Grief carries a unique weight when it strikes at a young age—a lesson I learned when I lost my mother when I was 26. When grief hits when you are only just entering adulthood, it can feel like the abrupt end to childhood, a loss that profoundly alters your perception of life, death, relationships, and your own identity.
Of course, everyone’s life milestones look markedly different and are distinctly one’s own. Nobody reading this needs to be told that a definitive grief manual is unattainable, and there’s no neat series of boxes in which to divide the parts of life. There are, however, some experiences that many people will navigate or aspire to at some point: Gaining independence, falling in love, finding a career, navigating friendships, getting married and having children. And for young grievers, these are likely undergone without the person they want most by their side.
Sections
Quarter-Life Grief
What I didn’t understand when my mother was diagnosed with cancer was that grief begins at diagnosis. During her illness, I seemed like any other young person, but internally, I was in turmoil. In the weeks leading up to her death, my mother suggested something that would forever change my grief journey—she told me to find a support group for young people after she died. Intuitively, I knew this was what I needed.
The support groups I found were understandably populated by those in the middle and later stages of their lives. As bereaved people, we did share emotions and experiences, but I felt I was facing issues closely related to my particular stage in life, which were distinct from the challenges faced by middle-aged people. The premature death of a parent feels like a theft, both of the loved one and of the future you imagined with them. This is why a generic adult support group can be unappealing: older people are mourning a shared life, while a young person is mourning a future lost. If you’re surrounded by people who haven’t had the same experience, you may feel misunderstood, leading to internalised distress and feeling even more abnormal.
Quarter-life grievers find themselves within a unique cultural context. When my mum died, like many other quarter-life grievers I’ve met, I was woefully unprepared to handle it. Emerging adulthood is already a stage of life marked by instability—grief is a deeply destabilising experience, so when you experience it young, it deepens the feeling of being lost and disorientated. Your expectations and aspirations for life drastically and indefinitely change, creating a formative split in your identity – the ‘you’ before grief and the ‘you’ after. This grief becomes part of your developmental experience, shaping your identity, decisions, and adulthood. That’s why each unchartered juncture can feel tumultuous for those who have lost a loved one early in life.
Gaining independence
Whether it’s leaving school, moving away for university or reaching legal ‘adulthood’, the first taste of independence can be equally thrilling and disorienting. For many young people, this is a time to discover a new identity and experiment with going out, drinking for the first time, and making new groups of friends. It can be hedonistic before a young person finds their own limits and preferences in terms of independence. But your relationship with the ‘hedonism’ of independence can be complicated by grief.
Strobe and Schut’s modern “dual process” grief model suggests there are times when a griever needs a break from the grieving process. Recent mourners must find a balance between dedicating time to grieving and allowing themselves to rest. For those in quarter-life, the challenge lies in distinguishing whether drinking and partying serve as coping mechanisms that mask grief or if they genuinely offer some respite from it. It can help to be gentle with yourself and recognise what you’re experiencing is nuanced. Your grief isn’t black and white and cannot be categorised as either ‘coping’ or ‘not coping’. Taking time off from grief, regardless of the form it takes, is not disrespectful or inappropriate, whether this manifests in drinking, casual relationships, partying or abstaining from these activities altogether.
First Love
Intimacy and relationships are aspects of young adult life that can already be sources of insecurity, and how grief layers over that terrain is unique for every individual. I often hear stories of how physical intimacy can be a relief. Sex is so immersive that it can wash away the numbness of grief, the physicality of it pinning you to the present moment when the rest of your life feels adrift. For others, it is not so straightforward.
For those I spoke to for my book, in new romances, deciding when to reveal their grief and not knowing how the other person would respond was always a live question. In long-term relationships, grief could raise existing fault lines or show that the partner in question wasn’t emotionally supportive. Meeting someone’s family for the first time could be a very present, very visual reminder that their partner’s ‘unit’ was complete (or ‘normal’) and theirs was not. Coming to terms with their sexuality when they had no opportunity to tell their loved one was complicated. Some young grievers reported seeking new relationships to fill the gap, sometimes leading to unhealthy relationships where the new partner took advantage of their vulnerability. Quarter-life grief asks us to become independent from someone we depended on before we are ready. While that independence can become positive self-sufficiency, it can also easily tip into hyper-independence, a common trauma coping mechanism that isolates us from new attachments.
Launching a career
Grief is excellent at warping time. Fresh grief is particularly good at melting the rigidity of a calendar month. For that reason, a recently bereaved person may either enjoy the structure of work, which allows them to feel the rhythms of normality, or they may seek the opposite: to take the time to get their bearings again when their world has capsized. Society is not structured to facilitate that need. Bereavement leave is next to non-existent on a global scale. Australia and Brazil grant grieving workers two days of paid leave; Canada, two days unpaid; China, France, New Zealand, and South Africa, up to three days paid. Workers have no legal right to compassionate leave in the United States. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, compassionate leave has no statutory footing, with the single (and recent) exception of two weeks’ leave for parents who have lost a child.
Young grievers are unlikely to have the experience to assert their wish for time off or bargain for more than what is offered under company policy, if anything is offered at all. They are less likely to have any savings to draw on to take any unpaid leave or a short sabbatical from work. And at the start of your career, any gaps in your CV can risk denting later prospects or slowing progress when other people of the same age are focused on progressing as quickly as possible.
Speaking to young grievers, many talked about their shifting priorities. Instead of chasing promotions, they felt they could only focus on getting through the day. Finding a fulfilling line of work was less of a priority than finding positions that offered flexibility and understanding. On the other hand, some young grievers I spoke to found that they coped by channelling all their energy into work – but eventually realised this had stopped them from processing their grief, and they still needed to try to face it head-on years down the line.
Navigating friendships
Our friendships naturally fluctuate over time, particularly in early adulthood. Many people experience the waxing and waning of different relationships. In today’s culture, friendship can be even more complex for young people. There’s an observation that in an age of constant online connection, interpersonal connections are weaker than ever. The loneliness epidemic in young people has been compounded by pandemic lockdowns and social media.
On top of a demographic shift towards loneliness, young grievers face barriers in receiving support from their friends due to ongoing taboos and misunderstandings around grief. The UK Bereavement Commission found that almost half (46 per cent) of their respondents had no support from their friends after bereavement. This is a staggering and deeply saddening figure. While some respondents cited their wish not to burden others as a reason for not seeking help, others cited the deep discomfort they perceived in others when talking about death and dying.
Many described feeling ‘misunderstood, avoided, and abandoned’ by friends in the months and years following a bereavement, or simply that their friends had no idea how to support them, even when they wanted to. There was a particular stigma around certain types of death, such as suicide and COVID-19. Insensitive comments and the expectation that the bereaved would move on within a set amount of time heightened their sense of isolation.
All of this implies that today’s young grievers have an increased likelihood of experiencing acute isolation in grief. With this in mind, it becomes clear how significant a role friends play in the support a young griever might receive. ‘The biggest predictor of your outcome when grieving is the love and support of others,’ says Julia Samuel. Your path to healing in grief should be paved with people – those who care about you and whom you trust in all areas of your life. When a loved one dies, it’s the love of others that gives you the strength to navigate through grief.
Getting married and having children
As a society, we are well past the era when getting married and having kids were universal aspirations or norms. Despite this, many of us grow up imagining what these moments might look like for us, just as we dream about our future careers and achievements. When you lose someone, those yet-to-be-realised images are drastically altered. I felt that on one hand, getting married and having children would recreate the cosy family unit I grew up in and subsequently lost when my mother died. If I have children, parts of my mother will live on through her DNA. Perhaps my daughter would even inherit my mother’s characteristics. On the other hand, I feel terrified to take that step into parenting without my mother there to guide me.
When I speak to young people who have lost someone, this is one of their most common regrets: that their parent, sibling or friend won’t be able to give a speech at their wedding, become a grandparent, aunt, uncle or godparent, or become a parent themselves. Young grievers begin to understand that, instead of being moments of unadulterated happiness in our worlds, these maturational events and major life transitions will inevitably be undercut by a sense of sadness and loss. And there are more milestones to come, down the line: turning the age of the person who died, or becoming a grandparent when your parent wasn’t afforded the same opportunity. I spoke to plenty of people who had lived with their young grief for decades, who were still finding new ways of experiencing it even as they reached retirement.
That these bittersweet feelings can underlie life’s biggest milestones (and even smaller everyday moments) is something often only understood by other people who experienced loss at a young age. It is something many of my non-bereaved friends fail to think about – even how big, happy achievements can feel sad as I cannot share them with my mum. Finding a community of people who really get it can help you feel less alone and more understood, something I’ve found hugely comforting.
Rachel Wilson is the founder of The Grief Network, a community operated by and for young bereaved people established after Rachel’s mother died when she was in her twenties.
In her first book, Losing Young: How to Grieve When Your Life is Just Beginning, Rachel weaves together other tales of bereavement with her own. She encounters individuals who’ve lost parents, siblings, partners, and friends at a young age. Talking to people who at a young age have lost parents, siblings, partners and friends, she explores how grief interacts with key milestones: what it’s like to fall in love, land your first job or become a parent without your ‘person’ by your side. Losing Young also draws on psychological research, interviews with titans like Julia Samuel and explorations of grief in history to understand why, culturally, we are so ill-equipped to deal with grief.
It is a personal and profound book about what happens when youth is reshaped by tragedy, trauma and loss. It’s for anyone who wants to understand what a young loved one is going through, who is struggling to rediscover themselves after grief, or hopes to feel less alone.
Order your copy of Losing Young here.
