When Grief Doesn’t Make Sense: Finding Meaning After Loss

Grief doesn’t just break your heart—it breaks your sense of how the world works.

People often talk about grief from a place of sadness. And yes, sadness is there—thick, heavy, sometimes unbearable. But sadness is a feeling. Grief is not.

Grief is an experience. It’s a full-body, full-mind, full-soul unraveling. It’s disorientation. It’s losing your emotional compass.

The routines that anchored your day feel hollow. Your body doesn’t move the same way. You forget what you were doing. You forget who you were before. Even small things—what you eat, how you sleep, the way you talk to people—feel foreign.

The conversations you used to have, the future you were counting on, the way your identity was shaped by the presence of that person or thing you lost—it’s all different now. And that difference? That unspoken gap between what was and what is?

That’s the grief.

One of the most resonant, real-world models I’ve come across in grief theory is called the Meaning Reconstruction Model, developed by psychologist Dr. Robert Neimeyer. Unlike many traditional grief frameworks that talk about “stages” or “acceptance,” this model doesn’t ask you to move on. It doesn’t suggest that healing is about letting go or getting back to normal.

Instead, it meets you in the rubble and asks a different question: What now?

When you lose someone—or something—that truly mattered, you don’t just lose a person.

You lose a version of yourself.

A version of your life.

A version of the future that no longer exists.

A storyline that once felt certain but has now been ripped out of sequence.

The Meaning Reconstruction Model honors that loss for what it is: Not just the absence of someone you loved, but the collapse of the sense meaning that gave your life shape.

Because grief isn’t just about what’s missing. It’s about what you’re trying to understand now that it’s gone.

Grief as Meaning-Making Work

Let’s start with what meaning-making is not.

It’s not about finding a silver lining. It’s not about believing everything happens for a reason. It’s not about spiritual clichés or trying to force a sense of being grateful for the pain.

I don’t believe in that. And not only do I not believe in it, but as a Certified Advanced Grief Counseling Specialist, I know the research. I know the harm that kind of messaging can cause. Telling someone “everything happens for a reason” or trying to force a silver lining onto their suffering doesn’t foster healing—it creates distance, shame, and isolation. It dismisses the depth of loss. It tells people that their pain is a challenge to overcome instead of something to honor.

That’s not just my opinion. That’s a professional fact. And if you’re in the depths of desperate, aching grief, I’m guessing you already know that.

Because when someone you love dies—or when your world collapses—you don’t want "a reason".

You want them back.

Meaning-making, in the context of grief, isn’t about justifying the loss. It’s not about trying to twist it into something good. It’s about reconstruction. Reorientation.

It’s about making sense of your life now that everything has changed.

It’s about building a new sense of identity, purpose, and direction in a reality where your meaning and purpose may have died with the person you loved.

According to Dr. Robert Neimeyer, grief is not a linear healing journey. It’s an ongoing process of trying to rebuild your internal world after your assumptive world—the one you didn’t even realize you were leaning on—has been shattered.

That’s what this model acknowledges. Not that you “grow” because of grief—but that grief forces a reckoning. It demands we renegotiate our relationship to ourselves, the world, and whatever (or whoever) we lost.

Let’s break down how this process unfolds—not neatly, not predictably—but as it often happens in real life.

Assumptive World Shattering

One of first core concepts of the Meaning Making Model is that we all carry invisible beliefs that shape how we navigate life and when you lose someone or something that mattered deeply to you, your internal framework can come crashing down. The beliefs you once held about safety, fairness, control, or who you are in relation to others suddenly feel unstable, or in some instances, completely false. So what is this “assumptive world”? It’s that collection of invisible beliefs most of us walk around with:

• If I do the right things, life will go well.

• The people I love will be here tomorrow.

• I know who I am, and where I’m going.

• The world makes sense—or at least, enough sense to function.

Loss drops a big ole flaming bomb into the middle of all that. And you’re left sorting through the wreckage, trying to piece together a version of life that feels even remotely livable.

When your assumptive world falls apart—it’s existential.

Sense-Making

The human brain needs stories. We are wired for meaning. For cause and effect. For understanding. Even in tragedy—especially in tragedy—we instinctively search for answers.

When someone dies, when something shatters, we start trying to connect the dots.

Could this have been prevented?

Did I miss a sign?

Why them? Why now?

What does this say about life, death, God, the universe, fate?

We ask these questions not because we expect satisfying answers, but because asking gives structure to the chaos. It helps us feel like we have some kind of agency, even if it’s just in the narrative we build around the loss.

Sometimes the questions are relentless. Sometimes they haunt us at night, loop in our minds when we’re driving, when we’re trying to work, when we’re doing something as simple as folding laundry.

And sometimes the silence in response to those questions feels cruel. But the act of asking is part of the grief work. It’s part of how we try to rebuild some sense of order in a life that no longer feels livable.

Even if we never get the answers we want—or any answers at all—the questions still matter.

They’re a sign that we’re trying to stay in relationship with the loss.

Trying to make it make sense.

Trying to understand how to live in a world that no longer plays by the rules we thought we understood.

Sense-making doesn’t fix the pain. But it gives it a place to sit. A container, however fragile, to hold the unthinkable.

Benefit-Finding (Without the Pressure to Be Grateful)

Let’s be really honest about this part—because it’s the one that gets twisted the most.

Benefit-finding is not about being grateful for your grief. It’s not about saying, “Well, at least something good came from this.” And it’s definitely not about assigning meaning to the loss itself, as if pain exists just to teach us something.

That mindset? It’s spiritual bypassing dressed up as wisdom. And for someone in the thick of grief, it is dismissive, invalidating, and even cruel.

So when we talk about benefit-finding in the context of meaning-making, we’re not talking about putting a shiny bow on your pain. We’re talking about the slow, organic ways you begin to notice the ways you’ve changed—not because the loss was good, but because the loss demanded something of you.

Maybe you don’t tolerate surface-level conversations anymore.

Maybe your empathy for other people’s suffering has deepened.

Maybe you see what matters more clearly now.

Maybe you make decisions differently.

Maybe you protect your time, your energy, or your peace with a little more fierceness.

That’s not because your loss was “worth it.” It wasn’t.

But it did transform you, whether you wanted it to or not. And the ways you choose to live now—more present, more tender, more bold, more connected—might feel like one of the few things you can carry forward.

That’s benefit-finding. Not a celebration. But a quiet noticing of how grief has reshaped you.

Identity Reconstruction

Loss doesn’t just takes away more than the person you love. It takes away who you were in relationship to them.

Were you their partner? Their sibling? Their child? Their caretaker?

Did they know you in a way no one else did—hold your history, your quirks, your softness, your secrets?

Did they represent a version of your life that made sense?

When they’re gone, you don’t just grieve them. You grieve the version of yourself that existed with them in the world.

And this is where grief gets even more complicated—because in addition to everything else you’re feeling, you now have to figure out who you are in the aftermath.

• Who am I now that I’m no longer their spouse?

• How do I live as a parent whose child has died?

• What does it mean to keep waking up in a world they no longer live in?

These are identity-level questions. And they don’t come with quick answers. They don’t get resolved by “moving forward” or “getting back to normal.” Because normal doesn’t exist anymore—not the way it once did.

Grief forces us into a quiet, often invisible process of rebuilding a sense of self. Not the old self. Not the before. But a self who carries the absence. A self who knows what it is to live with that kind of love—and that kind of loss.

Similar to benefit-finding, the rebuilding happens slowly, in tiny ways: In how you introduce yourself. In how you explain your family. In how you set the table for a meal. In how you make the bed.

Grief changes your identity in ways you did not choose. But eventually, in ways you can come to recognize as yours.

Continuing Bonds

I'm here to make a big request: let's retire the idea that we’re supposed to “let go” of the people we’ve lost or "move on" from loss that is actively being experienced. It does more harm than good.

Grief actually doesn’t ask us to let go. It asks us to learn how to hold on differently.

The Meaning Reconstruction Model introduces the idea of continuing bonds—and if you’ve ever felt pressured to “move on” when your heart is still very much tethered to the person who’s gone, I hope this concept comes as a relief.

Continuing bonds is the idea that you can (and should, for healthy grieving) carry your connection with your loved one forward. Not in a way that keeps you stuck, but in a way that acknowledges they are still part of your life. Still part of you.

It might look like:

• Telling stories that keep their memory alive.

• Living in alignment with their values or the way they showed up in the world.

• Making choices that honor who they were—or what they believed in.

• Noticing their presence in everyday moments: a certain song, a scent, a habit you picked up from them that still makes you smile (or cry).

• Talking to them. Out loud. In your head. In a journal. At the cemetery. On a walk.

Continuing bonds stomps on the outdated idea that we should pretend the person didn’t die, or tiptoe around the loss just to make others more comfortable.

The grief doesn’t end.

But the way we carry it—and the way we carry loss—can change.

Not so we forget. But so we can keep living, and still bring them with us.

Closing Thoughts

There is no formula for grief.

It shows up in waves, in whispers, in gut punches. It shifts who you are, how you see the world, and what it means to be you in the absence of what you’ve lost.

When nothing about your loss feels logical…that’s not a failure of your healing.

That’s grief doing what grief does.

And if you’re still standing—barely, shakily, or even on your knees—you’re doing the work.

Give yourself a little space to ask the questions.

And maybe—someday—new answers of your own will start to take shape.