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
Rethinking “normal grief”: love, distance, and the myth of easy loss
The phrase “They lived a good life” sounds comforting—until it lands like a period at the end of a sentence you aren’t ready to finish.
In this episode we take a look at the label of “normal” and “uncomplicated grief” and discuss if there can be such a thing. Can any grief truly be “uncomplicated “? “Normal”?
From the long life of a grandparent to the sudden absence of a parent, we ask whether age, distance, and interaction truly make mourning easier, or harder, or simply change the way it shows up.
We reflect on a candid moment with friends who said, “We’re fine” right after the service—and what that might reveal about goodbyes that were well made, faith that steadies the heart, and families that work together without drama. Can this be called “normal grief/uncomplicated” grief?
We also hold space for the opposite experience: the slow, uneven grief that lingers.
Along the way, we unpack how emotional intimacy can thrive across state lines and how grief is in comparison to regular connections that vanish.
If you are grieving, you’ll find permission to feel how you feel—brief and gentle or long and tangled—without apologies. No right or wrong way. No timelines. Just honest conversation about love, loss, and the many ways we carry both.
If this resonated, share it with someone who’s grieving or someone who wants to support others better. Subscribe, and leave a review to help others find the show.
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Hello and welcome back. I am so glad that you are here with me. I'm so thankful that you are still receiving either educational tips on how to be supportive to those in your in your life circle that are grieving. Or if you're grieving, I hope that my words can touch you and just help ease the grief just a little bit. Help us all to just understand grief and just get comfortable with it so that we can grieve out loud, that we can be better supporters. Now, last week in episode 14, I started listing. I went through not all the categories, but a lot of the categories of grief. And I've been thinking a lot about that. Because, you know, it's it's the list that you know teachers will give you or the experts will give you. And I just don't like the first one. You know, it's quote unquote normal grief, uncomplicated grief. And I think if a professional was going to give us the definition of this, it would just be an possibly that, you know, it's an older person that dies and they've lived a long life, and so it's uncomplicated. You know, maybe they just end up in the hospital and then a couple days later they die, and it's just it's old age. And so it's I I but I don't like it. I don't know how you feel, but to me that makes it feel like well, they lived to be 96 years old, they lived to be 103, they lived to be 89, they lived a good life. Yay, they lived a good life, and so it's like, well, what are we saying? They lived a good life. Well, that's good they lived a good life. Hopefully, we all can live a good life, but to say that someone's at a certain age and they've lived a good life, does that lessen our grief? I mean, on one hand, I would think, you know, my mother-in-law lived to be 96. My father-in-law died at 67. Is one easier than the other? Because I mean, that is some of the the words that people will give you when a 96-year-old person dies. It's like, oh, well, they had a good life. It's like, well, is that supposed to comfort me? They've been part of my life a lot longer. And I'm gonna miss them. I'm still gonna miss them. I I still love them. There's still gonna be a gap, right? So I don't like that first category of normal, uncomplicated grief. Because in my mind, unless you've lived to be 96 or 103 or whatever older age you want to pick, and you've had a perfect life, you got along with everybody. Everybody got along with you. You had no bumps and no twists and curves, no problems, no issues, no illnesses in your life. If you lived a really good life, uncomplicated, then perhaps there can be uncomplicated grief. But our lives are complicated. Our lives are up and down, our lives are chaotic, our lives are full, and so your love is. Your love has ups and downs. Your love is full, and so your grief is full. So I don't really know if we can ever say that someone's death is normal, someone's grief is normal. Because by saying normal, are we saying easy? Because that doesn't set with me right. Because, like I said, we life is complicated, so grief is complicated. It's so intertwined. Now, possibly you could say, well, if you didn't live in the same state as your loved one, then they weren't part of a of your daily, you know, if you didn't call them on a weekly basis or even a monthly, maybe you only called them once or twice a year, maybe you saw them once a year. They weren't really part of your everyday life. So maybe your grief is not as complicated as the people that lived right in right in the same town or the same area of the loved one, and who, you know, when they when they were living, they were part of your lives. There was birthday parties, there was maybe church, or there was baseball games, or you know, there was just daily or weekly involvement in each other's lives. And so your love is different than than the family that's out of state. But yet, the out of state people, you can't really say they weren't as close to the loved one. You can't say that you you don't know. Maybe they talked to their loved one every night or every week, and so they did stay connected, they did share their lives, maybe not physically, but emotionally and mentally, they still shared their lives. So I'm not even sure, I'm not even sure in which situation you can say that a death or the grief of a death of a loved one is uncomplicated. Now, I do have friends that they lost their mother, and it was right after I had lost my dad last year, and so I, you know, I felt for them, right? Because I was still in my grief. I was still just in the first few weeks of my grief. Uh, and so, you know, I happened to uh run into them, and I I mentioned something about, you know, how you how you doing? How you all doing, you know, how's it going? How and the the the response really shocked me, and it really surprised me because I had never I had never really heard it before. And maybe because maybe if I sat and really looked back, maybe I'd never asked anybody how they'd been doing. You know, once you went to the visitation or the funeral, you just kind of went on with your life, don't we? Don't we all just go back to our lives and we don't stop and ask each other how how are things going? Not very much. We don't do that very often, do we? But anyway, in this in this instance, I did, and I was totally surprised because I wasn't fine. I was still in the fresh grief, I guess I would call it. And so I thought, well, you know, her mom died a month after my dad. Surely she's definitely still in the fresh grief. And she's like, oh, we're fine. You know, as you know, as soon as we had that, uh the I think it was the funeral, you know, we had the service, we were good. And I was blown away. I'm like, I mean, I didn't question her, you know, I just kind of let her flow in her conversation, and then we went our separate ways. But it was something that really stayed in my mind, and it took me days and weeks to really absorb it. And even now I don't quite understand it because I don't think that I personally have ever bounced back yet in any of my loved ones' death journeys. If I've bounced back that fast from grief. Now I haven't talked to it, it's it's been what a week or not a week, a year and a half. And I have not questioned, you know, my friend on how they're doing because I felt like that was kind of I was kind of shut off back then. Uh, because it'd be very curious to me as to, you know, were they denying it? Were they, you know, pressing it down? Were they busy with life and not facing it, or were they really okay? And it's okay if they were okay after the funeral service, right? Because everybody's grief journey is their own. And so if they had love and a relationship with their mother, with their loved one, and maybe there was a good bedside goodbye uh time, uh, maybe faith is wrapped up in that, knowing, believing where how you know the physical body ends and where the spiritual body. There's just you know, so much that's intertwined in that. But it's all okay. But maybe they would say that their grief was uncomplicated because they said that they had time, they said their goodbyes, they then bury or have the service for the physical body, and they have a good visiting with out of town and local people and family, and they they rejoice and and celebrate their loved one, and they're good. And maybe they're the all the siblings get along together, and there's no confusion or that mess that can sometimes be there when you were going through your loved ones, you know, especially when it's a parent, uh, items, and there was no division or no arguing or no hard feelings, you know, there's so many things in that. So maybe that would be considered an uncomplicated grief because they were over it. Now, I'd almost have to go around and I'd have to ask all the siblings because it's still it's still individualized. This one couple may have been fine, but maybe the brother or the sister weren't. So even though I mentioned normal, quote unquote normal grief or uncomplicated grief, I don't know how often that really is. Because grief is the love of you have the of the loved of your loved one. It's the experiences, it's the life they live, the life you lived with them, the life they were a part of your life, you were a part of their life, and so you're grieving all that, and there's so many changes that it's hard to think that it's going to be uh uncomplicated because there's so many new things that come up. So it's just something I wanted to throw out there because I really didn't like the category of quote unquote normal, uncomplicated grief. Except when I think of my friends on the death of their mother. But it appears that their grief was short-lived or their grief was uncomplicated. And that's okay. Because all our journeys are different. There are no rules like we've talked about. We keep talking about there is no rules. So I hope this episode helped you. I hope it might help you to support someone. But I think these friends of mine are I don't know if I want to say rare, but I don't think they're the norm. I think there's way more people in in our world, in our life circle who are grieving, and you may not know they're grieving. But we need to check on each other and we need to know. We need to know. So if this has helped you, if any of my episodes have helped you, please share. Share with those that you know that are grieving. Share with those that maybe it's come up that, hey, I want to be a better supporter for grieving people. Then share my episodes with them. Thank you so much for being here. I am holding space for you. I am the caring death dealer, and I am here for you.