The Abridged version:
- Sacramento-based grief expert Dr. Dawn DiRaimondo lost her brother in Iraq, and she uses her experience to counsel others.
- Western psychology has long suggested that healing means “letting go” of a lost loved one, but new research suggests that isn’t necessarily the case.
- A 2013 study found establishing rituals in the wake of a loss can lead to less intense feelings of grief.
Andru Defeye served as Sacramento’s poet laureate from 2020-2024 and is the driving force behind Sacramento Poetry Week. In this regular feature, “The Great Joy Hunt,” he explores the science behind joy and shares strategies for adding more to our lives.
So it is the twenty-somethingth of May as I finally sit down to write this and I’ve been struggling to put my fingers to the keyboard for this column all month. It’s been feeling pretty depressy over here if I’m honest. It just feels like the air has been extra thick lately. Like there’s something a little off I couldn’t put my finger on. There is a lot of beauty happening lately. I’m celebrating it. Trying to stay present for it. But there’s also been an extra weight I’ve had trouble naming.
I didn’t think about it until midway through May, but my late father’s birthday is April 20. His deathiversary is June 21. So I am sitting right between those two dates trying to write an article about joy and grief and wondering why I’m meeting such resistance in my body and spirit.
Luckily I get to reason with experts on a regular basis about the neuroscience behind both our positive and negative emotions, and maybe most importantly, how they relate to each other. There is a line in one of my poems that people tend to gravitate to heavily, which is that:
“our bodies
are big enough
to hold the top of joy
and the bottom of grief
at the same time.”
Holding this dichotomy of emotion may be more important than most of us realize.
It has been three years since my father passed. When I say it out loud it seems like a lifetime ago, but as I was talking to Dr. Dawn DiRaimondo it seemed like only a few days ago. She reassures me that I’m still experiencing fresh waves of grief every time that another milestone is reached without him. Dr. DiRaimondo is a Sacramento-based grief expert not only through study, but through her own lived experience.
In 2004, at age 28, and newly licensed as a therapist, her brother was killed while serving in Iraq just six weeks shy of his scheduled return. This sudden, tragic loss left her looking for clinical guidance and finding a shortage. The trauma of her own personal loss would become a catalyst and inform her work as a therapist and eventually as the author of the book “Surviving Sibling Loss: The Invisible Thread that Connects Us Through Life and Death.”
Grieving in America
When someone dies in American culture, the societal expectation is that there will be a funeral within the following couple of weeks. In California, employees are legally given five days of bereavement leave (that may or may not be paid) after the death of a spouse, child, parent, sibling, grandparent, grandchild, domestic partner or parent-in-law.
Part of this push to get through grief in America comes from capitalism’s obsession with productivity, but for decades Western psychology also reinforced the idea that healing meant “letting go” of the dead. The assumption was that healthy grief required eventually severing emotional ties and moving on.
Modern grief research increasingly suggests that many people heal not by forgetting their loved ones, but by learning how to continue a relationship with them in a new form. In 1996, a book called “Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief” quietly revolutionized thought around death, closure, and the idea of “letting go” as part of the grief process. In the book, the authors argued that the dead continue to exist psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, behaviorally, culturally and neurologically inside us.
Though it’s been over 20 years since her brother’s passing, Dr. DiRaimondo explains that he has never stopped being present in her family’s traditions through the years. “My kids never met him but they know all about Uncle Michael.”
Cultures around the world have created and developed structured ways of revisiting and processing grief regularly. Modern America is actually the outlier in how quickly it expects grief to become invisible. Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in Mexico or Obon in the Japanese Buddhist tradition are yearly gatherings where the community comes together to honor, remember and share memories of their loved ones that have passed.
Grief and rituals
A 2013 study by researchers Michael Norton and Francesca Gino explored rituals humans turn to after loss. Whether grief from death, breakups, and even losing money, they found that people who turned to rituals experienced lower levels of grief. In the study, perhaps the most surprising fact is that the rituals do not need to be ancient, religious, or even believed-in to help lower the levels of grief.
Rituals help because they restore a sense of control. They give our nervous systems something to focus on outside of loss. Even participants who did not believe rituals were effective still experienced emotional relief after performing them.
The benefit isn’t in the ritual, but the intentionality. Across cultures, mourning rituals look different, and even contradict each other. Some traditions encourage crying loudly while others value silence. Some cut hair while others grow it. Yet the psychological benefits remain consistent. Rituals act as emotional stabilizers, helping humans create meaning, rhythm and agency in moments when grief threatens all three.
Joy, grieving and guilt on the ride
Joy often comes with a side of guilt when we are grieving. I remember for the first year or so that my father had been gone. I felt like I was betraying him if I was smiling too big or laughing too much. Every time I mention this to someone on their own grief journey I find it is pretty universal. The irony is that our loved ones generally wouldn’t want us sitting in sadness. Dr. DiRaimondo has come up with a helpful metaphor for this balancing act of honoring our grief while also healing through joy.
“We don’t have a big enough vocabulary for grief,” Dr. DiRaimondo explains, “People don’t want to talk about it so we don’t even have words for it so I end up using a lot of metaphors around grief.”
And one of them is a car ride.
Imagine your standard car with a driver’s seat, passenger seat, back seat, and trunk. Dr. DiRaimondo says that often when she first meets with patients, grief is usually in the driver’s seat of the car because it is steering much of life. As time goes on, we eventually get invited out with friends or to life events like weddings or graduations or parties, and there can be a guilt that comes with feeling joy or happiness.
Dr. DiRaimondo explains that when we’re going to a graduation party we can move grief to the back seat and joy to the front seat for a few hours. “You can focus and be present with joy in the passenger seat knowing your grief is in the back seat, not too far away,” she explains.
This acknowledgement that grief does not leave, but can take a back seat has been helpful for Dr. DiRaimondo not only in her work, but in her own grief journey. “I’m now 22 years into this and a lot of time my grief is in the trunk,” she explains, “It’s still in the car, not front and center, but I can access it easily, and I feel like clients like this idea because it includes all these parts of them.”
Dr. DiRaimondo is sure to point out that healing from grief isn’t linear. “Over time you learn the rhythm of grief,” she explains, “The waves are eventually less intense.” She points out that seasons like the holidays or this season between my father’s birth and death days can intensify grief and that finding ways to channel our grief energy helps us navigate the path.
The great joy hint
Before we ended our conversation I asked Dr. DiRaimondo directly if the heavy, thick-aired feeling I’d been feeling lately could have to do with the fact that we were in between my father’s birthday and death day and perhaps my body is remembering the loss.
“Your body remembers the lighting and the weather, even the smell of the air this time of year,” she explains. The question she leaves me with is, “So what else might it remember?”
It’s evident to me that somatically my body is processing heavy grief again this season. So I suppose the question becomes what rituals will I meet it with? Not to erase it, outrun it, or “get over it.” But to give my nervous system the support it needs to continue processing.
We think grief
is a wound that closes.
But most days
it’s just love
learning a new address.
Andru Defeye is the former poet laureate of Sacramento and a regular contributor, writing The Great Joy Hunt for Abridged.