The Caring Death Doula
In a world that rushes past death and ignores grief, The Caring Death Doula stops to listen with tenderness, truth, and time. Whether you are grieving right now or here to learn how to help those grieving, join your host, Frances, a certified grief educator on the journey of finding connection, conversations, and comfort. Let's make grief and death a natural part of our conversations.
The Caring Death Doula
Grief, Out Loud
In this episode, we open a compassionate map of loss—naming uncomplicated and prolonged grief, the heaviness of anticipatory grief, and the quiet ache of delayed or disenfranchised grief that so often goes unseen. Along the way, we talk about cumulative losses that stack before you can catch your breath, the sideways signals of masked grief like anger or illness, and the fog of ambiguous loss when there’s no closure, as with dementia or a missing loved one.
Together, we explore how collective grief moves through communities and why non-death losses—divorce, job changes, illness, infertility—deserve the same care we give after a funeral.
We share gentle practices for “grieving out loud”: speaking names, asking for help without apology, and creating small rituals that hold big feelings. You’ll hear why there’s no timeline, no rules, and no moral ranking—only the ongoing work of being kind to yourself and present for others.
If you’ve ever wondered whether what you feel “counts,” this conversation gives you language, validation, and practical ways to support both your heart and your people. From simple pauses each day, we draw a path toward healing that doesn’t rush or compare.
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Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I am so happy that you are here with me today. We've been talking about grief and how there's no timeline and there's no rules. Today I would like to look at some of the different kinds of griefs, not to put a label, not to say that one grief is worse than another or easier than another, but just for us to understand that there is so much grief around us. There are so many different types or categories of grief. And that's why it's so important that we get comfortable with grief, that we can talk about it, that we don't shy away from it, we don't bury it down. We need to grieve together. We need to grieve out loud. Yes, grief is a private journey. It is your own journey. But yet, if we're all comfortable with it and we're talking about it, then we can grieve out loud. We don't have to apologize if the tears come. We don't have to go off alone and excuse ourselves. And there will be no shame if we do have to excuse ourselves or pull the car over for a minute and cry. We're going to learn to pause and to rest and to take care of ourselves, to be gentle and kind with ourselves and with each other. So today, and in the episodes coming up, we're going to be talking about different categories of grief. Like I said, not so that we can judge each other or criticize or label or figure out, oh, this is what I'm doing, this is where I'm at, this is the kind of grief I have. If that helps you, then that's wonderful. But that's not the purpose of this. This is just to really get us to understand that grief is all around us and it's part of life. So we'll start with the first one, which is the quote unquote normal, uncomplicated grief. And that's basically what it is. Someone dies and you grieve. Then you have the opposite, which is the complicated or prolonged grief. And this goes on and on. It's prolonged, it's stretched out. And that is tied in with the anticipatory grief. Because a lot of times you'll get, oh, your loved one's got six months to live, ten days to live, and maybe it happens in that time frame, maybe it doesn't. And so you're pro it's prolonged grief. And it's anticipate anticipatory because you're anticipating your loved one's death. And sometimes it's prolonged. It goes on and on and on, and you just you're tired. You're tired, and you just want it to be over with. Or your loved one is suffering, and you want that to be over with. And it can bring in so much guilt and shame, this anticipatory grief. And we'll talk more about that. Then there's the delayed grief, and it surfaces after being denied or suppressed. There's disenfranchised grief that is not openly acknowledged or recognized, not supported, like a loss of a pet, an ex-partner, the change in a life role, miscarriage. How many women or couples have a miscarriage and they're grieving alone, they're suffering alone? They haven't even told anyone. There's cumulative grief, which is multiple losses close together. A lot of couples or many will die within weeks of each other or months of each other. It's like they just give up, right? When they lose their partner. Or maybe you lose an aunt, and then a year later you lose your your dad, and then maybe three months later you lose a cousin. It adds up multiple losses. Then there's mass grief, and that's grief that is expressed through other behaviors like overwork, anger, illness. There's ambiguous grief or loss. And this is grief without a closure when someone is missing or has dementia or is emotionally unavailable in some way or other. So there's never time for closure. There's there's there's there's not even that there's no time, there's just no opportunity. Then there's collective grief where we share it within a group or a community. And even within that collective grief, as we know, grief is so individual to each of us. There's no right way or wrong way, and we can't compare each other. We can't compare ourselves to anybody else. Because it hits us different, because we're all so unique and beautiful individuals. Then there's the non-death loss, grief of divorce, job loss, illness, and infertility. These are all ways that we can grieve, and there's a few others. But I want us to understand that grief is a part of our life. There's no way to escape it. We shouldn't deny it. We need to become so comfortable with it that we can grieve out loud, that we can support each other so that we feel supported. And I hope you understand that. There is traumatic grief where it's traumatic, where it's out of your control. More so than just the other forms of death. And it's abrupt and it's harsh and it's traumatic. There are so many types of grief. And I want us to understand, not so that we can criticize or compare and say, well, my grief is worse than your grief. That's not the point of this. This is to get us to understand how intertwined grief and loss, death, changes that come from loss and death, and the grief that comes from it, how it's intertwined amongst us all in our lives, and we need to become comfortable with it so that we can talk about it, so that we can walk together, feel supportive, heal. It's a it's a lifelong healing process. So please remember there are no guidelines, there are no rules, there's no right way or wrong way, there's no judgment and criticism, and let's be gentle with ourselves as well as others. Let's take care of each other, let's be a presence, let's pause and understand that grief is part of life. I am the caring death doula, and I am here for you.