When you’re mourning, what do you do with all that love? That grief’s gotta go somewhere. Here’s a term to add to your death-literacy vocabulary list: the grief surrogate. Not a stand-in for the dead person, but a stand-in for the relationship itself. A role or practice that gives our remaining love, protectiveness, and energy somewhere to land, now that the person who once received it is gone.
This is a different idea from the more familiar “continuing bonds” work of talking to photographs or writing unsent letters. A healthy grief surrogate is about taking the leftover current — that impulse to check in, care for, teach, or protect — in a different, constructive direction. Before it starts to form into knots of anxiety, restlessness, or numbness.
Done well, a grief surrogate doesn’t distract from grief or avoid it. It gives us something meaningful to do with it.
Grief is sadness and so much more. It’s love mixed with attention that once had an outlet and now al…
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