By Michelle Lumiére
When people talk about grief, it can feel like it comes with an unspoken hierarchy. As if there’s a scale we’re all expected to fit into: Was it a parent? A partner? A child? If it’s “just” a friend, we can feel like our loss should rank lower, that our hearts should be less broken than those of immediate family members. Yet for so many, this is simply not their truth. The loss of a friend can leave an unimaginable hole, a wound as deep as any.
One story that resonates is that of my close friend and former colleague, Kerrie Illsley. In 2020, Kerrie lost her colleague and previous line manager, Alison, the woman who had recruited me to replace her...
“When Alison died, it felt like my world shifted,” Kerrie shares. “Alison was more than a colleague to me, she was a constant, steady presence at work and a true friend outside of it. In some ways, our friendship was mother-and-daughter-like, I guess because she was a lot older than me and a mother herself, so she had that instinct. Even though she retired the year before she died, I expected our closeness to continue long into her retirement. So, when she was suddenly gone, the void was deafening.”
It’s a universally accepted truth that in many careers, we spend more of our life with our colleagues than anyone else; hours spent in the office together, in online meetings, at events, and on the phone. When we lose someone who shapes our daily lives this way, whose personality quirks and working style can affect our daily mood, our routines, and our confidences, the grief that follows brings with it a huge upheaval.
But the very fact such a person can be socially categorised as “just a friend”, or even, “just a colleague”, can completely downgrade the enormity of such a bereavement. Kerrie explains, “there are still days now when I hear about someone losing a parent or a sibling, and part of me thinks, well, I just lost a friend, so I feel a bit sheepish about making a big thing of it. But deep down, I know that Alison’s death was enormous to me. She was family really, even though we weren’t related.”
This experience is not foreign to me. I lost my own dear friend and colleague, Jeni, back in 2014. Jeni and I had not known each other very long in the great scheme of things, but her huge personality had accelerated us to best-friends status a lot faster than I was used to. We sat opposite each other every day and shared our daily routines, dreams, problems, and a lot of laughter. Losing her suddenly was a shock to the system, and her death left me with a sobering awareness of the uniquely sacred place in our lives our friends occupy.
But for both Kerrie and I, these losses felt low down in some sort of grief hierarchy; not blood, not spouse. On the one hand, that hierarchy was never projected by others. The family and other friends of Alison and Jeni certainly didn’t contribute to this feeling. It was just something we quietly invented in our own minds, like the bereavement version of imposter syndrome, and I believe this is very common when people lose a friend.
Friends are the people who choose us, and we choose them. Losing them can bring us to the same breaking points as any other loss, and the magnitude should never be underestimated. On the other hand, there is something to be said for the social frameworks that are missing for grieving friends. Paid compassionate leave is often strictly reserved for immediate family by employers, and there are less social groups or support services designated to friendship bereavement, compared to parent, child, partner, or sibling loss.
Even writing this, I can feel why. As someone who works in the end of life sector, comparing the loss of a friend to the loss of a parent, child, partner, or sibling, feels insensitive. So, the grief hierarchy, for many complex and subtle reasons, is real. It does exist, even when we are only, quietly, inflicting it upon ourselves.
