When news breaks that a beloved celebrity has died, many people are surprised by how deeply it affects them. Even though we may never have met the person, the sadness can feel real and personal.

Michelle Moriarty, Founder of Grief Connect, unpacks why celebrity deaths can hit us so hard, and why those emotions are completely valid.

The conversation began with Doug referencing Dawson’s Creek star, James Van Der Beek, who recently passed away following a battle with cancer. His death hugely impacted fans all around the world.

Why It Feels Personal

Many people grow up watching certain shows or following public figures through significant seasons of life. Over time, emotional connections naturally form. Michelle explains that audiences often feel like they truly know a character, and sometimes the actor behind them too.

“When we experience these connections with actors or characters, it can create what’s called parasocial griefwhen they die,” she said.

A parasocial relationship is essentially one-sided. Celebrities don’t personally know their fans, but fans can still feel emotionally connected through stories, interviews, and shared experiences portrayed on screen. Shows like Dawson’s Creek are often a big part of people’s formative years, meaning the characters – and the actors who portrayed them – also became woven into personal memories and identity.

What Is Parasocial Grief?

According to Michelle, today’s media environment strengthens these connections even further. Through social media, fans often see celebrities share personal milestones, struggles, and even experiences of illness or loss. This openness can deepen emotional investment.

As she explains, people may feel sadness, shock, tearfulness, or even numbness when a public figure dies – and these reactions are entirely natural. 

Michelle gave an example from James Van Der Beek’s cancer journey.

“Through his journey of dying and end of life he was very open about where he was at. He was also very open about his grief to do with his mother’s death, and those things help us form that connection. We can feel like we know them, so when they die themselves we then experience grief, loss, and the myriad of emotions that can come with it.”

Triggering Connection

Sometimes the emotion goes deeper than sadness about the celebrity themselves. Public loss can awaken memories of our own grief experiences.

Michelle explains that a celebrity death may remind us of a loved one we’ve lost. “We may be missing a person in our life, a family member or a friend or a colleague, and that experience of publicly viewing a celebrity death can also then really bring up feelings of emotion. It may bring up memories of the person in our real life who we’re missing also.”

Recognising this connection can help people understand why their reaction feels stronger than expected.

Healthy Ways to Process Grief

So what should we do when grief surfaces after a public loss? Michelle encourages people to begin with simple awareness.

She suggests acknowledging what you’re feeling and noticing both your thoughts and physical responses. Rather than pushing emotions away, creating intentional space to process them can be healing.

Small personal rituals can help, such as:

• Lighting a candle
• Listening to meaningful music (in this case the Dawson’s Creek theme)
• Rewatching a favourite episode

These moments allow grief to be expressed safely while helping people gradually return to everyday life.

Honouring The Lost

Importantly, grief is not only about sadness. Michelle emphasises that grief can also involve appreciation and gratitude for what someone brought into our lives.

Remembering joyful moments, laughing at favourite scenes, or revisiting happy memories can be a healthy way of honouring someone’s impact. Feeling moments of happiness while remembering someone is not disrespectful – it’s part of healing.

When to Seek Extra Support

While grief is natural, it’s important to notice when it begins affecting daily functioning. If sadness feels overwhelming, persistent, or makes it difficult to move forward, professional support can help.

“It can be really helpful to connect in counselling and access a professional if you’re struggling,” she encourages. “We can really dig deep into how you’re feeling and help you feel better around grief.”

Services like Grief Connect offer counselling options for people navigating loss, whether connected to personal experiences or emotions stirred by public events.

A Reminder: Your Feelings Are Valid

Celebrity grief may seem unusual at first glance, but psychology tells us otherwise. Human beings are wired for connection – and stories, music, film, and shared cultural moments create meaningful emotional bonds. 

If you’ve ever felt unexpectedly emotional after a public loss, you’re not alone. Those feelings simply reflect the ways stories and people shape our lives, memories, and hearts. And sometimes, even a one-sided connection can remind us just how deeply we are capable of caring.

Article supplied with thanks to Sonshine.

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Melanie’s parents divorced when she was 8 years old and her father moved out. Six years later, her mum was diagnosed with brain cancer. The cancer was aggressive and had already spread through her body. Over the coming year, Melanie’s mum was in and out of hospital, being treated with different therapies but with little success. The cancer was progressing fast and the prognosis was dismal.

Questions now turned to Melanie’s future. She was 14 years old and unable to fend for herself. Living with her father was not an option so the decision was made for Melanie to move in with her Aunt Anni.

Hurting, Angry and Finished with God

From then on, Melanie started visiting her aunt’s home regularly. Aunt Anni was a Christian and took her to church where she heard about God, but it had little – if any – impact on her. She does remember one Sunday though.

On this occasion, an older woman testified to being miraculously healed of breast cancer. While everyone in the congregation celebrated, Melanie was enraged. What kind of God would heal an old woman while leaving a young mother to die and abandon her daughter? God became the ultimate enemy. Every night, Melanie cried into her pillow saturating it with tears of anger and hatred.

That summer, Melanie was sent away to a Christian camp. A day after she arrived, her mother’s condition deteriorated, and she was placed in an induced coma. Knowing that her mother could die at any moment and unable to reach her, the camp was the last place she wanted to be.

The Night God Showed Up

One night at the camp, Melanie couldn’t sleep. Thoughts of her mother’s impending death plagued her. Would she even be able to say goodbye? She stepped outside her tent and began to unleash her pain to God. She had so many questions. “Are you even real? I really hate you for doing this!”

Suddenly through her tears, Melanie had a vision. She saw her mother’s hospital room and knew that Jesus was standing beside her. Written across the scene of the vision like a subtitle was a bible reference: “Luke 23:43.”

Melanie didn’t know the Bible; nor did she know what the verse meant. Afterwards, she returned to the the tent and woke up the girl beside her: “Can you help me find Luke 23:43 in your Bible?”

There they read Luke’s words describing the scene of the two thieves on the cross next to Jesus – and then Jesus’ words to one of them: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Melanie looked at her watch. It was 1:45am. With the vision came a surge of hope. A deep sense of peace and security settled over her whole being. She was not alone. Even though she might be losing her mother, her home and friends, everything was going to be okay. For the first time in a long while, Melanie tucked herself into her sleeping bag and fell soundlessly asleep.

Hope After Goodbye

Next morning, Melanie was woken by one of the camp leaders. Melanie’s dad was on the phone. Her mum had passed away. Melanie had only one question; “What time did she die?” Her dad answered, “1:45am.”

In that moment, Melanie knew God had met her mum. But she also knew that God had met her.

When she arrived home, Melanie’s aunt Anni took her aside and shared her story. At 1.45am the morning her mother had died, Anni had woken to hear God say the same words as Melanie; “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

It was a turning point for Melanie’s life. All her questions fell away. Her anger dissolved. In the months to come, as she mourned the loss of her mother and faced all the adjustments that had to be made, Melanie was sustained by a deep sense of hope. She had lost her mother, but she had also found faith. She knew that God held both her mother and her in his hands.

Article supplied with thanks to God Conversations.

About the Author: Tania Harris is a pastor, speaker, author and the founder of God Conversations.

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Grief is an universal human experience – and yet it is commonly misunderstood. Many of my clients ask for help to move through or “fix” their grief.

When the sadness of grief lingers longer than expected or the waves don’t show any sign of letting up, it is common to worry that something has gone wrong.

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Why am I still feeling sad? Shouldn’t it be better by now?” – you’re not alone. In our culture of efficiency and quick fixes, grief can feel like an unnecessary interruption to our lives. Grief doesn’t follow a timeline. It doesn’t respond to pressure. In fact, the mismatch between what grief actually looks like and what you expect it to look like can produce unnecessary suffering.

In reality, grief isn’t a problem to fix. It’s a process to move through.

Grief is our mind and body’s natural response to losing someone or something precious. And when you stop trying to fix grief or force it away, this ends up being what you need to stop fighting ourselves and create space for your mind and body to do the healing they need.

In this blog, we’ll explore what this looks like.

The Hidden Message Behind Trying to “Fix” Grief

Seeing grief as something to be fixed may unintentionally send the message that what you’re feeling is ‘wrong’ in some way.

Grief provides a human, emotional response to loss that serves a necessary purpose – to work through the pain of the loss and adapt to a new reality.

When we try to “fix” grief, we unintentionally tell ourselves: “I shouldn’t be feeling this, something is wrong with me”.

What we stop trying to fix it, the message becomes: “This hurts and it’s allowed to hurt”.

Giving yourself permission to feel reduces suffering. You stop berating yourself for not recovering as fast as you’d like. You don’t force yourself to feel differently than you are. Instead, you can connect with what you’re truly feeling and start to meet yourself with compassion in the pain.

Grief Doesn’t Need to Disappear for Life to Move Forward

Many people want to “fix” their grief because they believe that life can get back on track only once grief is gone. It’s true that in the early stages grief can feel like it overwhelms every part of life. But as you move through your grief, allowing the waves to rise and fall naturally, your grief will change shape. Life will slowly expand around grief.

What this looks like is being able to feel sadness about the loss and still:

• Connect with friends and family
• Enjoy moments
• Laugh
• Work
• Plan for the future

Grief will come to coexist with life, rather than overwhelming it.

When You Stop Fixing Grief, You Start Tending to Yourself

Stopping trying to fix grief doesn’t mean totally surrendering to your emotions and taking no action. Rather it gives yourself the opportunity to shift from pressure to care. Just like you would naturally tend to a friend who’s experienced a big loss, you need the same love and care when you are grieving.

Treating yourself with compassion while you are grieving might look like:

• Letting grief show up in small, manageable amounts
• Asking what you need while the wave is here
• Acknowledging that pain can coexist with connection, meaning and joy

Those who are grieving might need a gentle reminder that their grief is a sign of love, not weakness. Their pace is perfect, they don’t have to rush anything. It’s human to want this pain to stop, but the part of you that’s hurting deserves gentleness, not pressure.

Grief isn’t something to get over. It’s something to grow around. If you give yourself the time, space and care that you need to heal, grief will become a part of your story but not your whole story. It will provide a way to honour what was lost without taking over what still remains.

Article supplied with thanks to The Centre for Effective Living.

About the Author: Lauren Chee is a psychologist who understands the importance of forming a caring therapeutic relationship with her clients, and uses evidence-based skills that can lead to positive and lasting change. She has a special interest in anxiety-related disorders, OCD, social skills, parenting and attachment, child mental health and learning difficulties.

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So much of chronic illness and disability is invisible to those around us. I have lived with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) for the past nineteen years and know the daily experience of having my body and brain’s capacity reduced, even though outwardly I might look like I am going okay.

This lived experience pairs with my part-time job as a counsellor, often working with people through grief. And grief is some of those invisible layers that all of us with chronic illness carry.

The layers of grief we experience when living with chronic illness

Grief happens to us when we experience any ending, change, injustice, death, a lacking, a loss or disconnection. Chronic illness contains most of those – there are so many changes, so many endings, so many losses that we experience.

Some of the unique things we grieve when living with chronic illness are:

• changes to our goals, life dreams and longer-term plans. So much of our life is
  now edited down into pockets of irregular energy and health
• loss of employment and income (plus the added medical costs)
• changes and losses to our mobility and freedom
• disconnection from social opportunities and friendships
• reduction of intimacy and sex
• loss of confidence in ourselves and our body
• a loss of identity and self-worth
• difficulty finding words to describe what is happening internally
• the unfairness of seeing others live full lives while ours is shrunken down
• loss of predictability – we don’t know what our health will be like day-to-day

What does grief look and feel like?

Grief is not just sadness and tears. Grief impact us physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and socially. It looks and feels different for each person – it is usually quite strong in the early weeks and months, as our whole system is having its world turned upside down.

It can feel like a shattering, filled with a range of emotions, foggy minds and additional exhaustion. It sucks!

What joins in with that is the wrestling – this is all the changes to how we function day-today, and that can take a long time to adjust to. There are the ‘why me?’ questions that arise.

These are normal and healthy to experience.

There is also the shaping. Given that our illness is long-term, we start to shape what our life looks like now, finding different yet still meaningful ways of engaging with our world. These elements of grief don’t follow a neat path, so it’s normal and expected to experience those layers regularly and at the same time.

So, given that grief is part of our experience, what can help us carry these layers of grief in a gentler way? Keep an eye out for part two of this blog where I’ll share with you practical strategies that I’ve found useful on my journey with chronic and invisible illness.

Article supplied with thanks to Kelli Kieselbach.

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Becky Galli has faced more loss than most of us could imagine: a brother’s sudden death, a painful divorce, raising children with special needs, the loss of a son at just 15, and a rare illness that left her paralysed.

“I was 20 when my brother died in a water skiing accident,” Becky said

“He lived for nine days. It was such shock.

“But I watched my parents grieve honestly – my father from the pulpit, my mother through quiet support groups – and I learnt there are different ways to move through pain.”

Becky says a combination of faith and intentional morning routines has helped her keep moving forward.

“It all started with a morning ritual,” Becky said.

“Lemon water, coffee, and five or six books I pick from for daily readings.”

Becky’s own book, Morning Fuel, was born out of that practice and offers a collection of daily encouragements to help others begin their day with clarity, honesty, and hope.

“When the plan isn’t possible anymore, you need to find a Plan B,” she says.

“It’s about asking, not ‘why me?’ but ‘how can I move forward from here?’”

That forward motion often begins with simple steps.

“I focus on progress,” Becky said.

“Even drinking enough water can be a goal when life feels overwhelming.

“Those small wins matter. They keep you going.”

Becky’s not one to pretend her bad days don’t exist, acknowledging faith isn’t a band-aid solution.

“I’ve had a personal relationship with God since I was six, but we haven’t always been on speaking terms,” Becky said.

“The good thing is, He can take it.”

In writing Morning Fuel Becky’s hope is that we would pause, breathe, and reconnect to God, and His purpose for us.

“I write because I believe life can be good, no matter what,” Becky said.

“And I’ve had a lot of ‘what’.”

Becky Galli’s Morning Fuel is out now.

Article supplied with thanks to Hope Media.

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About the Author: Laura Bennett is a media professional, broadcaster and writer from Sydney, Australia.

I’m not certain where the obscure title of today’s post comes from (it’s often attributed to Jamie Anderson) but I’ve been pondering it ever since I heard it as a throwaway comment in the wonderful Three Pines mystery series. “Grief is love with no place to go“.

Profound, isn’t it? I think it is usually accurate. But I also wonder if it can be reframed, so that the love we have within remains life serving, even joyous. Let me try to unpack what I’m thinking…

The Price of Loving Deeply

You’ve probably heard a similar sentiment expressed, that “Grief is the price you pay for loving.” It is often said as the consolation prize at funerals, and at many levels, it is completely true. The grief we experience when faced with the death of someone we love comes because of our haunting sense of loss. We slowly realise that an era is over, and that while there are memories to cherish, there are not new memories to make, or not with the person we have lost. Many people who grieve (probably most), continue to “talk” to the person they have lost – most often as an internal dialogue in their head, but sometimes out loud. I certainly often ask myself “I wonder what mum would say if she was facing this?” As I remind myself of her gentle wisdom, I often tone my response right down (because “kindness is never wrong”) and as people have sometimes thanked me for a generous response, the insight often dawns on me “mum, I think it is you they are actually thanking.”

When Love Turns Sour or Walks Away

Sometimes it is more complex. What if grief is the price we pay for loving, but finding it didn’t work out? Oh that can be tough, when our love has not been returned, or perhaps even worse, when the love that once turned towards us, now turns towards another. While some divorces are civil, many are bitter, and almost none are joyous. There is great grief when someone dies, but what if the person is very much alive, but has chosen to walk away? That love then has nowhere to go, and sometimes morphs into bitterness, cynicism even rage.

The Tangle of Mixed Emotions

If you want to add another layer of complexity, think what happens when unknown to most, the marriage has been breaking down for years, and then he (or she) dies. The guilt, the ambivalence, the muddled emotions – well it’s all very confusing, especially when everyone expects you to speak about your deceased partner as though they were a saint. The line between love and hate can be very fine and deeply confusing. It has left many afraid to ever try to love again. Where does your love go when the last time it set out, it bashed into a brick wall?

The Hope of Readdressed Love

Not all endings are the same. Strange as it sounds, we should be grateful when ours is “good grief” – the grief because someone deeply loved is with us no more. For if we have loved well, we have been deeply blessed.

Back to our opening line. “Grief is love with no place to go.” Yes, it does start like that. But love is meant to be outward. It can take years for our eyes to re-open and to see the many places our love can find an address. The heart is a spacious place, and finding room for another when one has gone, does not mean that the one replaces the other. It is possible to have both together without in any way being unfaithful to either the living or the dead. It’s about allowing love to grow.

Jesus Wept: A Grief That Transforms

If you are into Bible trivia, you’ll know the answer to the “what’s the shortest verse in the Bible?” question. It’s John 11:35 “Jesus wept.” The context is so interesting. Jesus wept when he was told that his friend Lazarus had died. Nothing surprising at that – it’s a natural human emotion at the news of a serious loss. True – but Jesus also knew that he was about to bring Lazarus back to life again. The news of his death was no surprise, for in John 11:11 Jesus had announced that he would wake Lazarus from his “sleep”. Verse 25 sees Jesus announce, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” So why does Jesus weep 10 verses later when invited to see Lazarus’ tomb?

Realistically, while many reasons are given, it is hard to know. You would have thought he would have some suppressed excitement – “everyone is so sad, but just wait till they see what I am about to do. What a party we will all soon be having.” And indeed, a few verses later (v44) Jesus is instructing that the alive again Lazarus has his grave clothes removed.

Of course Jesus is deeply empathetic – and like most empathetic people, catches and mirrors the emotion of those around. It is reassuring how deeply he identifies with our sadness. But he doesn’t stay in the sadness. He moves it towards resurrection hope. His own death is not far off. That too was a mixture of unbelievable grief followed by transformative joy. His disciples, who had loved him well, are prostrated with grief before his resurrection. Their grief was love with no place to go. But post resurrection, that love transformed the world.

There are many reasons why the love inside of us might feel trapped and without an address. But love is a creative and transforming force. It looks outwards. If, for whatever reason, your love feels abandoned and alone, own the pain, acknowledge the loss, but also allow a little spark to burn. Your love might one day morph into something that finds a home and helps build a more loving, hopeful world.

Article supplied with thanks to Brian Harris.

About the Author: Brian is a speaker, teacher, leader, writer, author and respected theologian who is founding director of the AVENIR Leadership Institute, fostering leaders who will make a positive impact on the world.

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