How do you grieve someone you had a difficult relationship with?

The complexity of human relationships is never simple to follow; it is like intricate lacework, but lacework made of steel.

— Mignon G. Eberhart, quoted in Session 11 of the Grief Works programme

When people imagine grief, they usually picture losing someone they loved without complication. Plenty of relationships weren't like that. A parent who was cold or critical. A partner you'd been thinking of leaving. A brother or sister you hadn't spoken to in years. When someone like that dies, the feelings can be tangled, contradictory and very hard to say out loud.

Does a difficult relationship make grief easier?

Often it makes it harder. In the programme, Julia explains that the strength of grief usually tracks the strength of the bond.

How much pain we're in is often a direct measure of the quality of the relationship we had with the person who died.

— Julia Samuel MBE, Grief Works programme, Session 11: Exploring your relationship

But she's clear that the reverse doesn't follow.

if the relationship was difficult, grieving may be harder because we're more likely to feel regret and guilt.

— Julia Samuel MBE, Grief Works programme, Session 11: Exploring your relationship

A death also ends any hope that things might one day get better: the apology that never came, the conversation you kept putting off, the relationship you'd always half hoped you'd have. That's a loss in its own right, on top of losing the person.

Why do we only remember the good, or only the bad?

The death of someone we love can lay bare difficult truths that we sometimes gloss over, wanting only to remember the good.

— Julia Samuel MBE, Grief Works programme, Session 11: Exploring your relationship

Some people edit. They remember only the good, partly out of love and partly because speaking ill of the dead feels wrong. But the edited version doesn't match what they actually feel, and that gap can become its own source of distress.

Others go the opposite way, going over the painful parts again and again, unable to put their regrets down, until the good memories are crowded out.

Neither gives you the real person to grieve.

What does it mean to hold both together?

The programme's answer is to hold the whole relationship, the love and the difficulty, in what Julia describes as "holding all aspects together as a true, complex, human relationship."

She describes working with a woman whose tough, hard-working mother had died. The daughter was proud of everything her mother had overcome and achieved, and she also wished her mother had been more loving and sensitive. It was only when she could hold the love and the pain together, as one, that her grief began to shift and she found a way to start living again.

Answering all of them, not just the comfortable ones, is the point. As the programme puts it, the more you let your raw feelings and complicated thoughts come through, the stronger a position you're in to cope with your grief head-on.

Is it normal to feel relief when someone dies?

Yes, and it's one of the feelings people are most ashamed of. Relief is especially common after a long illness, after years of caring, or after a relationship that caused you pain. In Session 9 of the programme, Julia writes:

If someone's been sick or in pain, especially if you've cared for them, there will, naturally, be some positive emotions when they die. But this can leave us feeling dreadful, as though we've betrayed them.

— Julia Samuel MBE, Grief Works programme, Session 9: Working through guilt

Relief doesn't cancel out love, and it isn't a betrayal. It often sits alongside grief, guilt and sadness all at once. We've also written about how grief differs after a long illness.

Can you grieve a relationship you never had?

Yes. Sometimes the person who died was someone you never properly got to know: a parent who died when you were small, a relative you were estranged from, or someone you always meant to get closer to. With the death of a young child, the relationship can feel cruelly cut short before it had a chance to grow.

Julia describes supporting a woman whose half-brother died unexpectedly. They hadn't been close, and she had only learned about him later in life. That distance didn't make her grief lighter. As Julia puts it, "she was deeply grieving the relationship she never had" with him.

The grief researcher Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief for losses like these, which other people don't always recognise. Not being recognised can make them lonelier to carry, which is exactly why naming them matters.

Are your feelings valid if you weren't close?

A helpful way of understanding the depth of your grief is that it's a reflection of the depth of your love.

— Julia Samuel MBE, Grief Works programme, Session 11: Exploring your relationship

That's a useful pattern, and it explains a lot. It's also only a pattern. Relationships are complicated, and so is grief.

No matter how well you knew the person, or how close you were, your feelings of grief are completely valid.

— Julia Samuel MBE, Grief Works programme, Session 11: Exploring your relationship