. Loss becomes part of the landscape.
Before Olivia died, I worked as a psychotherapist specializing in grief and trauma. I sat with many bereaved parents and infertile couples, with women healing after miscarriages, stillbirths, or abortions, with mothers who had placed children for adoption, and with foster and adoptive families. I own close to a hundred books on loss, trauma, and bereavement. Nearly all of them assume that the bereaved will recover—will heal, resolve, move on. I, too, had been trained to expect healing. As a professional, I was a helper, a guide through pain. I believed healing was always possible.
But over time, I came to understand that some wounds never truly heal. I learned this not only from clients and colleagues, but from living through personal tragedy. With the accumulation of experience and sorrow came a new clarity:
Some losses are irreversible.
Some mistakes allow no second chances.
Lazarus may have risen, but most do not.
perspectives on healing
The word heal comes from the Old English word hælan, to make hale, whole, or free from infirmity. Among traditional therapists and counselors, it’s a favored term that means next to nothing in the aftermath of losing one’s beloved. How can we expect a person whose life has been shattered to reassemble what has been blown to smithereens? We total cars, but we don’t total human beings—we expect nothing less than a full recovery. And if physical recovery isn’t possible, we demand a psychological one.
Another favored concept, among professionals and laypeople alike, is resolution.
“Have you resolved your loss?” they ask.
“Has your grief been resolved?” they want to know.
Having sat on both sides of the therapeutic encounter, I’m no longer sure there is such a thing as final resolution when your spouse, child, parent, or best friend is dead and lost to you forever. It’s naive to sit in the place of a therapist and promise that grief will be “worked through,” that it can be put to rest. Far harder is the lived truth: to shape a life around an absence that never goes away.
To resolve something is to make a mental determination about it, to finalize it intentionally. But the word also means to change, convert, or transform—often through a breaking apart. It’s a fitting word for grief.
When someone asks, “Have you resolved your loss?” perhaps what they truly mean is:
“How has this changed you?”
“What did the breaking make of you?”
And when the question comes from someone who knows suffering, it may carry another layer of meaning:
“What became of you in the aftermath, so I might begin to understand what will become of me?”
Those who live with open eyes know: grief will come.
Loss is not theoretical.
So we try to build a life strong enough to withstand the breaking—
And deep enough to grow something new in its aftermath.
But not everyone who inquires about healing does so with depth or care. Some people are simply uneasy around grief. They want it to end—not because they care for the sufferer’s well-being, but because the presence of pain unsettles them. Grief reminds them of vulnerability, of death, of the uncontrollable. It disrupts the ease of social interaction and the illusion of emotional safety. And so, with a smile or a spiritual platitude, they urge us toward healing—not as a gift, but as an escape.
When someone asks, “Have you healed?” what they sometimes mean is, “Are you done grieving yet?” For many, there’s an unspoken time limit on sorrow. They believe—or need to believe—that suffering can be tied up neatly, that faith or time or attitude should bring swift closure. But real grief resists such timelines. It is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be lived with. Those who have the capacity to walk alongside the bereaved without rushing them are rare, and their presence is deeply precious.
the first six months: acute grief
While grief is deeply personal and varied, there is strong evidence that many people experience a form of acute grief lasting six months or more after losing a close loved one. Here, I must pause to make an important distinction: there’s loss, and then there’s great loss. From my work with clients, I’ve observed that the depth of love and relational intimacy in a relationship is directly proportional to the intensity of grief experienced afterward. The greater the love, the greater the loss. Additionally, when a death is complicated, unexpected, or out of time (such as child loss or suicide), the grief tends to be more complex as well.
When we lose someone deeply dear to us, we are not ourselves for a long time afterward. The selves we will become as a result of such a profound loss have not yet emerged. Everything I experienced after Olivia died—chest pains, stomach aches, mental fog, forgetfulness, intense emotion and longing—was, in fact, with what many bereaved people go through during acute grief.
There is no return to ‘normal’ anytime soon after a great loss. And if there is ambiguity around the loss—such as the loss of a child through kidnapping, adoption, foster care, or miscarriage, where the child is lost to some but not others—there is no general rule for how grief will unfold. If the grief of those facing more straightforward losses is profound and life-altering, how much more profound must the grief be for those without a grave to visit? In such cases, we can only respond with compassion and hope that a phoenix will rise from the ashes of loss. We can only be loving witnesses.
three years later: still mourning
Even after six months or more of acute grief, most people who have suffered a significant loss do not complete their initial mourning cycle for at least a year. Following the anniversary of the loss, many continue to mourn for two or three years or longer. Some bereaved individuals find the second year even more challenging than the first. For most, making sense of their loss takes years—often up to three or more—and many never fully “get over it.” Instead, they learn to live with the loss, seeking to integrate it into their lives and gradually build a new sense of normalcy.
Ultimately, healing after profound loss is a deeply personal journey without a universal timetable or destination. Whether grief lessens over time or remains a constant presence, what matters is the ability to find a way forward—one that honors the love and loss, embraces the pain, and opens space for life to grow anew. In this evolving landscape of sorrow and resilience, we learn not just to survive, but to live with meaning beyond the rupture.
reflections on losing my child
- Part 1: Of Love and Terror
- Part 2: Trauma
- Part 3: Waiting in Fear
- Part 4: Night Song
- Part 5: Walking Her Home
- Part 6: The First Year
- Part 7: Resolved to Heal
- Part 8: Tribulation is Treasure
resources
- The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child, Barbara D. Rosof
- When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
- Helping Children Cope with Separation and Loss, Claudia Jewett Jarratt
- Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom
- Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, Maggie Callanan & Patricia Kelley
- A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis
endnotes
- A temenos (Gr.) is a space set aside as a sacred domain, a sanctuary. In analytical psychology, it sometimes also refers to a spellbinding or magic circle where mental work can take place, and in which an encounter with the unconscious and its archetypes can occur. ↩︎
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