Grief is one of those things we all think we understand, until it happens to us.
In conversations for the Don’t Be Caught Dead podcast, I’ve spoken with Dr Candice Mace, clinical psychologist and grief researcher; Bryan Petheram, grief counsellor who worked for Griefline; Linda Rowley, wellbeing consultant and ambiguous loss practitioner; Christine Pedley, grief counsellor, death doula and celebrant; Todd Maguire, former Queensland police officer and author; and Australian of the Year recipient, Rosie Batty, family violence prevention advocate and author.
They have each encountered grief from very different places.
And yet, listening back to these conversations, I kept coming back to the same conclusion:
There is no right way to grieve.
There isn’t a timetable.
There isn’t a set of stages that everyone moves neatly through.
There isn’t a point where you wake up one morning and discover that you’re “over it”.
And sometimes grief isn’t even about a death.
Sometimes it’s about the life you thought you were going to have.
Sometimes it’s about a relationship, an identity, a future, a role, a body, or a version of yourself that no longer exists.
These six conversations helped me understand grief a little differently.
Not as something we complete.
But as something we learn to live alongside.
Candice Mace: Grief is not a roadmap
Dr Candice Mace is a clinical psychologist and researcher whose work focuses on grief, loss and trauma. Her own experience of bereavement led her into grief care and research, and she has worked with hundreds of people after sudden and traumatic losses.
One of the first things she challenged was the idea that grief follows a predictable sequence.
Candice explained that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages were not originally intended as a general model for bereavement after someone dies. They were developed in the context of people facing the loss of their health and terminal illness. Newer grief frameworks recognise that people can move between different experiences rather than progressing through a fixed sequence.
Her description of grief was much more fluid.
“Grief is not this beautiful linear thing.”
Candice used the image of a ball inside a box. In the acute phase of grief, the box can seem small and the ball large, so it hits the “grief button” frequently and intensely. Over time, the person grows, and the ball may miss the button more often. It can still hit it, sometimes hard, but not necessarily every day or several times a day.
That does not mean the loss has disappeared.
Candice described learning to integrate grief rather than locking it away. She spoke about noticing when grief returns, acknowledging it and allowing herself to respond to what her body and mind need.
Her advice was surprisingly simple: let it be intuitive. Sleep if you need sleep. Eat. Cry. Move. Seek connection. Look after yourself.
And when grief is significantly affecting self-care, work or relationships, professional support can be part of that care.
Linda Rowley: Some losses are ongoing
Linda Rowley works with people and organisations through change, loss and uncertainty, with a particular interest in ambiguous loss.
Ambiguous loss can be difficult to explain because there may be no clear ending. Linda talked about situations such as caring for a child with disability or living alongside neurological illness, injury or another significant change. Something important may have been lost, while the person or relationship is still present.
That can create a complicated emotional experience: grieving what has changed while also feeling grateful for what remains.
Linda also spoke about the importance of having conversations before we are overwhelmed by a crisis.
“Silence doesn’t protect us from the emotional impact of death or loss or change.”
If we do not talk about difficult things, she said, we can end up carrying them alone.
For Linda, talking about death is also a way of talking about life: our values, what matters, who we love and what our priorities are.
That is why she believes it is never too early to have these conversations.
Bryan Petheram: Your grief does not have to look like someone else’s
Bryan Petheram is a counsellor and a former group facilitator with Griefline. His work has taught him just how differently people can respond to loss.
People sometimes come to grief support believing they are doing it incorrectly. They may compare themselves with a sibling, partner or friend who experienced the same death and wonder why their own response looks so different.
Bryan’s message is that different does not necessarily mean wrong.
As he explained, someone might return to work quickly while another person cannot. One person might be sleeping and eating normally while another cannot manage those basic things. Their grief can look completely different.
He described grief as something that changes over time. The way someone is grieving today may not be the way they are grieving tomorrow, six weeks from now, six months from now or two years from now.
His work also highlights the importance of language. Sometimes people use expressions such as “passed away” or “moved on” because the words death and dying feel uncomfortable. But being able to name what has actually happened can be an important part of acknowledging the reality of loss.
There is no prize for having the “right” grief response.
There is simply the grief that belongs to you.
Todd Maguire: When trauma stays with you
Todd Maguire spent 27 years with the Queensland Police Service, working across some of the most demanding areas of policing, including undercover operations, major crime, tactical response, counter-terrorism and bomb detection.
He played a key role in dismantling organised crime networks, contributing to more than 500 charges, and received both a certificate of recognition and a Commissioner’s citation for his work.
But behind those professional achievements was another story.
For decades, Todd was exposed to some of the darkest moments of other people’s lives: violent crime, suicide, fatal accidents, domestic violence and child abuse. He was often the person knocking on someone’s door to deliver devastating news, or the person arriving when something had gone terribly wrong.
Undercover work brought another layer of complexity. Todd spent months at a time living inside an assumed identity, forming relationships with people he was simultaneously investigating. He described the undercover persona as giving him a way to escape being Todd for a while, to become “Donny”, someone who was carefree and had none of the baggage he was carrying.
But that baggage was already there.
In 2000, while Todd was still relatively early in his police career, his partner Karen died by suicide. They had been living together for 18 months and were building a life together. Karen had a four-year-old son, Clark.
Her death changed the direction of Todd’s life.
Todd has spoken openly about how badly he handled Karen’s death. He returned to work and carried the grief, anger, and pain with him. Over time, his coping became increasingly destructive. He described drinking all day, reckless behaviour, getting into fights, hating the world and losing interest in things he had once loved.
He was grieving while continuing to work in an environment where death, violence and trauma were part of the job.
Years later, another experience brought him face to face with what he had been carrying. During undercover work, Todd had developed a genuine connection with someone he was investigating. That person was struggling deeply, had become estranged from friends and family, and was experiencing suicidal thoughts.
Todd recognised something of himself in that person.
He described being confronted by the realisation that he had been travelling down a similar path, angry, unhappy, isolated and in enormous pain.
That moment forced him to stop.
He returned to his safe house and cried for hours. It was the first time in a long time that he had allowed himself to really break down. He realised he had to change what he was doing.
Todd’s story is therefore not simply a story about exposure to trauma through police work. It is a story about how professional exposure to death and trauma can intersect with personal grief and suicide loss, and how those experiences can become intertwined over many years.
His story also challenges the idea that people working around death and trauma somehow become protected from its impact.
They don’t.
Sometimes the work does not end when the shift ends.
And sometimes grief does not end when the funeral is over.
The experiences can continue to live in a person long afterwards, shaping how they cope, how they see the world and, eventually, how they find their way back to themselves.
Christine Pedley: There is no prescriptive way of grieving
Christine Pedley has spent much of her professional life around death and grief. She has worked in palliative care, family and community services, counselling and celebrancy, and became a death doula.
Then, shortly before she was due to undertake funeral-arranger training, her son died by suicide.
Her professional knowledge did not make her immune to grief.
In fact, Christine described having to relearn grief through the experience of losing her son.
“There is no prescriptive way of dying. There is no prescriptive way of grieving.”
She was equally clear: “There’s no right way, and there’s no wrong way.”
Christine also challenged one of the most common instincts people have when someone is grieving: the urge to fix it.
“Don’t fix it.”
There is nothing we can say that will make the death unhappen. There is no sentence that can remove another person’s pain.
What we can do is sit with them.
We can listen. We can ask what they need. We can bring food. We can help with practical things. We can talk about the person who died. We can continue to use their name.
Christine described grief not as a series of stages that eventually disappear, but as a lifetime of learning how to live without someone who was part of your life.
That does not mean life cannot contain goodness again.
It means the relationship with the person who died changes, rather than simply ending.
Rosie Batty: Grief can become part of a life of action
Rosie Batty’s story is one of profound personal loss and public advocacy. After her 11-year-old son Luke was murdered by his father, Rosie became a prominent advocate for family violence prevention and was named Australian of the Year in 2015.
In our conversation, she spoke about something that people can find difficult to understand about profound grief: a person can be devastated and still function.
People were surprised that Rosie could stand up, speak publicly, and continue moving through the world.
But grief does not always look like being unable to get out of bed.
Rosie also spoke about the opportunities she took on because she did not want Luke’s death to have been in vain.
“I didn’t want Luke to have died in vain.”
For Rosie, action became one way of making meaning after an unbearable loss.
She also spoke about the importance of conversation and storytelling. Talking with other people helped her process what had happened, while hearing from people who had been helped by her words reminded her that she was not alone in trying to make sense of what had happened.
At the same time, she acknowledged the limits of what other people can do. Her community showed enormous kindness (meals, practical help, messages, flowers and gifts), but there was still a hole that no one else could fill.
That may be one of the hardest truths about grief.
People can support us. They can sit beside us. They can feed us, listen to us, and walk alongside us.
But they cannot take the loss away.
So what does grief actually look like?
It looks different for everyone.
It can look like crying.
It can look like anger.
It can look like cognitive fog and not being able to remember simple things.
It can look like going back to work the next day.
It can look like not being able to work at all.
It can look like talking constantly about the person who died, or not being able to talk about them yet.
It can look like grief returning years later in a completely unexpected moment.
It can also sit alongside laughter, love, purpose, work, relationships, and ordinary life.
None of that makes the grief less real.
What can we actually do for someone who is grieving?
The conversations gave me a few practical reminders.
First, stop looking for the correct way to grieve.
Second, resist the urge to fix it.
Third, ask what the person needs, and understand that they may not know.
Fourth, offer practical help. Cook something. Do the shopping. Pick up the children. Sit quietly. Make a cup of tea. Keep showing up.
And finally, keep talking about the person who died when the grieving person wants to talk about them.
Sometimes the simplest thing we can offer is our willingness to stay present when the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
Maybe grief is not something we get over
We often use language like “moving on” because we need a way to describe what happens when life begins to function again.
But perhaps we need better language.
Candice talked about learning to integrate grief and grow around it. Bryan described how grief changes. Linda reminded us that some losses remain ongoing. Todd showed us how trauma can stay with someone long after the original experiences. Christine reminded us there is no prescribed way to grieve. And Rosie showed how a person can carry profound grief while also creating purpose and action.
None of these stories give us a formula.
And perhaps that is the point.
There is no right way to grieve.
There is no deadline.
There is no single path that will work for everyone.
There is only the very human task of learning how to live with what has happened, with support, with compassion, and without the pressure to make our grief look a certain way.
Because grief is not a failure to move forward.
It is a natural part of what happens when life does not go the way we planned it.
