Trigger Warning– This piece discusses themes of death, grief, bereavement, and loss

I’m 22, and I’ve attended three funerals.

That sentence surprises me every time I say it out loud, not because three is an unusually large number, but because for most of my life, funerals felt strangely… procedural. Growing up, I was always mildly amused (and a little confused) by how my parents would return from a funeral, sprinkle gangajal around the house, bathe, change their clothes, and then, almost seamlessly, return to life. Dinner would be cooked. The TV would be switched on. Someone would ask if the homework was done.

Nothing, on the surface, seemed to have happened.

As a child, I couldn’t understand why people gathered to mourn together. Why grief needed an audience. Why traditions wrapped death in so many rituals- thirteen days, endless visitors, specific foods, specific silences – when, to me, grief felt like something that should be private, quiet, maybe even hidden. I remember thinking: Wouldn’t it be kinder to just give people space?

What I didn’t have then- and what theory alone cannot give you is proximity.

I didn’t understand until I saw a person die in front of my eyes.
Until I saw my partner grieve her friend, her body collapsing into a sadness that words couldn’t reach.
Until I saw my mother watch her father take his last breath over a video call, frozen between pixels, helplessness, and a grief that had no physical outlet.
Until I saw my sister and her husband bury their dog, placing his favourite toy beside him, as if love could still be communicated through objects when language had failed.

Somewhere between these moments, grief stopped being an abstract concept and became a lived reality- unpredictable, embodied, and deeply relational.

Joan Didion writes that grief comes in waves, paroxysms that weaken the knees and blind the eyes, obliterating the dailiness of life. That word, obliterate, feels important. Grief doesn’t politely enter. It interrupts. It disregards your routines, your coping skills, your timelines. It has no distance. It arrives unannounced, and then returns, again and again, long after others think you should be “better.”

Psychology, of course, has tried to make sense of this chaos.

The most popular attempt is the DABDA model- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, often misunderstood as a neat, linear staircase toward healing. In practice, grief doesn’t move like that. You don’t graduate from anger into acceptance and never look back. You can accept a loss in the morning and rage against it by evening. Models simplify, but grief resists simplification.

Attachment theory comes closer to capturing something essential. Bowlby understood grief as a response to disrupted attachment, our distress mirroring the cries, clinging, and protest of an infant separated from their caregiver. Grief, in this sense, is not weakness; it is evidence of love. The intensity of mourning reflects the depth of the bond. But even here, stage-based ideas of grief fall short. Human loss is too contextual, too culturally shaped, too uneven to fit clean phases.

What resonates more with my lived experience is the dual process model of grief- the idea that we oscillate. Some moments we are immersed in loss: missing, yearning, replaying. Other moments we are washing dishes, answering emails, laughing at a joke and then feeling guilty for laughing. This back-and-forth is not avoidance; it’s regulation. As Stroebe and Schut suggest, we dose grief. (Stroebe & Schut, 1999) We step into it, step away from it, and step back again, not because we are in denial, but because surviving requires movement.

And this is where I return to the rituals I once questioned.

Death rituals are exhausting. They are repetitive, public, structured, and emotionally demanding. But perhaps that’s the point. When grief threatens to obliterate meaning, rituals lend us a borrowed structure. They tell us what to do when we don’t know how to be. They hold the grieving person in a collective rhythm- prayers, meals, visitors, days counted, not to rush grief away, but to prevent the mourner from disappearing into it.

What I once saw as an intrusion, I now see as containment.

Grief also dismantles something deeper than routine- it shatters our assumptions about the world. That the world is fair. That loved ones are permanent. That effort guarantees safety. Loss forces a confrontation with how little control we actually have. Meaning-making, then, becomes less about why this happened and more about how this now fits into who I am becoming.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve arrived at, despite all the theories I can cite: sometimes, there is no meaning to be found.

We are not always privileged enough to know why. No narrative is neat enough to justify a life cut short, a bond severed, a goodbye denied. At times, meaning-making doesn’t look like insight; it looks like survival. It looks like art, or silence, or showing up for others, or loving fiercely despite knowing how much it will hurt.

Grief doesn’t always make us stronger. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, it makes us softer- toward pain, toward others, toward the fragility of being human.

And maybe, that is enough.

– Jahanvi ( Trainee counsellor)