Cody Delistraty is a historian and author. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. He has served as culture editor at The Wall Street Journal and as features editor of the Paris-based magazine Mastermind.
Below, Cody shares five key insights from his new book, The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss. Listen to the audio version—read by Cody himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Bring grief back into the public sphere for the sake of health and better coping.
When my mother died of cancer, I was a 21-year-old college student trying to do everything right: school, sports, religion, all of it. I hoped that by being a good griever I could honor her. What that meant to me was moving forward, keeping my grief mostly quiet, not burdening others with it, and getting through the five stages—to acceptance and closure.
There is great societal pressure to get on with life after loss. You have the memorial. You take a few days off work, then it’s back to life. But over the course of the past decade, I’ve found that almost every aspect of what I thought it meant to grieve well was misguided. I also found an expanding array of people searching for better and new ways to cope with loss.
For something that affects all of us, grief is something about which we speak very rarely. It’s hard to imagine any other aspect of life that’s so ubiquitous yet shrouded. Until the early 20th century, most people in the West were open about their grief. French historian Phillipe Aries called this a time of “tamed death.” Loss and grief were integrated into daily life. Women wore mourning clothes; people corresponded on black-bordered mourning stationery, and some even wore lockets or jewelry with a deceased loved one’s hair. But amid the mass death of the two World Wars, there was a political desire to make grief private, in part to support the war effort. Soon after came a rise in so-called “happiness culture.” By the 1960s, the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer found in a wide-ranging survey that grief was not considered a standard aspect of life but a unique burden. Neighbors, worried about asking others how they were doing or for help themselves, were fretful of being an encumbrance. Grieving people reported more trouble connecting with others and health issues like getting a good night’s sleep.
While reporting my book, I found that people wanted to discuss their loss with others but didn’t want to overstep an invisible boundary. As I traversed the country to meet with scientists, technologists, doctors, and scholars, I spent many evenings alone in strange cities. Sometimes, I went out to bars to read, just to be around others, where I often ended up speaking openly to my fellow bargoers about my mother’s death. I wasn’t pushing it, but I wasn’t bashful either. It tended to come up naturally when I explained why I was in town. What I found came as a shock: strangers lit up in shared recognition. In even mentioning my mother’s death, many felt like they, too, could speak about their own experiences with loss.
Moreso, almost everyone is dealing with something. Loss boils beneath so many interactions yet, in a grief-repressive culture, discussion now requires a mutual permission-giving. Many people want desperately to talk about their loss. They may even want to wear it as conspicuously as one might have in the early 20th century. Yet in our individualistic culture where grief lives mostly in the shadows, many of us need to know our conversation partner is open to it, too. That’s something we all can work on, for the sake of grief and health.
2. Closure and five stages are mostly myths.
Closure is a concept that has so saturated Western culture that it has come to seem like common sense. The problem is: It doesn’t really exist. It comes from what the sociologist Pauline Boss has called the American “mastery-oriented culture,” in which we want to solve everything that appears to be a problem. As the sociologist Nancy Berns has noted, a fundamental misunderstanding of grief is that we can hold only a single emotion at a time. We don’t have to have closure to grieve well.
“The paradigm of contemporary grief is oriented toward an imaginary finish line.”
Another supposed common sense point about grief is the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “five stages.” That doesn’t really exist, either. Or at least we’ve badly misinterpreted it to mean there’s a prescriptive nature to grief, as in, if you hit each stage—denial, anger, bargaining, depression—then you’ll get to acceptance. In reality, Kübler-Ross’s research was about how terminally ill people were coping with their own death, not with grieving another. And while one study has shown that many people grieve in a progression that mirrors the five stages, it’s a concept that’s often misinterpreted as a blueprint for how to grieve, as if there are clear directions one can or should follow. One psychiatrist told me she had a patient who was asking her husband to make her angry so she could “get through” the “anger stage” faster. The paradigm of contemporary grief is oriented toward an imaginary finish line. What if, instead, we used the time of grief to reflect on ourselves and who we have lost? What if, instead of seeking definitive closure, we reframed and carried the memory of the loss with us into the future?
3. We must rethink our rituals—making them more personal and repeatable.
Funerals can be wildly expensive. The median cost of one with a viewing and burial in the U.S. is, as of 2023, $7,848 (for a funeral with cremation, $6,970). For many Americans, that’s a debt-incurring expense, like sending your kid to college or buying a house. We would do well to rethink the typical rituals of grief, not only because of their expense but because continual modes of engaging with the departed can be more meaningful than one-offs like funerals.
Take the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Or Obon for Japanese Buddhists. These celebrations don’t close the book on a loss but instead annually re-open it, allowing people to stay connected, even in their grief. One study from Harvard Business School showed the value of perpetual rituals. When describing how they coped with a major loss, 85 percent of participants reported creative, individualized rituals that they could do over and over again. One person described listening to Natalie Cole’s “Miss You Like Crazy” to think about their mom who had died. Another kept going to the same hair salon where they used to go with a deceased loved one, showing up on the first Saturday of every month as they’d once done together. Almost no one said funerals.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to get past the pain of loss— I don’t want to romanticize pain or emotional tumult—nor is there anything wrong with funerals. But trouble arises when we think of a ritual as the end to our grief rather than the beginning.
4. The science, technology, and medicine that could change grieving.
As we enter a technological, scientific, and medical near-future in which certain kinds of pain might be vastly improved, even erased, via neuroscience, psilocybin, pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, and otherwise, we would do well to consider that much of grief remains a valuable aspect of being human—that just because something is painful does not mean it needs to be solved.
“One neuroscience ethicist to whom I spoke thought something similar might be done in humans in the next 10 to 15 years.”
Perhaps most significantly for grief, the possibility for deleting individual memories via optogenetics was floated by Science magazine a decade ago after memories were selectively deleted in rodents. One neuroscience ethicist to whom I spoke thought something similar might be done in humans in the next 10 to 15 years.
So, too, there’s increasingly intelligent AI that can mimic a deceased loved one and, in the case of Prolonged Grief Disorder, an anti-opioid called naltrexone that’s being trialed. With psilocybin, perhaps the most promising of all of these, people who have taken it for their grief (myself included) have reported major epiphanies and perspective changes. These are all promising in their way, but being careful in how we use them for grief will only become more important as their potential progresses.
5. Expanding what we mean by grief.
There are implicit grief hierarchies under which we operate, where we think of deceased children, spouses, and parents as meriting the most attention. But there are all kinds of grief, including those in breakups and divorces, climate change, and the experience of racism. Grief can be challenging to define sometimes, as with “ambiguous loss,” a concept coined by Pauline Boss, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, where there’s “a lack of facts surrounding a loss.” This could be a psychologically absent father or a soldier whose body never made it home. There’s nothing tangible to grieve, yet there has undeniably been some loss. With these additional forms of grief, a different framework is required.
Instead of striving for an end game with grief—a “cure”—we must find a way to legitimize more kinds of grief, bring them further into the public conversation, and hold grief in one hand and a functional future in the other.
To listen to the audio version read by author Cody Delistraty, download the Next Big Idea App today:
