There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Megan Devine

Shortly after becoming a newly minted second grader, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom one sunny Saturday, I paused in front of my father’s black lacquer dresser long enough to be sure the coast was still clear, then slid open the top drawer, extracted Dad’s driver’s license from his wallet and calculated his age.

For reasons I no longer remember, I’d suddenly become aware of how much older my parents were than everyone else’s. Dad wasn’t the only father who’d gone gray, and he certainly wasn’t the only one with a receding hairline. With his deep, even tan from spending weekends outside doing yard work and still smooth skin, it was hard for me to guess.

1901? Wait … what? Dad was born in 1901. That means he’s 68 years old. That can’t be right … 

The math wasn’t complicated, but I struggled to believe the answer. Dad was still working full time. He exercised every day and ran behind me as I learned to ride a two-wheeler. And he showed up to everything.

By the time I got to college, my father seemed ageless. Still physically active, still running his own business, I moved through life assuming he’d be around for a long time to come. Ultimately, that proved to be true as Dad lived to be 102½, dying peacefully of old age in my parents’ bedroom in my childhood home.

The condolence cards Mom and I received were kind and comforting. Full of funny stories from family and friends, his dental hygienist, his internist, even a handful of colleagues he’d worked with for more than 50 years. As sad as I was to be without him, I couldn’t argue with the line in every card about what a long, full life he’d had.

When my mother died twelve years later at the age of 92, the same kind of notes rolled in. Only this time, I didn’t find the line about a long, full life comforting. A year earlier, my son Jimmy had died of brain cancer after eight years of treatment and multiple recurrences. Mom hadn’t wanted to die and leave me to grieve Jimmy’s death alone. And I wasn’t prepared to lose her so soon after my son.

This was the moment when I first understood how much context matters in grief. The way the death of an elderly parent or grandparent might feel like a circle-of-life loss in one circumstance and like your world had been upended in another. How much both the order and number of prior losses matters. That had Mom died before Jimmy, I would have grieved her absence in an entirely different way.

When I launched Salt Water back in 2018 and began meeting other bereaved parents, I came to recognize how insular my experience grieving Jimmy had been as well. When your child dies of a non-genetic, non-inherited, cancer of unknown origin, no one accuses you of not doing enough or blames you for not doing more to save him. Something, I learned to my shock and horror is not true for the parents of children who die of suicide or an overdose. It wasn’t just the judgment that stunned me; it was the idea that anyone thought they had the right to “audit the tears of other people” as poet John Roedel said.

My first teachers in the aftermath of Jimmy’s death were the parents whose children took their own lives. They helped me understand the way circumstances and context influence everything from other people’s reactions to whether the casseroles showed up. That even condolences could be served with a huge portion of judgment.

The more I looked, the more context I found. The client who told me about her boss telling her to take all the time she needed when her father died, a man she’d had only a sporadic, contentious relationship with after he abandoned her as a baby. But when her stepfather died, the man who raised her, that same boss questioned her need for bereavement leave.

There were the parents who’d lost children to car crashes or cancers that killed within days or weeks of being discovered. A single Fentanyl-laced pill, a Craigslist car sale gone horribly wrong, the uncontrollable rage of an ex-husband. Horrific circumstances that added complexities to the loss far beyond what I had experienced.

There was the nature of the relationship and the pressure that had been applied on the griever to maintain it. The abusive or mentally ill parent, the brother who bullied his sister mercilessly, the narcissistic spouse whose outside-the-house charm hid so much. Those who lose fraught, fractured relationships might have felt relieved when death came for the other person, but they still grieved the apology that never arrived, the reconciliation that didn’t happen or the closeness that wasn’t possible.

As humans, we like order and consistency. You need look no further than the average American company’s bereavement policy to see this in action. If your person fits on the traditional family tree – parent, child, spouse, you are entitled to four days of bereavement. But if the deceased was an aunt, a cousin or a grandparent, you only get two. And should you lose someone that doesn’t “belong” on the tree – a best friend, an ex-spouse, a former in-law or a fiancé not yet recognized as a domestic partner – you’re on your own.

When meeting someone new or learning about a death for the first time, I used to try to figure out the magnitude of a loss at the beginning of the conversation. In my naïve, “who knew?” days, the calculations were simpler, based primarily on the deceased’s age and degree of closeness to the griever. I knew from my own Rube Goldberg-like family where my second cousin was more of a sister than my siblings and my sister’s ex-husband remained close to my father long after the divorce that someone’s place on the family tree wasn’t a reliable metric on its own. But it’s taken years and a lot of loss for me to understand the way the circumstances of the relationship and the nature of the departure can shatter the survivors no matter the demographics involved.

One of the greatest gifts that’s come from spending the last eight years immersed in loss has been the deconstruction and rebuilding of my world view. I have come a long way from that curious child and young adult who believed, based solely on the data she had at hand, that most people grow old, get sick then die. That the departures are orderly – grandparents, then parents – and that life is mostly fair.

Jimmy was the Jenga block who toppled everything the first time around. But when I look back now, I realize that during the eight years of his cancer odyssey, I rebuilt the structure largely the same way changed only by the knowledge that children of all ages can die young and no other measure.

Despite what the self-anointed, so-called grief experts say, there are no clear paths, consistent approaches or perfect words to offer in response to every loss. What serves us best is worrying as little as possible about our own awkwardness and inadequacies and focusing instead on the other person. I still get it wrong, rushing in too quickly to offer a condolence, only to find that the relationship was complex and the mere mention of the deceased’s name a blow. But when I pause patiently to listen for the context and circumstances, I’m much more likely to be of some small comfort, even if words I say don’t begin to honor or acknowledge all that has been lost.