Grief vs Mourning: What's the Difference?

Recently, a public figure died tragically, and social media erupted with remembrance posts, tributes, and calls to honor their memory. I didn't participate. Not because I'm callous about death—as someone who has experienced loss through gun violence, I understand the weight of that kind of tragedy. But as I learned more about this person's life and public statements, I realized: I didn't want to mourn them. And that choice felt complicated.

It got me thinking about something we don't talk about enough: the expectation that when someone dies, especially someone in the public eye, we must all participate in collective mourning. But is that true? Is there an obligation to mourn every death we encounter?

The answer requires us to understand some fundamental distinctions. Understanding the difference between grief and mourning is essential for navigating these complex feelings around loss.

What Is Grief vs Mourning vs Bereavement?

We often use these words interchangeably, but they describe different aspects of the experience of loss. Understanding the distinctions is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the grieving experience.

Bereavement represents the loss of someone significant through death. It's the objective fact of the loss: a person (or beloved pet) who was alive is now gone. Bereavement is what happened.

Grief encompasses the distress that stems from bereavement and includes a range of psychological, behavioral, social, and physical reactions in response to a loss (this could be death or non-death). I think of grief as the emotional, physical, or holistic response to a loss. It's what you feel and experience as a result of any kind of loss, including bereavement.

Grief responses can include sadness, crying, anger, inability to sleep, loss of appetite, the full spectrum of human reaction to loss. But here's also an opinion: indifference is also a grief response.

If you learn that someone you've never heard of has died, your response might be indifference, and this is not because you're a bad person but because you had no connection to them. That's a valid grief response, or perhaps more accurately, the absence of a significant grief response because there was no meaningful relationship.

Mourning, on the other hand, involves the societal or cultural expectations regarding the public expression of grief following a loved one's death, often influenced by religious or cultural beliefs and practices. Mourning is an action. It is an activity that you can either participate in or not, depending upon how you want to honor somebody or if you want to honor them at all.

This is where things get complicated.

Mourning as Choice, Not Obligation

Mourning could involve posting tributes on social media, attending a funeral, saying "rest in peace," wearing black, lighting candles, or any number of culturally specific rituals. These are actions we choose to take to publicly acknowledge and honor a loss.

But what if you choose not to participate?

Let me give you some examples of when this might happen:

Example 1: The Unknown Artist 

A well-known musician passes away from pancreatic cancer. If you've never heard of this person, your grief response might be indifference—you have no emotional connection to them. Learning how they died might activate sadness if you've lost someone to cancer or illness, and this could propel you to learn more about them. But after researching, you still feel no connection. You're not obligated to post tributes or participate in public mourning just because others are.

Example 2: The Complex Public Figure 

A public figure dies tragically in an act of violence. As you learn more about this person's life and public statements, you discover they held views or engaged in actions you find deeply problematic. You can feel sadness about the tragedy of violent death—especially if you've experienced loss through violence yourself—while also choosing not to participate in public mourning or celebration of their life. These responses aren't contradictory.

Why You're Not Obligated to Mourn Every Death

The confusion happens when we conflate grief (the response) with mourning (the action). We assume that if someone has died, everyone must mourn them publicly. But that's not how it works. Your grief response is automatic and authentic to your experience and relationship with the person or thing lost. Mourning is a choice about how…or whether…you want to publicly express that grief. When we're expected to mourn people we didn't know, didn't respect, or who caused harm, we're being asked to participate in a ritual that doesn't reflect our authentic grief experience. And that expectation can feel deeply uncomfortable.

Moving Forward

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts really digging into grief as a concept. I will be exploring different kinds of grief, various terminologies, grief theories beyond the commonly known ones (yes, we'll talk about the Dual Process Model and the theories that informed it), and contemporary frameworks that help us understand loss in all its complexity.

For now, I want to leave you with this: Your grief responses are valid, whatever they are. Sadness, anger, confusion, or indifference are all authentic responses to loss. But mourning? That's your choice. You get to decide who you publicly honor, how you express that honor, and when you choose not to participate at all.

There's no moral obligation to mourn every public death, especially when doing so would require you to celebrate or honor someone whose life or actions you cannot, in good conscience, celebrate.

Grief is the response. Mourning is the choice. And both deserve to be understood on their own terms.

References

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.

Stroebe, M., Schut, H., & Stroebe, W. (2017). Grief is not a disease but bereavement merits medical awareness. The Lancet, 389(10067), 347-349.

Uccheddu, D., Gauthier, A. H., Steverink, N., & Emery, T. (2019). The pains and reliefs of the transitions into and out of spousal caregiving. A cross-national comparison of the health consequences of caregiving by gender. Social Science & Medicine, 240, 112517.

Wilson, D. T., & O'Connor, M.-F. (2022). From Grief to Grievance: Combined Axes of Personal and Collective Grief Among Black Americans. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 850994.