When someone very close to us dies, it is not only their presence that is lost.
It is not only the moments with them, the Sunday meals, their jokes and their stories, their gaze and their habits. Something of us is lost too. A part of our identity that existed within the relationship with them.
When such a familiar person goes, it is not only their figure that is absent. What is also lost is the part of ourselves that was inseparably bound up with them. “Grandad’s granddaughter”, “my father’s daughter”, “the wife”. A way of existing, of relating, of being described, dies.
The relationship was not simply an external connection. It was a mirror in which we came to know ourselves.
In Gestalt psychotherapy, the self is not something we possess or that simply exists inside us. It is a living process that emerges each time in our contact with others — in the way someone looks at us, listens to us, responds to us. In this sense, our relationships do not merely frame us; they constitute us.
Put simply, we are, in part, our relationships. And this is not weakness or dependence; it is the nature of the human self. The self is not understood as something fixed and isolated. It is not something we own that is individually ours, but a form that emerges at the boundaries of our contact with the environment and with others, in a continuous dialogue.
A large part of who we are is made up of our relationships.
We often perceive loss as an event that concerns the other person.
“They’re gone.”
But at a deeper level, loss is also a rupture in the continuity of the self.
When a significant relationship in our life is permanently interrupted, the system of meaning within which we learned to exist is shaken. What we knew as “me” is no longer quite the same. Physical loss leaves behind an inner emptiness that is not only emotional but existential. An emptiness in the way we made sense of ourselves.
The emptiness left by loss is not only what remains behind; it is also a space of transition. An in-between place where what we were no longer exists in the same way, and what we will become has not yet taken shape.
In psychotherapy this state is called the fertile void. It is not merely absence. It is the space before something new emerges, before a new form of meaning takes shape. Being able to bear this emptiness, without hurriedly filling it, is one of the hardest and most important things we can do for ourselves in grief.
Grief, then, is not made up only of sadness and the feelings that accompany loss. It also contains a deep, slow and often painful process of reorganising the self and renegotiating our identity.
Perhaps one of the most important and most difficult truths that emerges through grief is this: although the beloved person is absent, the relationship does not disappear — it changes form. It is transformed from the external presence–absence of the person into an internal experience of the relationship with them. This is what in the psychology of death and bereavement we call a continuing bond: maintaining an ongoing connection with a loved one who has died, as a normal and healthy expression of grief.
The gaze of the person we loved, or their words to us, are gradually internalised and take their place in the way we see ourselves and the world. They go on existing inside us, not as someone else, but as part of ourselves.
Grief confronts us with something that is hard to bear: that the people we love are not a given. And neither are we.
This awareness, which Yalom calls an awakening experience, can act as a catalyst for deeper contact with what really matters in our lives. It is not only a sorrowful reminder. It is also an invitation to choose more consciously how we live, what we prioritise, which people we keep close.
Within this awareness another possibility is born: to choose how we will carry these people inside us. Not only as loss, but also as trace. As a presence that left its imprint on who we are.
“The fact of mortality cannot be removed from human experience, but it can become a source of deeper awareness and meaning.”
Irvin D. Yalom
