What Do We Owe The Grieving Ones?

when their suffering becomes our own.

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Someone close to one of my loved ones was assaulted recently. I don’t know her on a personal level, but have shared conversation and know she means a lot to my loved one. Hearing news of what happened to her tormented my mind for more reasons than one.

It sickened me to my stomach. It caused me to toss and turn and troubled me to the point of not being able to sleep that night. I questioned why I felt so strongly to the point of my own internal rage and tears. It took me a while to realize what I was feeling was angst and anger caused by second-hand grief.

Somehow, through the grief of another, I was reminded of my own trauma derived from my encounters with sexual abuse as a child. My deep affliction caused by an experience from years ago was triggered, and I was returned to a state of grieving for both my younger self and for this girl who had just experienced an insufferable trauma against her will.

Even though I don’t personally know her, her grief stirred up my own.

Second-hand grief refers to carrying the burden of another person’s pain and suffering even when their loss has nothing to do with you and doesn’t otherwise affect you. It’s also feeling sympathy and empathy for someone undergoing a tragedy in their life to the point that it begins to affect your feelings and emotions. Second-hand grief is feeling pain and suffering that isn’t yours, yet you make it your own. It’s taking on someone else’s sorrow as if it were your own.

Unresolved grief is one of the most common reasons people suffer from second-hand distress, even when there's no indication of ongoing grieving. As you begin to suffer from second-hand grief, you can expect to start feeling the painful emotional symptoms of love and loss following a significant tragedy.

I didn’t consider how deeply second-hand grief can affect one’s emotions. Beyond this particular encounter with it, I thought of other moments I’ve experienced second-hand grief in life.

I was reminded of all the trauma we’ve witnessed and continue witnessing happen in our world. The massacres of people. Police brutality. Mass shootings. Mothers holding the bodies of their lifeless children in their arms.

The grief does not have to be my own for it to move me. When I witness the suffering of another, I am moved to both a personalized grief and to anger. Their pain becomes my pain. Their tears my tears. As an empathetic being, I know no other way. My emotional experiences keep me rooted to the humanness of others, for better or for worse.

Sometimes I feel guilty for knowing that after witnessing or hearing of someone else’s traumatic experience, I have the opportunity to reconvene with my normal state of life, knowing that their lives will forever be altered involuntarily and things will never be the same for them. And I often don’t know what to do with that.

I feel like to be a witness to another’s grief is my responsibility. But I can admit that right now, I have no idea how to be in observance without it breaking me. I read in another post about second-hand grief that the goal of emotional agility is to allow yourself to feel emotions and then return to a balanced, more self-aware and empathetic state.

But how do we remain emotionally agile and intact while bearing the weight of a grief that has completely disrupted the life of another? That has uprooted them? Devoured them?

What do we owe the grieving ones? What is it to bear witness to someone else’s grief, even if we do not personally know them? Do we lean into the pain alongside them, or detach ourselves from it? Do we bear the weight of each other’s suffering?

What do we do with another’s grief without making it our own? Or do we need to make it our own? Should someone’s suffering become ours, too? Do we allow it to anger us, even if it has “nothing” to do with us? Do we allow it to trigger the rage inside of us? Is it the anger that moves us to action?

Thinking on this led me to revisit a former post of mine: Every waking moment, my heart contorts, twists, performs a plié. In grief, in sorrow, in union with those experiencing inequity and overwhelming tragedy. In anguish, in prayer, in acts of communal lamentation. My heart bends. It is within the act of bending that meaning comes begging for me to keep myself available to concern.

Re-reading that piece awakened this revelation for me — we can bend to the weight of grief without breaking. Perhaps in doing so, we become a stronger instrument for movement, a more opportune catalyst for change.

We ought to be concerned enough to bear witness to each other’s grief. It is owed. For the sake of humanity, it is owed.

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Thank you for being here.

— If my words move you in any way, please consider supporting the costs of my upcoming intentional writer’s retreat.

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On Matters Of The Heart