High-functioning grief is a real mind*ck
When doing is how you cope
Eight weeks after my mum died, I drove my team to a venue outside Sydney and ran an event. I was in full professional mode, the kind where you’re switched on and showing up with a smile, laughing at the right moments, remembering everyone’s names. I was doing my job well, and on the drive home I judged myself hard for it.
I’d expected grief to arrive differently. I’d imagined it to be emotionally immobilising, the kind where you’re swaddled in blankets on the sofa, unable to move and surrounded by takeaway boxes. It’s the image of grief embedded in popular culture, isn’t it? Weeping in the lift, breaking down at your desk while a colleague slides a box of tissues toward you. So naturally, I assumed that’s what my grief would look like.
What actually happened was that I came back after two months and was smashing it. I made clients laugh, sent a hundred emails a day, ticked everything off my list, and spoke about my mum to colleagues without crying. I was surprised by it myself, which meant they probably were too. What they couldn’t see was that on my commute home I’d been rereading the same three sentences for twenty minutes without noticing, and that by seven-thirty, once I was home and the structure of the working day had dissolved, I’d be on the sofa in a blanket, unable to move, feeling the full weight of everything I’d held at arm’s length all day.
For a long time I thought I was grieving wrong. This is high-functioning grief, and it’s far more common than the silence around it suggests.
The phrase “she’s handling it so well” was said with a kind of relief, as if the absence of visible collapse signals strength. What’s actually happening, according to how researchers now understand bereavement, is that grief doesn’t travel in a single direction. Psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut developed what they call the Dual Process Model, which describes how bereaved people move between two states: sitting with the loss itself, and focusing outward on the demands and tasks of daily life. We oscillate between them, sometimes several times in a day. Both are necessary, and neither cancels the other out. So running the event and falling apart on the sofa at seven were not contradictions. They were the same grief, doing what grief actually does.
The people who told me I was doing so well meant it kindly. What they couldn’t see was that work was the one part of the day I reliably knew how to do. The structure held me, the role held me, and then I’d get home and the role was gone and it was just me, missing her.
There’s also something worth naming about the way some of us are wired, and the shapes that loss takes as a result.
Grief researchers Doka and Martin identified different grieving styles: people who process loss by feeling through it, and people who process by doing. If you’re the doing type, you might already recognise yourself here. The doers return to work and find, to their own genuine surprise and occasional self-disgust, that they are still good at their job. They make plans and create order in small ways because order is the only thing that feels solid enough to hold onto. I made a colour-coded spreadsheet in the days after my mum died, with tabs for funeral logistics, estate admin, and thank you notes. I’m not embarrassed about it anymore, because I now realise that was me coping, finding something to grip when everything else had come loose.
Psychologist George Bonanno has spent decades researching how people actually move through loss, and his work consistently shows that a significant number of bereaved people maintain relatively stable functioning after bereavement, not because the loss was small, and not because they didn’t love the person, but because resilience in grief is a real and deeply underexamined response. We’ve built a cultural story where real grief is visible, disabling, and publicly legible. Bonanno’s research quietly takes that apart.
I wrote about this on my Instagram recently and the response was huge, which is why I wanted to go into it properly here.
My friend Meghan Riordan Jarvis always says “grief is a verb” and that made so much sense to me. You can lead the meeting, make a dark joke at dinner, and walk through an entire day without crying once, and still miss them so completely it doesn’t have words. Grief that functions isn’t grief that’s absent – sometimes, it’s just grief that’s found somewhere to stand while it works out what to do next.
I’d love to know, has grief ever shown up like this for you? 💛
Life is going on… world is moving and it’s not stoping… no chance to stop life and tasks…so I understand you very well… productivity helps, continue routines is helping… but yes in the middle of everything there is grief and tears….
I work exactly the way you described. When I’m in a lot of pain, I’m the kind of person who gets things done anyway, then goes home and cries after a whole day of functioning — and functioning well — at work and everywhere else. That’s my coping mechanism, whether the disappointment is small or huge. Partly because at some point life just doesn’t let you lie around in a state of despair for days or months like in American movies. Very simply, you need to eat, and to eat you need to work for money. And I think it also comes down to how the brain works — maybe it needs some kind of normality so it doesn’t collapse. I can lie in bed and fall apart for a while, but then I have to get up and do something, even just move around because my back starts hurting. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to handle things, just whatever works best for each of us. Maybe for people like us, the body and mind make room for the pain, but they don’t hand it the keys to the house. They let it exist, but not take over.