The unseen unity: how grief connects us all

Right now, someone you work with is carrying grief. You almost certainly can’t tell. They replied to your message on time, showed up for the stand-up, and said they were fine. Grief rarely announces itself at the office, which is odd when you think about how universal it is. Everyone reading this has lost something or someone. Nobody is exempt.

This is something we found ourselves sitting with after a talk at Adaptive’s DEI festival last year, given by Christine Dernederlanden, a grief educator who lost her older brother when she was fourteen and has spent many years since building resources to help people, especially children, learn to grieve. Grief is one of those subjects that even well-meaning workplaces tend to skirt around, because most of us were never taught how to talk about it. What stayed with us afterward wasn’t advice on what to say to someone grieving. It was a shift in how to think about grief in the first place. So let’s talk about it properly.

Why grief belongs in a conversation about inclusion

We usually file grief under wellbeing. It’s also worth putting it somewhere else: belonging.

Think about how much energy goes into noticing what makes us different from one another, whether that’s background, culture, seniority, or the language we grew up speaking. Grief ignores all of it. It doesn’t check your job title, your salary, or where you’re from before it arrives. It’s the one experience that eventually lands on every single person. That turns grief from something each of us carries quietly and alone into something we all have in common. We just rarely say so out loud.

Grief is the response to love

Here’s the idea that reorders everything else: you grieve because you loved. If you were indifferent to something, losing it wouldn’t touch you. The intensity of grief is a measure of the strength of attachment. That’s why losing a pet you saw every day can flatten you more than losing a relative you saw once a year. Proximity and love, not the label of the relationship, decide how hard it hits.

There’s actually a biological version of this. When we’re anticipating something we love, a new relationship, a new arrival, even a new puppy, the body floods with the chemistry of excitement. When that thing is taken away, the same system crashes. The brain drops into fight, flight, or freeze. Grief isn’t a character flaw or a failure to cope. It’s what a nervous system does when love hits a wall.

So the next time you catch yourself thinking you should be “over it” by now, it’s worth remembering what the grief is actually made of. It’s the shape love leaves behind.

The “stages of grief” were never meant for the people left behind

Most of us have heard of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What almost nobody mentions is that this model came from studying people who were dying, not the people mourning them. Acceptance makes sense as an endpoint if you’re the one whose time is coming. But acceptance is a strange thing to ask of someone left behind.

Grief for the living looks different. It moves through disbelief, a grasping need to understand what happened, a deep specific sadness, moments of sudden clarity, and eventually something like compassion and resilience. The crucial part: these don’t arrive in order, and they don’t finish. Think of your moods as weather. Some mornings you wake up steady and by lunchtime you’re in pieces for no reason you can name. That isn’t going backwards, and it definitely doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. It’s just the wind changing.

Children, interestingly, seem to know this instinctively. Nobody teaches them the rules, so they move in and out of it naturally: down into the grief, then back out, then on with their day, then into it again. They don’t try to stay in the deep end permanently. Most of us could learn something from that.

What actually helps, at work and outside it

The most useful thing you can offer someone grieving is not advice. Its presence. Showing up, sending the text, and being willing to ask about the person who passed away, rather than carefully avoiding their name. Grieving people often feel that everyone else has moved on and forgotten; being asked “tell me about them” can be a relief, not a wound.

It helps enormously just to know your colleagues are aware. Some days you’ll want to talk. Other days you’ll want to bury yourself in a task and not think about it at all, and there’s no guilt owed for that either. There’s no correct way to do this.

And when someone has been stuck in grief for years, the instinct to “help them move on” usually backfires. You can’t force it, and pushing can retraumatize. Walking alongside someone patiently tends to do more than trying to shake them out of it.

Sitting with it, together

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: grief isn’t a problem to be solved or a weakness to be hidden. It’s what love leaves behind, it visits everyone regardless of who they are, and it is never meant to be handled alone.

That last part is why this sits comfortably next to how we think about inclusion at Adaptive. Belonging isn’t only about celebrating what makes people different. Sometimes it’s about recognizing the heavy, human things we all share and making it a little easier to carry them at work. Our mental health first aiders at Adaptive are one piece of that, a start rather than a finish. We don’t claim to have grief at work fully worked out, but giving people room, and naming grief out loud, feels like a good place to start.

Our thanks to Christine Dernederlanden for sharing her story so openly, and for the reminder that grief is something none of us carry alone.