In my TEDTalk from 2017, I made a comment about grief being a powerful teacher. I’ve been asked for elaboration on this statement a number of times since then, and I always pause in my response because I know it’s true, but it’s deep and difficult to explain on the spot. But it deserves a worthy reflection, so here we go.

When I feel a pang of grief arise inside, whether it’s in a personal or a professional context, I have a choice in the moment it springs up, to shove it aside or pay attention to it. Is it just a negative, destructive emotion, or can it be a helpful instructor? I worry that we usually think it’s the former, and miss out on the richness of allowing it to be the latter.

Grief teaches me about honesty with the realities of suffering, death and loss in a society that loves to avoid or pretend these things don’t exist. Our expressions of grief are some of our truest expressions as human beings. It’s only when we see the world as it really is, that we can live in it with an accurate understanding of what people actually need from one another.

Grief teaches me to be a different kind of person. What kind of person would I be if I ignored grief? I would fail to learn the many aspects of who people are and what their full lives are really like. I would be so disconnected from people. I would be so much less skilled at caring for others well and would just offer platitudes from a distance. I think I would live with more entitlement that this world is meant to just function for my happiness. Grief teaches me a bit about humility and a more sober perspective regarding my expectations. 

Grief teaches me how little I really understand about basic joys and gifts and privileges. When my husband and I both got seriously ill in 2023, wasn’t it the most simple things that I ached for? My ability to hug my daughters tightly rather than cringing at my healing lumpectomy site when my daughters leaned into me. My husband’s basic presence at home when he stayed in a rehab facility for a month. My independence that had to defer to a month-long daily radiation schedule. Our temporarily-lost ability to function as a “normal” family with a “normal” life. I semi-joked with friends that I couldn’t wait until life was boring again. Grief was big, and it also greatly magnified daily joys.

My professional grief as a nurse teaches me that our sufferings are not entirely individual, and this is a gift when we feel our worlds have crumbled while other peoples’ worlds go on. Our shared grief ties us together when we desperately need to know we are not alone. I listened to a patient’s mother quietly weep in the corner of her child’s room the other day, as we all worked so hard to stabilize her child. But when the social worker arrived and sat with the mom, a different, fuller expression of grief poured out of the mom. She was seen in a moment when she desperately needed to be seen, heard, and held. In its best form, the professional grief I carry for my patients and families teaches me that we are wired and meant to ache for one another and be moved towards one another in our sufferings.

These are some of the ways I have found grief to be a teacher, and I believe I have only scratched the surface of its richest lessons.