On September 18, 2025, the Contemplative Commons hosted a salon with Dr. Kim Penberthy and two of her colleagues from University of Virginia’s Perceptual Studies research lab; the subject of this inclusive and interdisciplinary discussion was on grief and, in particular, grieving the loss of loved ones.
How peculiar it is, Kim remarked, that Western culture assigns such a negative valence to something that will touch every single human during their lifetimes. What words do you associate, for example, with grief? “Death,” “loss,” “suffering,” and “longing” are bound to be along the lines your thoughts take you. But what about “praise,” “love,” or “community”? This shift in emphasis, from the static and negative to the active and creative, is precisely what Kim’s research has helped reveal to be conducive to healthy grieving.
Successful incorporation of grief into one’s life, she elaborated, can help lead to a continuance of honoring and maintaining a relationship with the deceased. In a way, we can understand grief as the effort to continue loving those who have gone. It is the flipside of the coin, the emotion that remains when the person we love disappears, she added.
Kim’s current research focuses on grief that goes beyond grief, that which is prolonged, persisting, and impacting an individual’s capacity to function in their day-to-day life. Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) is the term given to this being stuck in ruminative perseveration and yearning for the deceased. It’s been found that one in ten people develop this condition to some degree following the sudden death of a loved one. And, while her research shows that it shares symptomatology and is frequently comorbid with anxiety, PTSD, and depression, we still don’t truly understand PGD. After all, how can logic and neuroscience help shed light on the way human beings become so obsessed, so heartsick for a being who no longer exists in the material plane that they begin to lose hope in their own reality?
One participant in the salon rightly asked, “Then how do we go about helping someone through this process if we can’t even understand it?” The shock of losing a loved one is just as physical as it is emotional, Kim remarked, and the effects on the nervous system are just as significant as those on our brain chemistry. While grief can feel like a rift and is a literal or physical tearing in one’s world and body, this somatic description isn’t that far from the psychological reality: When a person once integral to one’s emotional wellbeing and cognition suddenly disappears, a vacuum forms in their stead. How can we fill that void in healthy and sustainable ways?
When the room was asked about experiences of grieving we’d found to be successful, the anecdotes shared had a common thread: Successful grieving usually finds a way of bringing the deceased back into one’s life. Writing letters, poems, and stories that recreate or revitalize one’s relationship with the dead seem to be some of the most reliable ways to help this process. It is a beautiful act, when you think about it—writing something for the dead. We allow them to play an active part in the creation of new meaning within our lives. Every time we recount the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the grieving poet always looks back at the one they’ve lost—how otherwise could myth and art be born?
Why are we, after all, so averse to the notion of death? Isn’t it odd the way we, in Western cultures, tend to see a healthy relationship to the dead as one in which they remain precisely and purely that? Maintaining an active relationship with the dead is most often, here in the United States, seen as some occult or witchy thing. But if successful bereavement relies upon incorporating the dead into the production of new meaning in our lives, how can we help normalize having active, communicative relationships with them? Indeed, as one salon member remarked, teaching our children how to grieve is one of the most important things we can do as a parent. To help others see death as a life-giving force may be one of the first steps we can take toward fostering a more relational and less fearful world.
Kim ended our discussion saying that, although grieving looks different for everyone, the cultivation of contemplative practice may have the potential to help navigate a difficult loss, a recommendation for those who cannot seem to mend the tear in their being. To truly heal physical wounds and injuries, they cannot be left untended. So why should we expect anything different from wounds, emotional, cognitive, or spiritual? The dead need our attention, consideration, and our love. We shouldn’t pathologize that need. A violence done to our emotional or spiritual dimensions can be as impactful as those upon our skin.
Leading us through a final, guided meditation, Kim asked that we take a moment to observe and reflect. Since we are beings who grieve, it means we are beings who have loved. We are those who, despite pain of loss being sure to come, continue still to love. Can it help to see grieving as a love-driven choice? As a choice to turn back for one more glance at our dear Eurydice? In choosing to keep loving someone despite their eternal departure, we create a space for the impossible, a space where the dead may help us live. Let us be grateful that we are surrounded by those who have mourned and who will mourn again. As Kim reminded us, it means we inhabit the earth with people who love, that we are capable of loving those who are gone in such a way that life itself becomes revitalized and death loses a touch of its finality.