The Quiet Echo of Inherited Grief

Grief doesn’t always arrive at the moment of loss. Sometimes, it lies dormant—unspoken, unseen—passed like heirlooms from one generation to the next. This is inherited grief, a concept I’ve come to understand not only through my work with bereaved clients, but through my own family story.

My mother was just six years old, when her father died, it was a sudden death, life would never be the same for my mother and grandmother. At a time when emotional support and grief counselling were scarce, her pain was boxed away, never fully acknowledged, never safely explored. That silence became a weight she carried into adulthood—a weight I, too, would come to know.

As I grew older, I began to notice the invisible threads woven into our family fabric: the deep emotional undercurrents that found their way into our family. My mother’s grief, unprocessed and alone, became a legacy.

I see this phenomenon unfold in many families. A parent loses a sibling or partner without support. Their children grow up in the emotional aftershock, sensing something is off but unable to name it. Over time, the absence of grief work becomes its own presence.

Healing inherited grief means tending not just to our own losses, but to the emotional footprints left behind by those who came before. It invites us to step into intergenerational compassion: to give voice to the stories that weren’t told, to offer ourselves and our families the support they never received.

Inherited grief in my family also coexisted with love, compassion and survival. Grief is not a problem to solve, but a truth to honor. And in that honoring, there is space—not just for healing, but for rewriting the legacy we leave.

Some ways to honour your own legacy grief:

• Normalize your experience: Inherited grief isn’t a flaw—it’s a quiet echo of love, loss, and longing passed through generations.

• Use emotional language: Gently name what you are feeling—grief, guilt, displacement, unspoken sorrow.

• Seek Support: Working through your grief may be difficult at times and may bring up uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, find a counsellor who has experience in inherited grief to support you to work through these.

• Creating Meaning: Sometimes legacy grief calls us to reinterpret the past with new understanding. Revisiting memories through the lens of growth can be powerful.

• Create healing rituals such as:

  • Planting a tree for each generation’s untold story.

  • Grief journaling, this can be a transformative practice for uncovering and healing emotional and psychological patterns passed down through generations. By writing regularly, you gain insight into the origins of these inherited experiences, creating space for self-awareness, understanding, and emotional healing.

  • Lighting a candle on anniversaries—not just to mourn, but to honor the grief