Grief feels unbearable, disorienting and chaotic – a grief researcher and widow shares evidence-based ways to face the early days of loss

Grief brings a person's world to a halt. Valentina Shilkina/iStock via Getty Images Plus

The July 4 floods in Kerr County, Texas, sent shockwaves across the country. Now that most of the victims’ burials are over, the weight of grief is just beginning for loved ones left behind. It’s the daily devastation of an upended world where absence is glaringly present, nothing feels familiar, and life is paused in dizzying stillness.

I know this pain intimately. I’m a grief researcher, social work professor and widow. I lost my husband, Brent, in a drowning accident when I was 36. He went missing two days before his body was found.