We grieving people know a lot about collateral damage when someone we love dies. It’s not just the loss of the person in our lives, although that would be enough. There are other losses, too. Death doesn’t happen in a vacuum. 

While the death of our person may be the headline, there are other related stories and losses. Death doesn’t come alone and doesn’t leave empty-handed. Our grieving lives are like having a home that has clearly been robbed, but we don’t know what all is missing. It can take a long time to discover all the valuables that have been lost. 

These additional losses, the supporting cast to the main loss event, are sometimes called secondary losses. Grief therapist and educator, Ken Doka, describes them as ripples in the pond. The main loss is like a rock thrown into the middle of the pond. The amount and size of the ripples depend on size of the loss. But to the grieving person, the term “ripple” may feel too gentle and small. Sometimes it feels more like waves or maybe even a tsunami as there is so much damage. Collateral damage. 

Yet, the main loss and its collateral damage are not the full picture. For many grieving people, they find that there is more. They experience that sometimes there are collateral blessings. 

Perhaps the term “collateral blessings” is a familiar one for you. For me, despite working in the grief support world for many years, it was only recently that I heard a grieving person refer to “collateral blessings.” The person was a parent who had experienced the death of a child to cancer who was taking part in a pediatric oncology bereavement support weekend. While the term was new, it resonated deeply because the experience being described was not unfamiliar at all. I had seen it in the lives of others and experienced it myself.  

Before going any further, let’s pause for a moment to consider what collateral blessings do not mean. They do not mean that the recognition of good things or blessings in our lives following a loss make the loss worth it. The value of a life is beyond measure, and it is unwise and perhaps even offensive to suggest that anything could equal the value of the life of someone we love. 

Collateral blessings also do not explain loss or death. When someone dies, we understandably have questions. One of the first ones is how—how did someone die? Most of us feel the need to get as many facts as possible so we can understand how it happened. We need these facts so we can better begin the process of figuring out how we can fit this story into the larger story of our lives. The more unanswered questions as to how it happened, the more challenging it can be to reconcile with the reality of the death. 

How is not the only question that is important to us, of course. Much of the time, we also wrestle with the question of why? Knowing the how of someone’s death does not answer the question of why. Why did this person die? Why them and why now for them and for us? We need to make meaning of both their lives and their deaths—for them and for us. 

Experiencing blessings in the midst of our grieving does not answer our questions of how or why someone died. It might be possible, however, that the collateral blessings might support us in addressing questions of how and why for our own lives—how can we continue living and live as fully as possible and why would we want to live following the death of someone we loved deeply?

Collateral blessings are ones we experience and find in the wake of our loss and grief. Collateral blessings do not (this is important) erase or cancel out pain and collateral damage. Blessings and damage coexist and both are real. 

There is a cynical view that is often expressed that the “real world” means a world of struggle, pain, and suffering. This view does a disservice to life. Struggle, pain, and suffering are certainly real and part of our lives, but they are not more real than love, connections, insights, and joy which are also part of our lives. 

New and often unexpected experiences of love, connection, insights, and joy found in our lives after someone dies are examples of collateral blessings. There are people we meet that grace us who we had never encountered before. There are depths of gratitude that are sometimes found. There are insights and understandings about our lives—past, present, and future—and the lives of those we have lost. There are unexpected sources of pleasure and joy, both small and large, which find us, especially as we pay more attention. Collateral blessings all. 

Our lives are full of so many varied things. These include quiet pleasures and loud thrills, moments of pleasure and pain, times of arriving and leaving, learning and unlearning, coming together and coming apart, and births of the new and deaths of old, young, and in-between. 

With change comes loss, and with loss comes some amount of grief. Each loss brings collateral damage as our lives truly do contain multitudes. And sometimes, perhaps even often, there are also collateral blessings. For death is not the last word, and as writer Anne Lamott has reminded us, “grace bats last.” 

And that deepened awareness can truly be a blessing. 

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Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.

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