How long must we grieve?

Helpful or not, cultural norms shape the timeline of grief after interpersonal loss.

Following the unspeakably tragic Jeju Air crash that claimed 179 lives on December 29, 2024, the South Korean government promptly declared a national period of mourning. One week of intentional grieving will take place as a nation, the acting president of South Korea announced.

Scheduled TV shows were cancelled. Professional athletes carried out tributes during competitions. Celebrities and other public figures refrained from social media activity, and those that slipped up received swift public condemnation.

Are seven days enough?

Here is a more personal example, again from the Korean context. My mother passed away last month. Her funeral—admittedly, a very traditionally Korean one—lasted three nights and four days. The ceremony was filled with rituals and terminologies, some of which, to this day, I have trouble accurately naming and describing.

Four days. Are four days sufficient? Do the three long nights somehow help?

And another rhetorical question: Where do we come up with these numbers that dictate what is called for, in terms of the progression of grief?

Psychology and related fields regularly grapple with this issue of a grief timeline. Recently, for instance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, Text Revision (DSM-5 TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2022), the latest version of the DSM, recognized prolonged grief disorder (PGD) as a diagnosable illness.

My intention in bringing up PGD in this post is not to argue for or against the legitimacy of this diagnosis, but to simply highlight one aspect of this diagnosis in connection to my question of how long; a PGD diagnosis requires the interpersonal loss to have occurred one year ago or more, which seems to suggest that the cutoff for “normal grieving” is 12 months. One calendar year.

One year seems more realistic in comparison to what a previous version of the DSM, the DSM-IV-TR (the version I was trained under in graduate school; American Psychiatric Association, 2000), specified as the duration of typical bereavement: 2 months (see Diamond, 2012). That is, any bereavement lasting under 2 months was to be considered “normal”; anything beyond the time period could be perceived as unhealthy.

Surely, two months seems too restrictive of a time period to place upon something as complicated and culturally sanctioned as bereavement. For some people, a few days or weeks or months are enough. But for others, a much longer period might be required to make significant progress on grief.

Back to my Korean funeral experience. As a Korean American who is a bit removed from Korean cultural practices after the death of a loved one, I was at the mercy of the funeral organizers in terms of participation because of my unfamiliarity with the traditional elements. I basically did what I was told to do, going with the flow.

But in this passive posture, I did observe that the messages embedded in the various funeral rituals, whether spoken or sung, progressed from deep sadness to eventual hopefulness. For instance, the first couple of days were full of songs and hymns that emphasized sadness; by the fourth day, we were singing hymns about meeting my mother again someday. The preacher reflected this optimistic message in his delivery of the last sermon of the funeral ceremony.

But no matter how loudly and with conviction I tried to sing the words of a song declaring a reunion of some kind in the future, I could not shake off the thought, “I am not ready to be at this stage. My heart still aches, and I want to sit in that pain and long for my mother. I am not ready to turn the pages just yet.”

Have you experienced a noteworthy loss that you are struggling to make sense of? Or perhaps the death of a loved one that is hitting you harder than you expected? Are you experiencing familial or cultural pressure to follow a certain timeline in your grief?

Know that your pain is legitimate. And the time that you are taking to recognize and grapple with that pain is valid, no matter how long. Your cultural norms might suggest a certain timeline, but know that ultimately, everyone grieves differently.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text rev.).

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

Diamond, S. A. (2012). DSM-5 hysteria: When normal mourning becomes neurotic bereavement. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evil-deeds/201202/dsm-5-hysteria-when-normal-mourning-becomes-neurotic-bereavement

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