Grief isn't only for the dead: mourning jobs, hopes and empty nests

Yes, grief reaches well past death. All four experts here treat a divorce, a lost job, a child leaving for college, or the slow realization that a parent will never become who you needed as real losses that deserve grieving. Seeing them this way turns the question of why you can't just get over it into a more useful one: what does this loss need from me?

David Kessler developed the stages of grief with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. He defines grief as "a change we didn't want." By that measure the stages apply to breakups, divorces and job loss, which is why he teaches companies how to manage change. He warns that bargaining, the endless what-ifs, is the mind preferring guilt to helplessness. People get stuck when they refuse to walk the new road a loss has put them on. His remedies are being witnessed by people who understand grief and finding meaning. He calls meaning a sixth stage, and he found it after his own son died.

Andrew Huberman explains why these losses hurt so much. The brain maps people, animals and even meaningful objects by space, time and closeness. After a loss, its predictions about where and when that person or thing will appear keep firing. He describes grief as a craving state, not only sadness, and as the work of untangling an attachment from those predictions. People grieve at different rates for biological reasons, he says, not because they loved more or less.

Dr. Ramani Durvasula works with people hurt by narcissistic parents or partners. Healing, she says, means first accepting that the person won't change, and then grieving the lost hope, the lost someday and the person you wanted them to be. People often don't recognize this as grief, especially if they stay in the relationship. This loss comes with no closure, no justice and no mourning rituals, so she argues it can be more complicated than a death.

Mel Robbins spoke days after dropping her youngest son at college. She groups the empty nest with divorce, moving and losing someone you love, and calls the sadness "a mentally healthy response" to a major life transition. What's lost may include part of your own identity. Her central point is that time alone doesn't change things. What you do with that time does.

They disagree on scale and on how long it lasts:

• Scale. Huberman says losing an object in no way approximates losing a person, even if the grieving process is similar. Durvasula ranks her kind of loss above death in complexity. Robbins sits between them and treats the empty nest as a normal adjustment of a month or two.
• Duration. Durvasula says the grief her clients carry never fully goes away.
• The five stages. Kessler holds them as observed truths. Huberman says few people move through them in order.
• Hope. Kessler offers to hold hope for people who can't, while Durvasula calls hope the biggest barrier to healing. They mean different hopes: Kessler means hope of living again, and Durvasula means hope that another person will change.

So what do you do with this? Name the loss as a loss, and build in the time and rituals that non-death losses don't come with. Catch the what-ifs. Interrupt old reaches, like texting your kid to fill the silence. Talk to people who understand, and ideally tell your story to a therapist as many times as you need. Once the rawness eases, ask who you become after this. If any loss leaves you stuck, numb or unable to function, or starts to look like depression, see a mental health professional, ideally one trained in grief.