12/01/2025
We live in a grief-illiterate culture.
Instead of teaching people how to grieve, we teach them how to function around their grief. We label normal, sane heartbreak as “disorder,” rush to pathologize deep sorrow, and then wonder why so many of us feel numb, dissociated, or like we’re “doing it wrong” when someone we love dies.
Our ancestors understood something we’ve largely forgotten: grief is not a personal pathology, it’s a relational event. It belongs to the whole village. The old ways gathered people in kitchens and living rooms, around fires and gravesides…wailing, singing, holding each other, feeding each other, telling stories until the tears and laughter braided together.
Now? We sedate. We prescribe. We hustle harder.
We scroll. We binge. We pour another drink.
We treat grief like a problem to be fixed instead of a holy task to be tended.
And because we refuse to meet grief in community, the system keeps trying to invent new ways to “manage” it for us.
Right now, researchers are studying intranasal oxytocin — a hormone spray up the nose — to see if it can shift how widowed people react to photos of their dead spouses. Small studies show it can reduce avoidance and slightly change brain connectivity in people with complicated grief.
Let that sink in: instead of giving people circles to cry in, songs to sing, altars to tend, bodies to lean on, and time, we give them brain scans and hormone sprays and call it “progress.”
This isn’t about shaming anyone who uses medication or experimental treatments. Sometimes those things are needed and lifesaving.
But no nasal spray, pill, or fMRI machine can give us what we most desperately need in grief:
• people who will sit in the wreckage with us
• rituals that help our bodies do the grieving they’re wired to do
• communities that don’t flinch at tears, rage, or silence
• permission to hurt for as long as love requires
Grief is not a malfunction. It is love trying to find its new shape.
Until we remember how to grieve together, we’ll keep medicalizing what is, at its core, a sacred human capacity.
If you’re grieving, you are not broken. You are not “too much.” You are doing something our culture has forgotten how to hold…and that doesn’t make you sick. It makes you human.
~ Freyja Inanna
Photo credit Pexels
