Inside Good Grief: A Grief Counselor's take on Sara Bareilles's "Home"
Updated: Oct 8
Last night I saw Sara Bareilles's Good Grief Tour in Chicago. It was a special night of leaning into an emotional space many people avoid but all of us know well. As a grief researcher, and a songwriter who made my own grief album, I love seeing when loss, and the ways grief changes us, become a normal part of the conversation. Personally, it was a night I won't forget: tears on my face, sounds of sniffles all around me, and the clear sense that I wasn't alone.
The grief educator in me also heard every song through the Transcending Model of Grief and Loss (TMGL), which I developed with my colleague, Dr. Katie Atkins. It's the framework behind Griefly Speaking, the reflective workbook we wrote to help anyone navigating their own loss.
Bareilles has said the opening song, "Home," grew out of a podcast conversation about grief between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert. The lyrics describe a man who lost his father at 10, learned to grieve in silence, and spent decades unlearning it. The song opens on the day he has lived one day longer than his father did.
Sara's lyrics capture what Katie and I have spent years writing about. Grief doesn't move through stages, and it doesn't resolve on a schedule. Our relationship with grief begins before we ever experience a loss. And an event like outliving a parent can pull someone back into grief long after they thought it was settled. In TMGL, that isn't a relapse. It's how grief moves.
TMGL describes four spaces people navigate after loss. A space is not a step, a stage, or part of a series. It is a new landscape you walk after loss. Here's a quick overview:
Uncharted Territory: who you were before the loss. The beliefs, family rules, and vulnerabilities you carried in, often without knowing it.
Initial Reaction: the first shock after a loss. Your body, mind, and household respond to a world that just changed.
Lost/Adrift: the disorienting middle. The old map no longer works, and a new one isn't drawn yet.
Transcending: carrying the loss forward instead of leaving it behind. The grief doesn't end; it becomes part of how you live.
Here's how TMGL can help name the specific ways a loss shapes who we are, using "Home" as our guide.
Uncharted Territory: the rules he inherited
"I was taught to bury with the dead the presence of my grief "
Before he could grieve, he had already learned how not to. His family's rule was silence. This is what TMGL means by vulnerability carried into a loss: the beliefs about grief that shape our experiences even before loss.
Initial Reaction: the day childhood ended
"I stared across the great divide, at my mother who was left
The dinner table stretched oceans wide, like the hollow in our chests"
The song doesn't take us to the funeral. It takes us to the dinner table. That's where a child's world actually breaks. His first reaction isn't only to his father's absence. It's to a household that has come apart, and to a mother who suddenly feels far away while sitting right across from him.
Lost/Adrift: what silence stole
"I see it now, but didn't then, that silence is a thief"
"I thought I could outrun it in the end."
In the Lost/Adrift space, people often feel disillusioned and disconnected. He lost friends. He missed comfort offered in unlikely places. He lost the chance to know his father's story, because asking felt too dangerous. He thought grief was something to outrun. The silence kept him adrift far longer than the death alone would have.
Transcending: speaking his name
"When I speak his name, my voice gives out"
"But I want my son to know now"
Transcending isn't a finish line. Decades later, his voice still breaks. What changed is that he lets it break in front of his son. He carries the loss forward and chooses not to pass the silence on. He has to continue to integrate the loss into his own identity as a father.
While I outline each space one at a time, the experience is not linear. Outliving his father lands as a fresh loss (Initial Reaction), and with no one ahead of him to follow, he's adrift (Lost/Adrift). Yet he's also letting his son see him cry (Transcending). This is what stage models miss: he never finished grieving his father. He's grieving the way only a 53-year-old can, still carrying a 10-year-old's loss.
The Loss Template
The spaces show where someone is and how losses are navigated, and the Loss Template is the next part of TMGL and helps explain why their grief takes the shape it does. It looks at four elements: Context, Grief Expectations, Identity, and Process.
Context: the facts around the loss
Context looks at the circumstances of a loss. A boy loses his father at 10, far too soon for anyone to be ready. His world is irrevocably altered: his childhood, his mother as she was, and later his friendships. He had no control over the death, or over how the adults around him handled it.
Grief Expectations: what he was taught grief should look like
He learned that grief should be hidden, and that questions would only hurt people. Those expectations, more than the death itself, kept him stuck for decades. Grief Expectations can be the heaviest part of a loss, because we rarely know we're carrying them.
Identity: who experienced the loss and who the loss made him
Who he was shaped the grief: at 10, he knew his father wasn't coming back but had no words for it. The grief then shaped who he became: a man who kept people at arm's length. And each milestone can reopen a loss with new questions, like who would my father be to me now. Outliving his father is the milestone with no map, and so he had to create his new identity with his own son.
Process: how he moved with the grief
His process moved from avoidance to connection. He ran, he isolated, and eventually he let someone in. The chorus is the invitation he never received as a child and now offers.
"Tell me your story, I'll tell you mine"
Reflection
The song's quiet lesson: silence can shape grief as much as the loss itself. Naming what happened, out loud and to someone, is one way to acknowledge and honor what matters in our life.
What were you taught, directly or not, about how grief should look?
Is there a loss in your life you've never said out loud?
Who could you tell your story to?
If these questions stirred something, Griefly Speaking is the reflective workbook Katie and I created for people navigating loss. That might be a death, or another kind of loss: a relationship, a job, or the future you expected. It's built on TMGL and helps you explore which spaces you're in and what's shaping your grief with your Loss Template, in your unique way. Join the conversation and follow Sara’s call…..Tell your story.
"Home" written by Sara Bareilles, from Good Grief (Epic Records, 2026). Listen here.
Sources:
Griefly Speaking is available for purchase on Amazon.
Free Clinician Guide to help with your clients
Free Reflection Guide to Understand your own grief
Comments