The Grief We Struggle to Name

Spoiler alert for Episode 9 of the Testaments

Watching Episode 9 of The Testaments was incredibly difficult for me to sit with, and I have been reflecting on why. From the very beginning of The Handmaid's Tale, viewers have witnessed profound death and non-death grief: the loss of safety, familiarity, bodily autonomy, innocence, identity, motherhood, connection, and imagined futures. We have watched people lose not only one another, but pieces of themselves; yet, this episode felt different.

As I watched Agnes believe she was helping Becca, I kept thinking about how often individuals genuinely try to survive systems, relationships, or environments by being “good,” compliant, loyal, or careful, only to eventually realize those strategies were never capable of protecting them. Grief emerges when someone begins to recognize that the very system they trusted has harmed them.

Within the Transcending Model of Grief and Loss (TMGL), Sonya and I talk about the Uncharted Territory, which is a space where loss is unfolding before it is fully recognized, named, or understood. Many individuals who experience disenfranchised grief live in this space for years. They may sense that something has shifted, ruptured, disappeared, or no longer feels possible, but they do not yet have language for the grief itself.

What makes stories like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments so emotionally activating is that they portray grief beyond death. They illuminate the psychological and relational losses tied to oppression, identity disruption, chronic fear, survival, and loss of agency. As grief counselors and educators, we have an opportunity to expand the conversation beyond bereavement and create language for the losses society often overlooks. This is one of the reasons we created the Griefly Speaking workbook alongside the TMGL framework: to help individuals, counselors, and students explore grief that may not immediately “look like grief.”

Sometimes the most important question is not: “Who died/What was lost?” But rather: “What changed, ruptured, disappeared, or no longer feels possible?”