Unfortunately, unless you’ve experienced grief over someone you hardly knew yourself, it can be challenging to understand because it’s not immediately obvious what, specifically, there is to grieve. Disenfranchised grief happens when someone experiences a loss that those in their family, friend groups, community, or broader society are reluctant to validate or support.

One of the most important things to note about these types of losses is that they are at a higher risk of being disenfranchised. Examples include individuals who died when you were very young, relatives who have always been out of the picture, and people who you have lost touch with for long periods. If this is the type of loss that brought you here, head over to this article for a more in-depth discussion.ĩ Reasons It Is Not Crazy To Grieve A Celebrity Deathįor the purposes of this article, we want to focus on grief experienced over someone connected to you, usually by relation, who has been absent or who died before you had the chance to get to know them. The first category is when someone grieves a person who they were aware of, but who they were not connected to in any way – such as when a celebrity dies. Grief over the loss of someone you didn’t know, or hardly knew, can occur in a hundred different ways, but for our purposes, I think we can split it up into two main categories. In these instances, the loss is very much real, though it may feel hard to define. They grieve for how the relationship could have been, should have been, or would have been had things been different. Other times, when a person mourns someone they didn’t know as well, loss takes the shape of something a little more abstract and theoretical. These are the intimate details we grieve when a familiar loved one who occupied a particular space in our life dies. It’s tangible and detailed and reflects many of the specific things we miss about that person, like the smell of their favorite detergent, the way they always sang slightly off key, and the corny jokes they couldn’t help but tell.

Sometimes loss takes the shape of someone we knew well.

I have never known men