Sensemaking and grief

Grief is an argument with a fact. Not a disputable fact — not an interpretation, not a contested claim — but a fact that has closed. Someone is gone. The relationship is over. The version of life you were building won't be built. And yet, in the early aftermath of loss, people do something that looks very much like arguing with this. They run counterfactuals. They return to moments where the outcome could have been different. They feel the wrongness of the loss with the force of a moral claim — this should not have happened — even though "should" has no purchase on the past.

This essay is about what happens when the sensemaking method meets that experience. The method was built for a particular kind of problem: two people, or two positions, holding genuinely different views of the world, each protecting something real. The work is to surface what's being protected on each side and thereby make the conflict legible. That's what the perspective maps do. That's what the worked examples model. But grief doesn't have two sides. It has one person and an irrevocable fact. And asking "what are both sides protecting?" produces a strange answer: one side isn't a position at all. It's reality.

So what does the method do here? And what does grief teach us about the method's actual nature — what it's really doing when it works?

What the method can still do

Start with what holds. Even in grief — even where one "side" is a fact rather than a position — there is a genuine internal conflict that the sensemaking frame can illuminate. The person grieving is not univocal. They contain impulses that pull in different directions: the impulse to keep the person present — to maintain routines, to speak of them in the present tense, to leave their things untouched — and the impulse to rebuild a life that the loss has made necessary. Neither impulse is wrong. Each is protecting something real. The first protects the reality of the relationship, the refusal to act as if someone never mattered. The second protects the future self, the recognition that survival requires movement.

This is terrain the method knows. It's the same structure as any conflict between two legitimate claims: not "who is right?" but "what are both protecting, and how do we honor each?" The perspective map on grief — the piece earlier in this publication that maps the tension between the completion tradition and the continuing-bonds tradition — is actually mapping an external version of this same internal conflict. Clinicians and cultural frameworks have formed themselves into camps around the same question the griever is living inside.

The method is also useful for naming what Joan Didion called "the vortex" — the pull toward magical thinking, the irrational sense that the right set of actions or thoughts could undo what has happened. In The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Didion describes keeping her husband's shoes because she couldn't yet give them away: he would need them when he came back. The analytical eye can name this as the mind protecting itself against an unbearable truth by maintaining a small fiction. That's not a pathology to fix. It's a position protecting something: the self's capacity to function in the immediate aftermath of devastation. If you move too fast, you break. The magical thinking is, in this sense, an adaptive response — and mapping it with some care is more useful than dismissing it.

Similarly, the method can surface what Pauline Boss calls "ambiguous loss" — losses that have no clear ending, no confirmed death, no moment of resolution. The parent of a missing child. The adult child of a parent with dementia — the parent is present and also, in important ways, gone. The person whose estrangement from a sibling is so complete it functions like death without the social permission to grieve. In these situations, the internal conflict isn't between holding on and letting go; it's between two incompatible perceptions of whether the loss has happened at all. The method can hold that ambiguity without forcing resolution — and that holding, in itself, is something.

Where the method reaches its edge

But grief also marks a genuine limit. The most important one is this: the method was built to produce understanding that might enable cooperation. When two people disagree about housing policy, about gun rights, about how to divide labor in a household, there is a potential future in which understanding what each side is protecting leads somewhere — to a negotiated position, to a new frame, to the possibility of working together on something. The understanding has a destination, even if it doesn't determine what that destination will be.

Grief has no such destination. There is no adversary to cooperate with. The fact of the loss cannot be negotiated, steelmanned, or understood into a better state. You can map the griever's internal conflict with great precision and still be left with the same irrevocable fact you started with. This is not a failure of the method — it's the method encountering a problem it wasn't designed for. A hammer is not failing when it can't turn a screw. But it's worth being honest about the shape of the tool.

The second limit is temporal. The sensemaking method, as practiced here, produces maps — relatively stable pictures of what different positions are protecting at a given moment. Grief doesn't work that way. It moves. It loops. It surfaces without warning. A person can be genuinely functional for months and then find that a piece of music, a smell, an offhand comment has returned them to the acute phase as if no time has passed. George Bonanno's research in The Other Side of Sadness (2009) documents the oscillating nature of resilience in grief — people are not on a linear trajectory from loss to recovery. They move back and forth, which means that any map of what they're protecting is accurate only right now, and might be different tomorrow.

This doesn't make the map useless. But it means it must be held lightly and updated often — which is more like therapy than like analysis. The therapist who works with a grieving person over months is doing something the perspective map cannot: tracking the movement, adjusting to the oscillations, being present through the returns. The map gives you a snapshot. Grief requires sustained accompaniment.

The third limit is harder to name. Thomas Attig, in How We Grieve (1996), describes grief as "relearning the world" — the recognition that the world you knew was partly constituted by the person you've lost, and that their absence means the world itself has changed its shape. This is not just a psychological state; it's an epistemic event. The self that is doing the sensemaking is itself changed by the loss. The usual assumption of the method — that there is a stable analyst who can map a conflict from the outside — doesn't quite hold when the analyst is the one who has been altered. You cannot map a landscape from inside the earthquake.

What grief teaches about sensemaking

There is a version of this essay that ends here, with the limits catalogued. But grief turns out to be a surprisingly illuminating case for understanding what the method is actually doing when it works — and that's worth sitting with.

When sensemaking maps a political conflict, it's not just describing two positions. It's offering the reader a different relationship to the conflict — one where it becomes possible to hold both sides simultaneously rather than having to choose one and dismiss the other. The value isn't just cognitive. It's existential. It changes how the reader stands in relation to the disagreement. The conflict doesn't stop being real. But it becomes livable in a different way.

This is actually very close to what the best grief work does. Not resolution — grief rarely resolves in any clean sense. Not the elimination of pain. But a changed relationship to the loss. The person who has done grief work well has not stopped feeling the loss. They have found a way to carry it that doesn't require it to stop being true. They live with the loss rather than against it.

The philosopher Sigmund Freud, in "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), described grief as a process of "reality-testing" — the slow, painful work of the mind checking, again and again, whether the lost person is really gone, until the evidence has accumulated to the point where the psyche can accept it. What Freud called pathological melancholia was, in part, the refusal to complete that testing — the mind staying in argument with the fact. More recent grief research has complicated this picture significantly, but something in Freud's core observation persists: grief involves, at some level, learning to stop arguing with what has happened.

And here sensemaking can quietly offer something after all — not by arguing back, and not by making the loss more bearable, but by naming what the internal argument is about. The pull toward the continuing bond and the pull toward rebuilding are both legitimate. Both are protecting something. You don't have to choose between them prematurely. You don't have to stop loving someone in order to also be alive. Naming that — giving words to the structure of the internal conflict — can reduce the additional suffering that comes from believing you're doing grief wrong.

That's a modest contribution. Grief is one of the most resistant experiences to the kind of clarity the method offers. But "modest" is not nothing — especially if naming the structure spares someone the exhausting work of arguing with themselves about whether it's acceptable to still love someone they've lost.

A word about what this essay cannot do

If you're reading this in the middle of acute grief, this essay is probably not what you need. It may even be mildly irritating — a tidy analysis of something that doesn't feel tidy at all. That's appropriate. The map is not the territory. If the analysis helps you locate yourself, use it. If it doesn't, ignore it and find someone who can actually sit with you. Sustained accompaniment is almost always more valuable than a clear picture of the landscape, and Ripple does not offer the former.

What this essay is for is the person who has moved through the acute phase and is trying to understand what happened — or the person who loves someone who is grieving and wants to understand what they're living inside. For those readers, a map of the internal terrain might be useful. And a clear accounting of where the method cannot go might be more useful still: because sending someone to a map when they need a companion is the one thing worse than having no map at all.

Further reading

• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) — Didion's memoir of the year following her husband's sudden death is one of the most precise accounts in print of how grief functions as an argument with a fact. The sections on magical thinking are worth reading slowly.
• George Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (2009) — the most accessible summary of empirical grief research; documents the oscillating, non-linear nature of resilience and challenges the "stages" model on empirical grounds.
• Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (1999) — a landmark account of losses that have no clear ending; essential for understanding the range of what "grief" actually covers, beyond death.
• Thomas Attig, How We Grieve: Relearning the World (1996) — makes the philosophical case that grief is not a passive process but an active "relearning" of a world that has changed. One of the most useful conceptual accounts of what grief is actually doing.
• Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV — the foundational psychoanalytic account; worth reading even if only to understand what subsequent grief research has revised and what it has retained.