Understanding Yearning After a Death

Some people are natural yearners. They ache for days and moments that exist only in memory — often childhood ones, often tied to a parent. One grieving person described longing for fragments of time with her mother, details too personal to spell out here. Yearning after loss is common enough that you probably have your own version of this ache to slot into that blank space.

This isn't the same as fondly recalling someone. It's the kind of memory that grabs your stomach, that surfaces without warning and knocks the wind out of you. If you're grieving someone you loved, chances are you already know exactly what this feels like.

Yearning is one of the most common reactions to loss, yet grief research and writing on the subject remain thin. That gap is worth noting for anyone whose heart keeps reaching back toward the past.

This piece is meant to open up that conversation — to name yearning as its own experience and look closely at what it does to us.

What does yearning mean?

The Oxford Dictionary defines yearn as follows:

"Have an intense feeling of longing for something, typically something that one has lost or been separated from."

German has a related word, sehnsucht, defined this way:

"A high degree of intense (recurring), and often painful desire for something, particularly if there is no hope to attain the desired, or when its attainment is uncertain, still far away."

There's no exact English equivalent, but sehnsucht may come closest to capturing the intensity of yearning after someone dies.

What might you yearn for?

O'Connor and Sussman (2014) put it this way:

"Yearning is an emotional state widely experienced in situations involving loss, focused on a desire for a person, place, or thing that was treasured in the past."

You can yearn for people, places, objects, moments, entire relationships. If something mattered enough to grieve, it's almost certainly something you'll yearn for too.

How does yearning show up in grief?

Grief theorists have been describing yearning as its own phenomenon for decades, even without much formal research behind it. Bowlby and Parkes, back in 1970, proposed a four-phase model of grief in which the second phase is "yearning and searching." Here's how that phase has been described:

"In this phase we are acutely aware of the void left in our life from the loss. The future we imagined is no longer a possibility. We search for the comfort we used to have from the person we have lost and we try to fill the void of their absence. We may appear preoccupied with the person. We continue identifying with the person who has died, looking for constant reminders of them and ways to be close to them."

That theory is now more than forty years old, so how well has it held up? On the question of yearning, later research backs it up: yearning is indeed one of grief's most common features.

In a 2007 longitudinal study of 223 bereaved people, researchers tracked five grief responses — disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance — and found that acceptance and yearning were the two most frequently reported. Yearning tended to climb until around four months after the loss, then gradually decline (Maciejewski, Zhang, Block, & Prigerson, 2007).

Is yearning helpful or harmful?

It depends.

Grief research often sorts emotions into "positive" or "negative" categories, which is useful for studying and comparing them but can oversimplify things in real life. It's more accurate to think of most emotions as sitting on a spectrum, where whether they help or hurt depends on the person, how they cope, and the emotion's overall effect on their life.

The potential downside:

In the 2007 study mentioned above, yearning was the most commonly reported "negative" emotion. Bowlby and Parkes warned that someone who can't move through the yearning-and-searching phase may get stuck trying to fill the space their loss left behind. Researchers studying complicated grief describe it as being "characterized by an intense and prolonged yearning for the deceased."

The takeaway: painful, distressing yearning is common in early grief, and for some people it becomes an ongoing, intense presence that interferes with daily life.

The potential upside:

On the other end of the spectrum, plenty of grieving people would say their yearning isn't entirely negative — and some researchers agree, noting that yearning can bring on a bittersweet kind of comfort, drawing people closer to memories of who they lost.

Nostalgia is a slightly different feeling, but research on it points in a similar direction:

"A team at Southampton found that nostalgia was a very common experience with 80% of their 172 participants stating they experience nostalgia at least once a week and 42% indicating they experience it at least three or four times a week. Most interesting to us though is the finding that one of the most common triggers of nostalgia is negative affect. Which suggests that we are apt to access memories of a happier times in an attempt to counteract negative feelings like fear and anxiety in the present.

Also, their findings support the idea that nostalgia has the capacity to generate positive affect, bolster social bonds, and increase positive self-regard. So, when a social situation is one that is apt to trigger anxiety or fear, nostalgia about relationships from the past can help boost confidence in ones ability to interact, open up, and bond with others."

Yearning and nostalgia overlap enough that they may sometimes work as similar coping tools — or that people who believe they're yearning may actually be leaning on nostalgia to soften a hard grief emotion.

A closing thought

Years out from a loss, many people find they've come to see their yearning less as a burden and more as something oddly comforting — a way of staying connected to what they loved.

Would someone earlier in their grief see it differently? Almost certainly. So the point worth holding onto is this: yearning is common, your feelings about it may be mixed or shift over time, and that's fine. Grief exists because you lost something good, so it makes sense that yearning, like most of grief, carries both the sweetness and the ache at once.