Not All Grief Comes With a Funeral

How losing my mother led me to rethink the way we recognize, talk about, and make space for grief.

I Lost My Mom. Then I Started Asking Different Questions About Grief

My journey into grief research didn't begin in a library. It began with losing my mother. In 2019, my mom died from cancer. I was pregnant with my second child at the time, and her death changed me in ways I could not have fully understood then. I knew I would miss her. What I wasn't prepared for was everything else I would grieve. I grieved the future I thought we would have together. I grieved becoming a mother again without my own mother physically present. I grieved the moments my children would never have with her. I grieved relationships and traditions that changed after she died. I grieved parts of myself that no longer felt recognizable. And somewhere along the way, I started paying attention to how people responded to grief and also sometimes, how they didn't.

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When Grief Became More Than Personal

My research has focused on grief in higher education, leadership, and well-being. After my mother's death, I became increasingly curious about the conversations we have around loss. Why are we so uncomfortable when someone is grieving? Why do we rush to say something that will make the situation feel better? Why do grieving people sometimes feel responsible for making everyone else comfortable with their pain? And perhaps most importantly: What happens to people whose losses aren't even recognized as grief? That last question stayed with me. Because death is not the only thing we grieve. We grieve so many things:  relationships, careers, friendships, caregiving, and communities we once belonged to. Yet many of these losses don't come with rituals, sympathy cards, bereavement leave, or even acknowledgment. My research confirmed something I had increasingly come to understand through lived experience: our cultural understanding of grief remains heavily centered on death, while many non-death losses remain unnamed and socially unrecognized. I wanted to explore what might change if we expanded not only what we recognize as grief, but how we communicate about it. Those questions eventually led me to develop what I call Grief-Conscious Communication.

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In my recently published article, Beyond Bereavement: Toward a Theoretical Framework of Grief-Conscious Communication, I introduce a framework for thinking differently about the way we communicate around loss. At its core, grief-conscious communication is about learning how to recognize grief, make space for it, listen to it, and respond to it without immediately trying to fix, minimize, explain, or rush it away. The framework operates across three interconnected areas: personal consciousness, relational practice, and systemic transformation.

That means this work isn't only about teaching someone what to say to a grieving friend. It's also about asking harder questions:

• Do our workplaces make room for grief?
• Do our policies recognize only certain kinds of losses?
• Do people feel safe telling their supervisors, professors, friends, or families that they aren't okay?
• Do we know how to sit with someone's pain without reaching for a cliché?
• And whose grief have we unintentionally decided doesn't count?

My article ends with the idea that becoming grief-conscious isn't a destination.

It's an ongoing practice, one that asks us to resist our tendency to look away from grief and instead learn how to turn toward one another with greater presence. That's what I hope this work contributes to the world at large.

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Dr. Chinasa Elue is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Higher Education at Kennesaw State University, grief researcher, speaker, and certified grief coach whose work advances grief-conscious communication through research, education, and public scholarship. She is the host of the Grieving in Color Podcast and founder of Renewed, an annual grief retreat that creates a supportive community where high-capacity women can process grief, reconnect with themselves, and heal together.

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Read the Research: My article, “Beyond Bereavement: Toward a Theoretical Framework of Grief-Conscious Communication,” was published in OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying in 2026.

Citation: Elue, C. (2026). Beyond Bereavement: Toward a Theoretical Framework of Grief-Conscious Communication. OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 00302228261463638.

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