How TMGL Came to Be

Several years ago, we booked a trip to Mexico to write.

That was the plan, anyway: two friends and counselor educators finally carving out time to put words to the articles we kept saying we'd co-write.

What actually happened on that beach was something else entirely.

Katie was six months postpartum after giving birth to stillborn identical twin boys, holding a beautiful daughter in one hand and a grief with no clean edges in the other. Being home for Mother's Day that year felt unbearable. Leaving town to avoid it brought its own complicated feelings, including the quiet - and sometimes not-so-quiet - judgment of people who couldn't understand why she needed to go.

Sonya reflected on her divorce, trying to close the distance between the life she'd expected to be living and the one she was actually living. She was grieving a future that was never going to happen.

We didn't end up writing what we'd planned to write. Instead, we talked. Mostly about grief and about how strange it was that neither of us recognized our own experiences in much of what we'd been taught about it.

Katie had kept working through her loss and was told, approvingly, that she was "grieving well." Sonya grieved quietly and was told she needed to take more time to grieve properly - and then, not long after, that it had been long enough.

Different losses. Different ways of grieving. Yet both of us were being handed scripts for grief that didn't match what either of us was actually living. So we kept talking. For days. And not just about the losses everyone assumes count. Divorce. Moving. Caregiving. Friendships that quietly ended. Infertility. Childlessness. Changes in identity. The future you thought you were going to have. The version of yourself a relationship asked you to be, and who you become when that relationship changes or ends. Death, of course. But death was never the only thing on the list.

For Katie, that list includes a husband, Mike, who died of stomach cancer before he turned 30, and a marriage chosen after he entered hospice because dying married mattered to him. It includes the years it took for the word widow to sit comfortably in her own mouth, and relationships that changed because her grief reminded other people of losses they weren't ready to face. Years later came unexplained infertility, IVF, the birth of her daughter, and then another pregnancy less than a year later: identical twin boys who were stillborn. And there have been losses since that required her to reconsider identities, relationships, and values she thought were firmly established. Developing a model of grief does not make a person exempt from grief. If anything, those experiences continue to remind us that loss can return us to questions we thought we'd already answered.

For Sonya, the list includes growing up as the child of divorce and then, decades later, living through her own. It includes realizing that a future she'd planned in detail was no longer going to happen and grieving a version of herself that had existed within a marriage that no longer did. She turned some of that experience into music. Her album, Into the Wild, explores different rooms within a space she called "the wild,” a place where the path forward wasn't yet visible and where there was no way to simply skip over what had happened.

She arrived at that description through songwriting, before either of us had developed a grief model that would later name remarkably similar territory Lost/Adrift. That convergence became important.

Two people using very different ways of making sense of loss kept arriving somewhere similar. Sonya was describing "the wild" through music. In our conversations and, later, our research interviews, we kept hearing people describe their own versions of disorientation, uncertainty, changed identity, and trying to understand a life that no longer looked the way they expected it to. We wanted to understand what we were hearing, so we began researching it intentionally.

We interviewed people about the losses that had shaped their lives, not only deaths, but losses of many kinds and listened to how they described their experiences in their own words. Patterns began to emerge. Four factors repeatedly shaped how people understood and experienced their losses: the Context surrounding the loss, their Grief Expectations, their Identity, and their Process for engaging with what had happened. Together, those factors became what we call the Loss Template.

Within people's stories, we also began to recognize four recurring spaces: Uncharted Territory, Initial Reaction, Lost/Adrift, and Transcending. They weren't stages. There was no prescribed order, timeline, or finish line. People revisited these spaces as their circumstances changed, as their identities developed, and as old losses took on new meaning.

One participant captured something at the heart of what we were hearing: "I don't dwell on the why anymore, because it's part of my story now, and it is part of who I am." That is how the Transcending Model of Grief and Loss (TMGL) came to be.

It didn't begin with us sitting down and deciding to create a new theory of grief. It began with two people sitting on a beach trying to understand why the grief we'd been taught about didn't fully resemble the grief we'd lived. Then we listened to other people. We researched. We looked for patterns without assuming everyone would experience loss in the same way. And what emerged was a model that understands grief not as something we complete, resolve, or leave behind, but as something that can become woven into our identities, relationships, and stories as we continue to live. TMGL grew from lived experience, but it was shaped by listening closely to the experiences of others.

Maybe that's why, years later, we keep returning to the same idea: There is no single right way to grieve because there is no single way to experience loss. Over the next several posts, we'll introduce one of the tools that grew from this work, the Loss Template, and explore the four factors that can help us understand why the same kind of loss can look and feel so different from one person to another: Context, Grief Expectations, Identity, and Process.

Griefly Speaking is available for purchase on Amazon.

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