Becoming Grief Literate, One Post at a Time
You can’t be the perfect griever—no one can—but what you can be is grief literate. I always thought that you had to grieve in a certain way, that there were steps and a timeline, but I was thankfully wrong.
When I interviewed to work as a research assistant with Susan Cadell, I remember being asked if I'd experienced grief. Or maybe she said, have you grieved? The exact wording is lost to time. What stuck with me wasn’t the question but my response: No. In true job interview fashion, I quickly followed up with, “But I want to learn.” And that was true; but that no didn’t sit right with me. Years later, though the conversation is probably long forgotten by Susan, my answer still echoes in my mind.
It’s not that I’d never experienced grief; it was that I didn’t really know what grief was. I used to assume grief was a single feeling, something felt immediately and dealt with privately. Writing that now makes me cringe. Grief is in everything and everywhere. It was there in the interview; it was when I thought of my cat who passed away; and when I realized there would be no more Christmas with my cousins begging our Grandpa to let us open the gifts.
Working on content and co-managing social media for Grief Matters opened my eyes to a new world in which I can find grief everywhere. Unexpectedly, this also opened me to a deeper understanding of myself.
Since joining Grief Matters, I’ve learned that grief literacy isn’t about solving or avoiding grief. It's about understanding and managing it; it's about recognizing it, naming it, and allowing it to exist. Through community events, reading books, and engaging in online spaces, I’ve learned that talking about grief doesn’t have to be taboo or uncomfortable. That realization has become both my motivation and my passion for creating social media content for Grief Matters.
So while I can’t be the perfect griever, I can be grief literate. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
You don’t need to fully understand grief to be grief literate. Grief literacy isn’t about being good at grief (what would that even mean?). It’s about awareness, empathy, and the ability to engage with grief, both your own and others’. Too often, we gloss over conversations about grief, keeping them neat and contained. But grief is anything but tidy. Becoming grief literate invites a deeper, more compassionate understanding of the world around you.
Even when something isn’t labelled as being about grief, it often carries elements of it, because grief is everywhere. Finding grief in unexpecting pieces of media offers a new way of looking at what it means to grieve. Like when I first watched the British comedy-drama tv series created and written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, I had never heard anyone describe it as a show about grief. And yet, it captures so beautifully how grief can reveal itself in the smallest moments. More recently, reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh showed me just how unpredictable grief can be. Both the series and the book opened my eyes to the quiet, complicated, and unique ways grief shows up differently in all of us. Finding storylines that include grief without making it their central focus remind us that grief doesn’t follow a formula. It reminds us that there are no steps to grief. It’s not linear; it's messy, unpredictable, and raw.
By creating social media content, I’ve come to see that vulnerability is often the first step toward building a true sense of community. When you share your stories about grief, or read others’ stories—like our blog posts and cartoons—you’re contributing to grief literacy. Every post we research and share, and every comment you leave, helps inspire us: what paths we should take next, what content to share, and what matters to the Grief Matters community. Learning about your experiences with grief gives us a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the many ways people express grief. Whether we wear our grief openly or carry it quietly, communities like Grief Matters are creating a space where every form of grief can be seen, shared, and valued.
Grief literacy isn’t just a skill, and being grief literate isn’t just about noticing grief; it’s also about how you respond to it. This has been something I’ve had to both learn and unlearn. Early on, I wanted everything we posted on our social channels to be profound, to reach as many people as possible. But what I learned is that grief doesn’t always need to be profound to matter. Sometimes, the most meaningful posts are the simplest ones, the ones that acknowledge grief without trying to fix it.
And finally, I realized that grief is not limited. That was my biggest ‘Aha!’ moment: understanding that grief doesn't exist in just one form or one moment. Grief isn’t only about the loss of people; it can be for animals, places, the past, anything you’ve felt deeply connected to. Once I let go of this restricted understanding of grief, I was able to step into a space where I became more aware of the deep and varied ways grief lives within ourselves and others.
Where I am right now in my lifelong learning about grief and grief literacy is this: there is no right way to grieve. Through our individual experiences, we find community and the opportunity to learn from one another. My favourite part of working on social media for Grief Matters has been seeing the incredible community that has formed, one that is passionate about learning and supporting each other.
While I talk about grief much more openly now, there is still so much to learn, both about grief itself and about myself. With that in mind, I encourage you to connect with us on social media, explore more of our blog and cartoon posts, and even consider sharing your own experiences with grief. While grief can be deeply personal, it doesn’t have to be something we face alone.
