What is “Meta Grief”? Navigating Grief Fatigue, Grief Exhaustion, and the Toll of Ongoing Tragedy
Grief can make reading hard. Want to listen to this article instead? Find its corresponding podcast episode here.
During the first weeks of January 2025, grief surrounding the LA fires flooded my Threads feed.
We’d collectively entered a new year—an opportunity for a fresh start, or at least a year we hoped might be a little less griefy than the one that came before it. But nope. Tragedy burst in with an overwhelming, devastating roar. People were grieving their homes, their possessions, their routines, their communities, and of course, their loved ones lost.
But there was something else too. A sort of frustration, despair, and fatigue that there was yet another thing to grieve, that there were no breaks to be found between losses, that—as life continued to unfold—we were looking at enduring many, many years of unpredictable, unavoidable grief to come.
In other words, people were grieving about grieving.
I wondered, “Is there a word for that?”
When I Googled “grieving about grief,” I got a list of articles—the general kind you think of after the death of a loved one or when you’re writing a research paper about the difference between grief and bereavement. But I couldn’t find any words about grieving grief itself.
So I created one:
meta grief (noun)
The grief you feel about the fact that you’re grieving; the experience of grief itself being a source of sorrow
My January 2025 post about “meta grief” on Instagram Reels. Read the comments to see how this video resonated with grievers. | Credit: @shelbyforsythia
Meta grief is an invisible load that adds another layer to an already heavy experience. It’s something many of us carry without even realizing it.
Meta grief stems from living inside of an endless cycle of loss, trauma, and heartbreak—both in your personal life and in the world. It’s grief about the ongoing nature of grief itself, a deep, internal knowing that death, poverty, violence, oppression, and disaster will always be a part of being a human on planet Earth.
Becoming aware of meta grief looks like recognizing that you’re not just mourning your loss, but fact that you have to grieve in the first place. It’s the distress, despair, or resignation that comes from knowing that grief is with you for the long-haul and that you’ll keep encountering it, even if you’re not ready or willing to.
If this sounds like you, come along as I do my best to wrap words around this experience.
Do Any of These Sound Familiar?
In trying to pin down exactly what meta grief—or “grieving about grieving”—is, I’ve gathered the following sentiments from my Life After Loss Academy students, friends, family, coworkers, fellow grief professionals, and strangers on social media.
See if one or more of them resonate with you:
You’re overwhelmed by the idea of grief—that it never fully ends and can resurge again when you least expect it.
You’re longing for the innocence and ease of a world before loss, and sometimes wish you could go back in time to an age where you didn’t know about or understand grief.
You dread the future, not necessarily because of what might happen (although that can also be dread-inducing), but because you know more grief will always be waiting for you.
You’re exhausted by the unending process of grieving, resent the work it takes to process, and wish you could hit pause, but you know that ignoring your grief only makes things worse.
You feel helpless and heartbroken witnessing world events—natural disasters, wars, political strife, violence, climate change, oppression—that remind you of the fragility of life and the endless reasons to mourn.
In my experience, these five elements form the heart of meta grief.
It has little to do with the loss itself and more to do with how you feel about having to grieve loss in the first place. It’s the weight of knowing that grief is hardwired into the human experience and that it doesn’t have an endpoint.
If it feels like a lot, that’s because it is.
The Many Layers of Meta Grief
I’ve noticed meta grief shows up differently for everyone.
Here are a few ways it might show up for you:
1. Grieving the Loss of Innocence
Do you ever experience “pre-grief nostalgia”—an ache to return to a time before you knew what grief felt like? Maybe you look at people who haven’t yet experienced profound loss and feel a pang of envy for their innocence and ability to live without the shadow of grief hanging over them.
You might also feel angry at people who know that grief exists yet willingly ignore it (the “ignorance is bliss” or “look on the bright side” types).
On many past podcast episodes, both on my own shows and others, I refer to grief’s appearance in our lives as a perspective shifting event. Once you see, you can’t unsee. Once you know you can’t un-know. And In my online course + community, Life After Loss Academy, I describe living with grief as “having a pair of grief glasses permanently superglued to your eyes.”
In other words, once grief first appears in your life, you’ll never know a life without grief again.
Meta grief is mourning the loss of pre-grief innocence—the version of yourself that wasn’t forced to wear grief glasses, that didn’t know how heavy and eternal grief is.
A Threads post describing the loss of “grief innocence” and resenting grief’s presence | Credit: @earthtoanii
2. Dreading Future Grief
Even when you’re not in the devastating early days of grief, you might notice yourself bracing for the next loss. Meta grief can appear as anticipatory grief: the knowledge that grief isn’t a one-time event but something you’ll face again and again, in different forms and iterations as you continue to live on.
For instance, you may be grieving the death of a loved one now, but you know that others you love will die in the future. You may dread the day a beloved pet dies, the day you’re forced to leave a job you love, the day you or a loved one receive a life-changing diagnosis, the day you and a partner separate, or the day your community faces a collective tragedy or disaster.
The meta grief of anticipating future losses is exhausting. It takes you out of the present moment and suspends you in a constant state of tension, thinking about what might come next. While it’s factually true that you’ll face more losses, the lived experience of preparing for future losses is a “grief about grief” that many people feel, but is rarely discussed. And because you’ve lived through it before, you know just how deep and destabilizing the next loss might be—so the anticipation you feel isn’t abstract panic-spiraling. It’s grounded in experience.
3. Feeling Stuck in a Cycle of Grief
When one loss seems to follow another—or when they’re all heaped on top of each other—it’s easy to feel like you’re trapped in a never-ending cycle of mourning. This kind of meta grief is about the weariness of grieving itself—the desire to move forward but feeling like grief keeps pulling you back.
One of my students in Life After Loss Academy and I began calling this “grief debt,” the sense that you will always owe some form of emotional, physical, mental, or spiritual processing time to grief. It’s a feeling that compounds with each new loss, because more loss means more grief to process. It can feel like you’re in a never-ending game of “catch up” with grief.
For example, my best friend died from COVID-19 in 2022, while the world was still reeling from the early years of the pandemic and its social and political upheaval. One month later, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness and began a brand new grieving process for the health and body I used to have. I had barely started to grieve my best friend and was caught up in the grief of the United States and the larger world when this fresh loss arrived. It was like watching my grief bank balance dip from the negative hundreds of thousands into the negative millions. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
4. Mourning on Behalf of the World
The world feels especially heavy these days. War, climate disasters, violence, and systemic oppression add to the personal grief we all carry. Meta grief can look like mourning for people you’ve never met and places you’ve never been, simply because you notice and feel the weight of the world’s suffering. And the 24-hour news cycle—which gets more views and clicks on “negative” stories than it does on “positive” ones, only intensifies the feeling of being stuck in a continuous cycle of loss.
Whether you’re watching children be separated from their parents at the border, hearing about families being torn apart by violence in war zones, witnessing the overturning of policies designed to protect marginalized people, or keeping tabs on the latest hurricane, tornado, flood, or fire, it’s a lot—on every level—to contend with.
And wrapped up in all this can often be a belief that you have no right to grieve your personal losses with so much going on in the world—that your individual grief has no place among the collective.
Conversely, you may grieve needing to tune out the pain of the world in order to tend to your own personal pain. Either way, it can feel like a kind of grieving about grieving. It’s a recognition that you are just one human. And it’s impossible to hold it all.
5. Grief That Some—or All—of This Loss Could’ve Been Prevented
One flavor of meta grief that many people seem to feel is the “if only” flavor. It’s a belief that if something had gone differently, then our grief over a loss wouldn’t be so big—or that our grief wouldn’t exist at all. It’s the knowledge that, in some cases, human decisions led to a very real increase in pain, suffering, heartache, and grief.
This can be applied to personal losses, such as the suffering-filled decline of a loved one, a lengthy divorce process, a late-in-life diagnosis, or a delayed exit from a toxic friendship or relationship. But it can also be applied to communal or world losses such as pandemic deaths, policy-related losses like those surrounding immigration and reproductive rights, responses to climate change, and involvement in war.
Regardless of whether the loss is personal or communal, the lingering story is, “This didn’t have to be our grief. This didn’t have to be the path we chose. There were other paths we could’ve taken, ones with less suffering. This pain did not have to be our burden.”
It’s not regret. Regret is “I chose wrong and I wish I could go back and choose again.” It’s a profound sense of disappointment—that if people or circumstances outside of our control could’ve been different, then maybe everyone’s suffering would either be lessened, or wouldn’t exist at all.
6. Grieving the Grief Journey Itself
Grief requires so much of us. It demands we sit with discomfort, process complicated emotions, and revisit memories that feel more painful than comforting. Meta grief is the exhaustion of knowing that grief is an inherent part of being human. Said another way, you must grieve in order to survive. There’s no shortcut, no magic pill, and no easy way out.
While many grief experts, including me, talk about the benefits of seeing grief as a long-term companion, there’s another side to the coin: the never-ending presence of grief. Whether you’re making plans, celebrating a milestone, dealing with life’s inconveniences, or working towards your dreams, grief is a part of the picture. No matter how “good” you get at grief, you will always be grieving, and there will always be more to grieve. Even joy comes with echoes of loss—of the people who aren’t here to share it, of the versions of yourself or the world that existed before grief entered the picture.
There are many griefs embedded in the grief journey, including the fact that grief never goes away, the reality that society often demands you hide or suppress grief, grieving the person you really want to process grief with, and the inherent unpredictability of how grief shows up day-to-day.
A Threads post describing “the grief inside of grief” and mourning the grief journey | Credit: @oliviahowell
How to Cope with Meta Grief
Meta grief is tough, but there are some ways to soften its edges or the force it exerts on your life.
Here are some ways to navigate it:
1. Acknowledge It
The first step is to name what you’re feeling. Saying, “I’m grieving about my grief” might feel strange at first, but it’s a powerful way to validate your emotions.
If you have a friend or family member who feels similarly to you, consider acknowledging your meta grief with them saying, “We’re grieving about our grief!” This can provide space for both validation and noticing that you’re not alone.
2. Take Grief Breaks
While I believe grievers are grievers 24/7, there is a big difference between actively engaging with your grief (journaling, moving your body, crying, talking about it, and so on) and allowing yourself to simply exist in the world as a grieving person.
Give yourself permission to take breaks from actively processing your grief. Watch a funny movie, spend time in nature, or do something that brings you joy. You don’t have to be immersed in grief work 24/7 to honor your losses—or even to “heal.”
If you have the time, money, and energy, you might even take a vacation or “griefcation”—a vacation that honors your grief.
3. Build a Grief-Inclusive Routine
Create regular rituals that make space for your grief while also allowing you to live. Writing, meditation, or even a short walk can help you find balance between mourning and feeling like you’re able to grow into the future.
For instance, I regularly listen to new episodes of a podcast I used to listen to with my best friend. While she’s not here to listen in-person with me, I imagine what she might say in response to the hosts and picture her laughing along with me at parts I know she’d find funny. It’s one way I fold my grief for her into my routine.
You might also consider incorporating grief books, podcasts, or online courses into your day-to-day life. These resources can help you have more language for talking about grief and reassure you that you’re not the only one noticing and bearing the heaviness of the world.
If you’re grieving the death of a loved one in addition to experiencing meta grief, my book Your Grief, Your Way is a great place to start. It’s a short nonreligious daily devotional for living life after a person you care about dies.
4. Find Community
The more I talk about it, the more I realize that meta grief is something a LOT of people feel. Seek out spaces where you can connect with others who “get it,” whether that’s through support groups, online forums, or trusted friends.
My community, Life After Loss Academy, is designed for all kinds of losses. Each week we come together as a group to honor both our personal losses and the ways society and the world we live in are shaping our grief experience. If you’re interested in talking about meta grief with a group of compassionate, validating grievers, consider joining us.
5. Shift Your Perspective
Grief—including meta grief—isn’t something to conquer or get rid of; it’s something to carry. Seeing grief not as something to “hurry up and get over” but as a constant, ebbing-and-flowing presence in your life can help you anticipate its presence, build up a tolerance for it, and perhaps even welcome it at times.
With time, attention, patience, and practice, grief can begin to feel less like a burden and more like a companion, one that shapes you and the course of your life in meaningful ways.
Closing Thoughts: You’re Allowed to Grieve About Grief
Meta grief is a natural response to the complexities of being human. It’s okay to grieve about grieving, to feel tired of carrying loss, and to mourn the fact that grief is an inevitable part of life.
The good news? You don’t have to carry it all alone. Whether you’re grieving a personal loss, the weight of the world, or both, there are tools and communities to help you navigate the invisible load of meta grief.
I’d love to hear from you. Do you think meta grief is an appropriate term for “grieving about grieving”? Get in touch and let me know.
And of course, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, join my online grief support course + community, Life After Loss Academy. Each week, we meet to chat about grief’s presence in our lives, tools for coping with it, and how we’re finding stability, hope, and purpose in a majorly griefy world. Coaching replays are available if you can’t attend live, and discounted memberships are available if you’re a marginalized or financially stressed griever. Learn more and join today.
