Grief Is Not Only About People
There is a narrow story we have inherited about grief. In the dominant Western frame, grief is treated as a private, human-to-human rupture. A death occurs. A relationship ends. The bereaved are expected to process, adjust, and eventually return to normal. Even our language reveals this assumption. We speak of “closure.” We ask when someone will “move on.” We quietly measure resilience by how quickly the visible signs of sorrow recede.
Photo by David Thielen on Unsplash
But many Indigenous worldviews hold a much wider understanding of what grief is and what it asks of us. Grief is not confined to the loss of a person. It is relational. It is ecological. It is communal. It is the work of continuity. Scholars such as Shawn Wilson describe knowledge itself as relational, embedded in networks of accountability between people, ancestors, land, and story. To exist is to be in relationship. To lose is to experience a shift in that web, not its disappearance. In that understanding, grief is not an isolated emotional event. It is the ongoing labor of reweaving connection.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes of land as pedagogy, as teacher and relative. The land holds memory. It carries language. It sustains identity. When harm is done to the land, something relational is broken. When a person dies, that rupture extends beyond the individual body. It touches place, lineage, community, and future generations. The web trembles. Grief, then, becomes a practice of tending what remains and restoring balance where possible.
Similarly, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, invites readers to reconsider the language of resources and replace it with the language of relatives. Plants, rivers, and animals are not commodities; they are kin. If we accept that premise, environmental destruction is not only a regulatory failure or economic miscalculation. It is relational loss. It is grief. Entire communities carry sorrow not only for loved ones but for waters polluted, forests cleared, species gone. These are not abstract policy debates. They are broken relationships.
This wider frame challenges the modern funeral industry in profound ways. If grief includes more-than-human ties, then funerals cannot be reduced to contracts, timelines, and transactional exchanges. They become moments of communal recalibration. A green burial is not merely an environmentally preferable option. It is an act of relational continuity, an acknowledgment that the body remains accountable to soil and ecosystem. Natural organic reduction is not only technological innovation; it is participation in a cycle that understands human life as part of a larger regenerative system. Even the decision to plant a tree or return compost to a meaningful landscape reflects a desire to maintain belonging, not sever it.
You have seen this in arrangement rooms. Families often speak of wanting to “bring them home.” That home is sometimes literal, but often it is symbolic. It is the mountain where they hiked. The river they fished. The grove of trees where stories were told. Beneath the logistics, what they are expressing is a longing for continuity. They do not want the relationship to end. They want it to change form and remain woven into place.
The Western emphasis on closure can inadvertently shrink grief’s moral horizon. When we confine grief to private emotion, we overlook its ethical dimension. Continuity work asks something of us. It asks us to remember ancestors not only in sentiment but in practice. It asks us to care for land that holds the stories of those who came before. It asks us to consider how our disposition choices affect future generations. It asks leaders to measure success not only in margins but in relational impact.
This is where your environmental advocacy and your leadership research converge. If leadership shifts in funeral service prioritize efficiency over relationship, then both people and place feel the strain. Burnout increases when care work is stripped of meaning. Environmental harm increases when land is treated as a disposal site rather than a relative. A relational worldview reframes both crises. It suggests that professional sustainability and ecological sustainability are not separate challenges. They are intertwined.
To expand grief beyond human-to-human loss is not to romanticize or appropriate Indigenous traditions. It is to listen carefully to what those traditions have preserved: an understanding that life and death occur within a web of accountability. Death does not erase relationship; it transforms it. Grief becomes the practice of honoring that transformation with integrity.
If we allowed ourselves to hold this wider view, funeral service would look different. Cemeteries would be designed as ecosystems, not storage. Corporate decisions would weigh environmental impact alongside financial return. Ritual would extend beyond the day of service into ongoing acts of stewardship. Families would be invited to see memorialization not as an endpoint, but as participation in continuity.
Grief is not shrinking in our time. It is expanding. We grieve loved ones, yes, but also landscapes altered beyond recognition and futures made uncertain. The question is not whether we will grieve. The question is whether we will treat grief as something to contain or something to tend.
Continuity work is slower. It is less marketable. It does not promise closure. But it offers something deeper: a way to remain in a relationship with those who have died, the land that sustains us, and the generations who will inherit what we leave behind.
With You, Until.
Marc D Malamud
Transitioning Doula
