The Thing About Grief Nobody Prepares You For
Grief does not follow a schedule. If you’re looking for support, learn about grief counseling with me in Chicago.
You might feel okay for three weeks and then fall apart in a grocery store because a song came on. You might go back to work, answer emails, and seem completely functional to everyone around you, while carrying something so heavy you are not sure how your legs still move.
People mean well when they say things like “they would want you to be happy” or “at least they are not suffering.” But grief is not comforted by logic. It has its own weather, its own timeline, and it does not negotiate.
If you are in Chicago and you are carrying a loss right now, this post is for you. I am Sabita Nandy, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with 20 years of experience working with people through some of the most difficult periods of their lives. I have a Loop office at 125 S Wacker Drive and a Michigan Avenue office at 401 N Michigan Ave, and I work with grieving adults in-person and online throughout Illinois.
If you’re looking for support, learn about grief counseling with me in Chicago.
What Grief Actually Looks Like (It Is Not What You Think)
Most people are familiar with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The stages were introduced in her 1969 book and became deeply embedded in how we talk about loss. But grief researchers have since clarified something important: these stages were never meant to be linear, and they were originally developed from interviews with people facing their own deaths, not necessarily those mourning someone else.
Real grief is nonlinear. You might cycle through emotions within a single morning. You might skip stages entirely. You might experience anger and acceptance simultaneously. You might feel relief, and then feel guilty for feeling relief. All of it is normal.
What Grief Looks Like Emotionally
- Intense sadness that can arrive without warning
- Anger at the person who died, at yourself, at the circumstances, at people who seem unaffected
- Guilt, especially if the relationship was complicated or if you were not there at the end
- Numbness or a feeling of unreality, like watching your life from outside it
- Relief, particularly after a long illness or a difficult relationship
- Loneliness even when surrounded by people who love you
- Anxiety about your own mortality or the safety of people you love
What Grief Looks Like Physically
- Disrupted sleep: either insomnia or sleeping far more than usual
- Changes in appetite
- Exhaustion that rest does not fix
- Physical chest tightness (often called a broken heart for a reason)
- Weakened immune system: grief suppresses immune function, which is why many people get sick shortly after a major loss
- Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
What Grief Looks Like in Daily Life
- Avoiding reminders of the person or, conversely, being unable to move anything of theirs
- Withdrawing from social situations that feel impossible to navigate
- Losing interest in things that used to matter
- Going through the motions at work while feeling completely disconnected
- Replaying the final days or moments on repeat
Grief is not a sign of weakness. It is the price of love. The deeper the attachment, the louder the loss.
When Grief Becomes Something More
For most people, the acute intensity of grief softens over time. It does not disappear, but it becomes more integrated, less disabling. However, for a meaningful percentage of bereaved individuals, grief does not follow that trajectory. Research published in the National Institutes of Health estimates that complicated grief, now formally recognized as Prolonged Grief Disorder in the DSM-5-TR, affects roughly 7 to 10 percent of bereaved people.
Prolonged Grief Disorder is diagnosed when intense grief symptoms persist beyond 12 months after a loss in adults, and when those symptoms significantly interfere with daily functioning.
Signs That Grief May Need Professional Support
- Intense longing for the person who died that has not eased after a year or more
- Difficulty accepting that the loss is real, even months or years later
- Bitterness or anger that feels stuck, unchanging
- Feeling that life has no meaning or purpose without the person
- Avoidance of any reminders of the loss, to a degree that limits your life
- Difficulty engaging in relationships, work, or activities you used to value
- Thoughts that you would rather not be alive, or that you have nothing to live for
If any of these feel familiar, that is not a character flaw. It is a signal that your grief has become something your nervous system cannot process alone. That is exactly what therapy is for.
What Makes Chicago Grief Harder
This is not something that gets said enough: where and how you live shapes how you grieve.
Chicago has a specific cultural backdrop that complicates loss in particular ways.
If you work in a demanding field, whether that is finance in the Loop, medicine, law, academia at the University of Chicago, or any of the high-performance industries this city runs on, you are likely back at your desk within a week of a major loss. The pace does not stop. The emails do not stop. And so you learn to compartmentalize. You hold the grief in one hand and the rest of your life in the other, and you move forward.
The problem with compartmentalization is that it is a temporary solution. Grief does not stay compartmentalized. It leaks. It shows up as irritability, as difficulty concentrating, as a short fuse at people who do not deserve it, as a vague and unnameable weight that sits on your chest on Sunday evenings.
Many Chicagoans I work with, particularly in the Loop, are grieving privately at a level of intensity that nobody around them knows about. They look fine. They are doing the job. But they are running on empty, and the loss is still there, unprocessed, waiting.
The Midwest cultural layer compounds this. There is a tendency here to value toughness, to push through, to not make too much of difficult feelings. Grief in this context can get minimized, rushed, or kept very private. Which means it often goes without the support it actually needs.
How Grief Counseling in Chicago Actually Works
If you have never been to therapy before, or if your experience with therapy was not particularly helpful, it is worth knowing what grief-specific counseling actually involves.
Grief therapy is not sitting in a room crying while someone nods. It is structured, purposeful work that helps your mind and nervous system process what has happened at a pace that is sustainable for you.
What the First Session Looks Like
The first session is mostly about understanding your story. I want to know about the person you lost, your relationship with them, the circumstances of the loss, what has been hardest, and what support has or has not helped. I do not push for emotional intensity in the first session. I am building a picture.
What the Ongoing Work Involves
Depending on where you are and what you need, grief therapy might include:
- Narrative work: Making sense of the story, processing what happened, and finding language for what is often too big for words
- Meaning-making: Who are you now that this person is gone? What do you carry forward from them? What does your life mean in the context of this loss?
- Nervous system regulation: Grief has a physical dimension. When your body is in a prolonged stress response, it cannot process the emotional content of loss. I use somatic approaches to help bring the nervous system into a state where deeper processing becomes possible
- Addressing complicated grief: If your grief involves trauma, a sudden or violent death, a complicated relationship, or previous losses that were never processed, we address those layers specifically
- Rebuilding: At some point the work shifts from processing to forward motion. This is not about forgetting. It is about learning to carry the loss in a way that allows you to live fully
Grief After Different Kinds of Loss
Not all grief looks the same. The relationship, the circumstances of the loss, and what it disrupts in your life all shape how grief unfolds.
Grief After the Loss of a Parent
Losing a parent, even an elderly parent, even when it was expected, reshapes your fundamental sense of the world. For many people, a parent is their oldest relationship, the person who knew them longest. That loss can trigger unexpected identity questions alongside the sadness: who am I now? Who do I call?
For second-generation Chicagoans whose parents were immigrants, there is often an additional layer. The parent represented a connection to a heritage, a language, a set of stories. That connection does not fully transfer. It changes what is possible to know about yourself.
Grief After Sudden or Traumatic Loss
When a death comes suddenly, through accident, suicide, a sudden medical event, or violence, grief carries a traumatic charge on top of the loss itself. The nervous system has to process shock and grief simultaneously. This is harder, it takes longer, and it often requires specialized support.
The research on prolonged grief disorder consistently identifies sudden and traumatic loss as a significant risk factor for complicated grief. If your loss was sudden, please do not wait to reach out for support.
Grief After Divorce or Relationship Loss
Grief is not only about death. The end of a significant relationship, particularly a long marriage, carries a grief that is real, legitimate, and often minimized by the people around you. You are mourning a person who is still alive, a future you thought you had, an identity you built around that relationship.
This kind of grief is often invisible to others. There may be no funeral, no condolence cards, no weeks of casseroles from neighbors. You are expected to move on, to be resilient, to start dating again. The private weight of that loss deserves the same care as any other kind.
Grief After Job Loss or Career Identity Loss
Chicago professionals who have lost a job, been pushed out of a career, or reached forced retirement sometimes find themselves grieving in ways they did not anticipate. When your identity has been built around your work, losing the work is a form of loss that therapy handles directly.
A Note on Generational Grief
One thing I have come to understand over 20 years of practice is that the grief many people carry is not entirely their own.
We inherit grief from our families. Losses that were never mourned by previous generations, traumas that were survived but never processed, deaths that were not spoken about because there was no space or safety to speak about them. This inherited grief lives in us often without our knowing it. It shows up as a heaviness we cannot explain, as an over-responsiveness to certain kinds of loss, as a relationship with death or ending that feels larger than our personal history accounts for.
Part of the work I do is helping clients identify what is theirs and what they inherited. Both deserve attention. And often, doing your own grief work begins to gently shift something in the generations around you as well.
Grief Counseling in Chicago: What to Expect Practically
A few practical things worth knowing:
- Insurance: I accept Blue Cross Blue Shield PPO, Aetna PPO, and United Healthcare PPO. Please contact me to verify your specific plan. Self-pay sessions are $200 for 60 minutes.
- Locations: Loop office at 125 S Wacker Drive, Suite 308 and Michigan Avenue office at 401 N Michigan Ave, Suite 1225 (Loop: Monday through Thursday, 11 AM to 8 PM, lunch-hour appointments available; Michigan Avenue: Tuesday through Friday, 11 AM to 7 PM, and Saturday 10 AM to 4 PM).
- Online therapy: Available throughout Illinois. Secure, confidential telehealth sessions for anyone whose schedule or mobility makes in-person sessions difficult.
- Timeline: Grief work does not have a fixed end point. Some clients find meaningful relief within 12 to 16 sessions. Others value longer-term support, particularly when the loss is complex or when it connects to older, unprocessed pain.
- First step: schedule your first appointment. No paperwork, no commitment. Just a brief conversation about where you are and whether working together makes sense.
