Episode 4: Why People Judge Your Grief (And How to Ignore It) | Beyond the Loss

When a child dies, we expect grief.

What we don’t often recognize… is how grief itself becomes judged.

In this episode of Beyond the Loss: Life and Identity After a Child Dies, I explore what I call the moralization of grief—the subtle, often unspoken ways we assign meaning, legitimacy, and even hierarchy to different types of loss.

Over time, grief can become something that feels measured… compared… or even explained away.

And for parents navigating child loss, this creates an added layer of complexity—one that can lead to isolation, disconnection, and the sense that grief must somehow be justified.

We’ll talk about:

The hidden hierarchy of grief
Why certain losses (illness, accident, suicide, overdose) are perceived differently
Cultural expectations around mourning and emotional expression
The emotional impact of comparison among grieving parents
A more compassionate way to hold grief—without judgment

This is not a conversation about fixing grief.

It is a conversation about understanding it… and allowing it to exist without explanation.

If you are living with the loss of a child, supporting someone through grief, or seeking deeper insight into grief, identity, and healing, this episode invites you into a different way of seeing.

📌 Connect & Continue the Conversation:
Website: https://sharonspano.com

Podcast: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SharonSpano-BeyondtheLoss-Host

Substack: https://substack.com/@drsharon

Take gentle care, and I'll see you in the next episode. 

Dr. Sharon Spano 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Beyond the Lost. This is a space for parents who have lost a child in any way at any age, where no grief is ranked, explained, or excluded. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, developmental coach, systems thinker, and a parent whose life was forever changed by the death of my own son Michael. When a child dies, life doesn't return to what it was. Identity shifts, meaning fractures, and yet life continues to ask something of us. These conversations are for parents living this reality and for the professionals who support them. My intention is to offer a space where loss is not compared, judged, or explained away. Today we're talking about the moralization of grief and why parental loss often sits inside a hierarchy that few people even realize exists. So grief is often treated as if it should follow rules, unspoken expectations about how long you should grieve, how visibly you should grieve, how people should behave. And when grief doesn't match those expectations, and often they're cultural expectations, we are uncomfortable. So let's talk about the moralization of grief. What does it really mean? Grief then becomes something that is judged, ranked, explained away, or treated as more or less legitimate. Common examples are the cliches that we all have heard before. Some of them just actually make my teeth hurt. Everything happens for a reason. That's one that drives parents really crazy. At least, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or you should be further along by now, meaning in your grieving process, they're really saying you should be over it by now. But all of these euphemisms, if you will, and if you're a parent who's lost her son or daughter, they make your skin crawl, and I know that only too well. They're often said with very, very good intentions. But what they really do is they introduce judgment into grief. So how does this specifically show up in the context of child loss? Well, parental grief, as you may already know, is heavy. It is often scrutinized again. And the cause of death can create some of these hierarchies of sympathy, even for the parents themselves. We carry within us a hierarchy. I've often heard parents say, I don't want to be in a grief share with parents, perhaps whose child has died of suicide or drunk overdose. You'll hear this from parents who maybe had a sudden accidental loss, things of that nature. And they don't mean to be cruel or to lack empathy, but it's just a way of saying, I don't think those parents will understand my type of grief, or vice versa. So the hierarchy is often illness, accident, suicide, overdose, and I'm not saying them in any specific order, but culture quietly assigns meaning to these types of losses. Parents then feel the pressure to explain, defend, or justify their grief. Now, what's the hidden impact of this? Well, this creates fractures, even as I alluded to a moment ago, amongst grieving parents. Comparison begins, belonging becomes more complicated. Parents may feel shame, isolation, misunderstanding, particularly around the issues of suicide or drug overdose, and grief becomes something they feel that they must account for or make up for. Why does this happen in our culture? I want to talk about that for a minute. Basically, as I've said before, when we lose a child, it disrupts the order of the family system. And we, by nature, as human beings, we seek order. So the death of a child disrupts that natural narrative of life. And culture innately tries to restore that order through explanation. We quite naturally, as human beings, look for stories that somehow will help make the loss feel more natural or predictable. But child loss resists all of those explanations. And that's why it's so difficult. So the cost when grief is moralized. Well, parents will withdraw into themselves. They will not even reach out to one another for support. Conversations become careful or non-existent. Belonging becomes very fragile, and grief becomes something people feel that they must prove. So let's talk about a different orientation around this so-called moralization of grief. What if grief did not need an explanation? What if child loss did not need ranking? The way a child dies, and this is so important to me as we explore these conversations deeper within this podcast, the way a child dies does not determine, let me say that again, does not and should not determine the legitimacy of a parent's grief. Grief does not belong in a hierarchy. So I want you to consider these concepts for a day or two. I'd love to hear your comments about them as we dig deeper into them. But perhaps the most compassionate thing that we can do is to stop asking grief to make sense and simply allow it to exist. Take gentle care. Until next time, this is Dr. Sharon Spano. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this conversation stirred something for you, you don't need to make sense of it right away. There's no timeline for understanding and no right way to carry what remains. Beyond the loss exists to honor parents who've lost a son or daughter and all the complexity that this implies, and to support the professionals who walk alongside them without comparison, judgment, or explanation. Wherever you are in the long after, you are not required to arrive anywhere else. Until next time, take gentle care.