What I Learned About Grief in a Room Full of People Who Study It
Reflections from the European Grief Conference 2026 in Porto
I spend a lot of my life around grief, standing right in the messy middle of it. I sit at kitchen tables with families. I hear the stories that don't make it into obituaries. I meet the sibling who is doing all the organising while falling apart. I see the friend who doesn't quite know whether they are "allowed" to be as devastated as the spouse. I see the ex-partner hovering somewhere at the edge. The colleague who has lost the person they ate lunch with every day for twenty years. The pet owner who apologises for crying because "it was only a dog."
In 2024, I went to my first European Grief Conference, mostly because it was in my hometown of Dublin, Ireland, and I was home at the time; it all worked out. Then I experienced it. I was hooked. So this past month, I went to Porto for the 2026 European Grief Conference.
More than 400 researchers, psychologists, healthcare professionals and academics gathered to talk about grief, loss and bereavement. The conference itself was intentionally international — delegates from around 35 countries — and its stated aim was to bring research, practice and policy together. I went as someone who works at another point on that same continuum: funerals, memorials and celebrancy. When I was in Dublin, I noticed there were maybe 3 funeral folk in attendance. Not Good.
I left with pages of notes, photographs of approximately four thousand PowerPoint slide photos 😂, some genuinely brilliant ideas, several questions, and one thought that kept coming back to me:
We still have a tendency to decide who is entitled to grieve. So….Who gets to be a griever?
One presentation explored something I see constantly in my work: the hierarchy we unconsciously create around grief.
Spouse. Parent. Child. Sibling. Grandparent. Friend. Colleague. Neighbour.
And somewhere along the way, we begin making assumptions about who must be suffering most based upon the title of their relationship. Except human relationships don't work like that. We know this. So whyyyy do we do it when it comes to grieving?
The person who legally qualifies as someone's "next of kin" isn't necessarily the person who knew them best. A best friend can be family. An estranged child can experience enormously complicated grief. A former spouse can still love someone deeply. A colleague can spend more waking hours with someone than many members of their family. And sometimes the person who appears to have the "closest" relationship with the person who died isn't the person experiencing the greatest impact.
Research presented at the conference looked at how identity and status as a griever can become organised almost as a scale or hierarchy, and at the tension between grief being enfranchised — socially recognised and validated — and disenfranchised, where a loss isn't given the same legitimacy.
But something else occurred to me while listening: Sometimes we disenfranchise ourselves.
We say:
I shouldn't be this upset.
We weren't even related.
Other people were closer to her.
It was only a pet.
We hadn't spoken in years.
I don't have the right to feel like this.
That, for me, is one of the missing pieces in conversations about grief. We don't only need society to permit us to grieve. Sometimes we need to give it to ourselves.
Another idea that stayed with me came from work being undertaken by the Irish Hospice Foundation as part of Ireland's National Adult Palliative Care Policy. Their systematic review is examining what good bereavement care should look like across serious illness, before and after a death. One of the preliminary observations presented in Porto was particularly interesting: among trials reviewed so far that had improved grief outcomes, the intervention had begun before the death. The work is still underway, so that isn't a conclusion. But the principle deserves attention.
Because grief doesn't necessarily begin when somebody takes their last breath. It can begin with a diagnosis. It can begin when roles change. When independence disappears. When somebody becomes a carer. When the future you assumed you had suddenly looks completely different. I am working with a family right now where the grief began 3 years prior so the death almost feels like a release to some, but to others, they still weren’t ready to say a final farwwell.
The model presented at the conference describes support moving through pre-death grief, death, transitional bereavement care and bereavement-conscious practice, with the level of support changing as people's needs change. And one sentence on the screen stopped me: “Support before the death is prevention.” We aren't going to eradicate grief, nor should that be the objective. We can apply all the science in the world to grief it doesn’t have a solution, but perhaps the one thing we can do is prevent some people from arriving at the other side of a death feeling completely unsupported.
Not everyone needs therapy
This was another important thread running through the conference. Grief is painful. Pain does not automatically equal pathology. The conference itself was structured around a four-level public-health model, beginning with societal grief literacy and community awareness, moving through general support and information, additional support where risk factors exist, and finally specialist treatment for complicated grief reactions. Some grieving people will need specialist psychological or clinical intervention. Many won't. They may need information, Community, Ritual, a friend who keeps showing up, Someone who knows how to listen without trying to fix them, A funeral or memorial that gives shape to something that otherwise feels impossible to comprehend.
Which brings me to another sentence I wrote down:
Science can't fix grief.
And I don't mean that dismissively. I was literally sitting at a conference surrounded by extraordinary researchers whose work I found fascinating. Research can help us understand grief and identify risk. It can show us where interventions help. It can improve services. It can expose inequality. It can help governments and organisations decide where resources should go. But grief isn't a malfunction. Love isn't a clinical condition. There are parts of being human that aren't supposed to be fixed. Sometimes they need to be experienced.
Which is why funerals and memorials belong in this conversation
This may have been the biggest takeaway for me professionally. Funeral people need to be in rooms like this. And grief professionals need to be in ours. Because there is still far too much separation between what happens before death, at death, during the funeral, and afterwards. Hospice over here. Funeral service over there. Celebrants somewhere else. Bereavement counsellors further downstream. Researchers are studying all of us. Meanwhile, the family experiences one continuous event. Death doesn't respect our professional silos. A meaningful funeral or memorial isn't therapy, and celebrants shouldn't pretend to be therapists. But a funeral service can do something extraordinarily important. It gathers people. It acknowledges what happened. It tells the story of the person who died. It allows people to publicly express love. It gives grief somewhere to go for an hour. And importantly, it can recognise relationships that official systems sometimes don't. When I interview a family as a celebrant, I'm not only asking who somebody was. I'm discovering who their people were. Those people don't always share DNA.
This conference also made me think a great deal about how we educate the next generation of grief and death-care professionals. If someone is studying bereavement, should they visit a crematorium? Should they spend time with a funeral director or in a hospice? Should counselling and mental-health programmes include greater exposure to what actually happens between death and disposition? Should funeral-service education contain more substantive training around grief and mental health? Should celebrants understand the difference between normal grief, people who may benefit from additional support and situations where referral to specialist care is appropriate?
My answer is increasingly: yes, yes, yes and yes. We need to understand enough about one another's work to know where our own expertise ends and someone else's begins. That is what genuine holistic work and continuity of care could look like.
One of the things I love about international conferences is being reminded that grief may be universal, but the way we express it absolutely is not. That included suicide-bereavement support, conversations about informal support versus counselling, culturally specific approaches to loss, and work examining bereavement in places such as Greenland. Culture sits underneath so much of what we do. What is considered an appropriate funeral. Who cares for the dead. Who is expected to grieve. How loudly. For how long. Whether grief is private or communal. Whether neighbours arrive with food. Whether colleagues attend the funeral. Whether children are included. Whether the dead remain part of everyday conversation. You cannot simply export one country's model of "good grief" into another community and assume it will fit.
The official programme itself recognised this, explicitly setting out to develop culturally sensitive responses to bereavement across different levels of need. And that matters to me enormously as someone who grew up in Ireland and now works predominantly in America. I've lived between different cultures of death. Only recently, going home to Ireland again made me recognise just how much that has shaped the way I work.
Hospitality.
Gathering.
Food.
Storytelling.
Showing up.
Doing something rather than desperately searching for the perfect thing to say.
There is a reason those ideas keep finding their way into my memorials.
There was an enormous amount of valuable research presented in Porto. But at times, I found myself wanting less reading of research and more interpretation: What does this mean?
What should somebody in practice do differently on Monday morning because of what you've discovered?
Where does the funeral director fit?
Where does the celebrant fit?
Where does the neighbour fit?
Where does the person who doesn't need a therapist but desperately needs someone fit?
I'd love to see future conferences create even more deliberate bridges between research and real-world practice: stronger moderated conversations, more Q&A, more practitioners alongside academics, clearer tracks for different audiences, and perhaps fewer simultaneous sessions that leave delegates sprinting from room to room trying to catch everything. Streaming some sessions would help enormously, too. And, on the practical conference-planning side, a more intuitive agenda/app and consistent auditorium-quality audio across rooms would make an already substantial programme much easier to navigate. Because there was so much worth hearing.
Perhaps the future of grief care isn't one perfect intervention. Perhaps it is a better-connected ecosystem.
Researchers understanding practitioners.
Hospices understanding funerals.
Funeral professionals understanding bereavement.
Mental-health professionals understanding ritual.
Governments understanding communities.
And all of us becoming a little more comfortable acknowledging that grief isn't simply something that happens after somebody dies. It begins in relationships. And relationships are often what help us learn to live with it. That, more than anything, is what I'm bringing home from Porto.
— Jennifer Muldowney
The Glam Reaper
Muldowney Memorials