What the heck are secondary losses?
Grief causes so many ripple effects beyond the loss of the person who died. It causes relationships to fracture, social, financial and community impacts. There are secondary losses that are profoundly painful. The concept of secondary losses was new to me, and it took me a long time to come to terms with the impact it has had on my life.
The incredible women at What’s Your Grief talk about secondary losses in a really helpful way. “Death does not just create a single hole in one’s life. Instead, the loss can impact many areas of one’s life, creating multiple losses from that “primary loss.” Though it is easy to think that our grief is solely the grief of losing the person we cared for so deeply, our grief is also the pain of the other losses that were a result of the death. You will hear these losses referred to as “secondary losses,” not in the sense that their impact is secondary, but rather that they are a secondary result of the primary loss.”
The full impact of secondary loss is something that I’m still processing. It’s been 27 years and I still feel these losses. When my mom died, I lost my family, my community and what little financial security I thought I had. I was on my way to university and my parents hadn’t saved a penny for me to go. We hadn’t applied for loans. We hadn’t made any arrangements because my parents, in their complete and total denial that my mom was dying, made no plans. I was devastated. They had pushed me my entire life to go to university, it was expected of me from the time I was little. So to find out that not only was my mom dying but my father expected me to stay home and take care of him and my brother, was too much for me.
I got through four years of university on working during the school year, a full scholarship, my mom’s small government death benefit and working full-time during the summer. I’m not sure how I survived it through my intense grief. I know my friends were the main reason I made it through and the help of a really talented therapist. I actually think back on those years with so much joy. I loved my classes, how much I learned, how much I grew and the friends I made along the way. My entire life changed in those four years.
In the last twenty years, I’ve realized how much I lost in those years. All of my mom’s friends eventually disappeared, our entire social circle as a family vanished. My family disintegrated. I had to completely rebuild my life. I’ve spent the last seven years in pretty intense therapy trying to repair these secondary losses. It’s still a work in progress, just like my grief.
