Hi everyone! It’s Melinda. Welcome to Melinda’s Grief Corner! MGC comes out twice a month on Sundays. If this is your first time here, be sure to check out past posts to learn more about the inspiration behind this new Article Club feature and read about other grief-y topics I’ve covered with resources I’ve shared!
In my pre-grief era, I always assumed that the death of a loved one would be the one and only loss. Like a contained kind of loss. A colossal one that was finite in that there was the one person - as big and as important as they are - and that their life and love would be the only things I would mourn.
Oh dear, reader. How naive I was! Now of course the death of your (and my) loved one is the main loss. The epicenter of our grief. There is nothing that can measure up to its importance, its significance, and its weight that we must carry.
But it is not the sole loss. There are in fact other losses that ripple out from that center. And those, I have learned, are called “secondary losses.”
I learned about this while (attempting) to earn my “grief Ph.D.” (aka intellectualizing my feelings) in the early weeks and months after my dad’s death. The secondary losses came first. The information on what they were came second.
It started when I slowly started to see friendships fade away. Grief triggers our own feelings about mortality, it brings into focus the fact that everyone we love will die one day (sorry, I know, I’m just a bright ray of sunshine over here), and it is MESSY. So folks in our lives may just stop showing up for us. And that happened for me.
So as I was quite literally writing my dad’s eulogy, I realized folks were pulling away. That they didn’t want to give space to all of my big messy grief feelings. And that’s when I started to mourn friendships that I thought were solid.
The secondary losses for me kept coming. I decided to move out of DC and back home to be with my mom. I ended the lease on my DC apartment. I packed up all of my stuff and in the process of that shed actual belongings that I didn’t want to move into my mom’s house. I lost a sense of independence as I had not lived with my parents (except for very short stints) since I moved away for college in 2006.
I lost communities I was part of - neighborhood friends, the cycling studio I went to all of the time, my weekly pottery class, my neighborhood coffee shop where they knew me and my regular order. I lost my routine - my daily walking route, my weekly farmer’s market, going to the art museum that always brought me joy. I lost my identity - was I even my dad’s daughter anymore (I know weird question), did I still not want to have children, who am I as this person who is moving back home which was never part of my plan?
The questions and the losses kept coming. But in many ways I was fortunate. I could move my job since I was working remotely. I could afford to move in the first place. I didn’t have major responsibilities - a husband, children, or a mortgage - that were tied to DC that would make it difficult to make the choice to move.
But these losses carried their own weight and their own grief. They were not things I knew I would either lose or choose to give up in order to live a life that would make room for my grief. They may not have been my main loss, but they were tethered to it. And they added to my grief.
So as I was in this whirlwind of losing things I never thought I would also lose, I learned the term “secondary losses” from an article on whatsyourgrief.com, a website I have recommended in previous posts! Here is a very helpful visual of what secondary losses feel like:
This article also helpfully explains that secondary losses may not happen all at the same time. They may in fact come up at different points, which makes them unpredictable and that much more jarring. You can’t really prepare for the secondary losses, but you can acknowledge that they are happening. And they can be upsetting as well. To me, it was important to acknowledge that my secondary losses were also painful. Sometimes they cut even deeper, albeit in a different way, because they came out of absolute nowhere.
So dear reader I hope you find this resource helpful! If anything I hope it normalizes this for you. Many, if not everyone, will experience secondary losses. But they aren’t talked about very much and we often don’t think about it until we’re in it. Hopefully, this helps you feel a little more seen in your grief today.
Until next time,
big hugs.
Share this post