Powerful examples of exploring grief in personal essays

Real-world examples of exploring grief in personal essays

Let’s start where the pain actually lives: in the scenes, not the summaries. The strongest examples of exploring grief in personal essays don’t begin with, “I was very sad when my father died.” They start with the moment you couldn’t find his slippers, or the way the nurse kept calling him “sir” when he hated formalities.

Think of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking (published as a memoir but written with the intimacy of a personal essay). She doesn’t just tell you her husband died. She walks you through the dinner table, the overturned shoes, the medical jargon, and her own irrational belief that he might come back. That’s a textbook example of how grief lands in details before it ever becomes insight.

When you’re looking for examples of examples of exploring grief in personal essays, pay attention to how writers:

• Anchor big feelings in small, specific moments
• Let the narrative wander through time the way memory actually does
• Allow contradictions—love and anger, guilt and relief—to sit side by side

The goal isn’t to imitate Didion or anyone else, but to notice the patterns in the best examples and adapt them to your own voice.

Examples of grief on the page: eight concrete scenarios

Let’s walk through some grounded, story-ready scenarios. Each one is an example of how grief can be explored in a personal essay without turning into a flat sob story.

1. The grief that shows up in ordinary chores

One of the quietest, yet best examples of exploring grief is the “after” moment: doing something totally normal that suddenly isn’t normal anymore.

Imagine you’re cleaning out your grandmother’s fridge a week after her funeral. You find her half-finished jar of jam, the brand she always bought, with her handwriting on the lid. You have to decide whether to throw it away.

A personal essay here doesn’t need grand speeches about mortality. The power comes from describing the color of the jam, the smell when you open the jar, the way your hand hesitates over the trash can. This kind of scene is a strong example of how grief hides in tasks we don’t think of as emotional.

2. The grief of complicated relationships

Not every loss is clean. Sometimes you’re mourning someone you also resented, feared, or barely knew. These are some of the most compelling examples of exploring grief in personal essays because they push against the pressure to speak only well of the dead.

Picture a writer whose estranged father dies. They haven’t spoken in ten years. At the funeral, everyone talks about what a generous man he was, while the writer remembers slammed doors and unanswered calls. The essay might move between the eulogies being read and flashbacks to childhood arguments.

Instead of forcing a moral, the writer lets the conflict stand: “I don’t know how to grieve a man I spent my adult life avoiding.” That sentence alone is a sharp example of honest grief on the page.

3. The grief of “non-death” losses

Some of the best examples of grief essays aren’t about death at all. They’re about divorce, infertility, a lost friendship, a body that no longer works the way it used to.

Take the writer who learns they will never be able to carry a pregnancy. They’re not grieving a specific person, but a future they imagined. The essay might describe sitting in the parking lot after the doctor’s appointment, watching other people walk in casually, as if this building doesn’t hand out life-changing news.

Here, the narrative can weave in outside information—maybe a brief reference to how common pregnancy loss and infertility are, citing data from the CDC—to show the writer’s grief is personal but not isolated. This is an example of how research can deepen, not dilute, an emotional story.

4. The grief that arrives late

Another powerful example of exploring grief in personal essays is delayed grief—the kind that shows up months or years after the event.

Imagine someone who loses a sibling in their twenties but stays “strong” for the family. Ten years later, they’re in a grocery store and see their sibling’s favorite cereal. Suddenly they’re crying in aisle seven, embarrassed and confused.

An essay like this can move between the present-day breakdown and the earlier, more stoic version of the self. The contrast becomes the story: “Why am I crying now, when I didn’t cry at the funeral?” This is one of the best examples of how to explore grief as something that doesn’t obey timelines.

5. The grief of caretaking and anticipatory loss

There’s also the long, slow grief of watching someone fade—through dementia, chronic illness, or addiction. The National Institute on Aging talks about “anticipatory grief,” the mourning that begins before death actually happens.

Picture a writer whose mother has Alzheimer’s. The essay might center on a single visit to the nursing home. The mother mistakes the writer for a nurse, then for her own sister. The writer goes along with it for a while, then slips and calls her “Mom,” shattering the illusion.

This scene becomes an example of exploring grief in personal essays by showing how the writer is already grieving the mother she knew, even though the woman is still physically alive. The loss is repeated every visit.

6. The grief of identity change

Sometimes grief is about who you used to be. A former athlete after a disabling injury. A person leaving a high-control religious community. A worker laid off from a job that defined their sense of self.

Imagine a chef who loses their sense of taste and smell after a severe illness. The Mayo Clinic and other sources have documented lingering sensory loss after viral infections, including COVID-19, which can completely reshape daily life (Mayo Clinic overview).

In an essay, the chef might describe cooking by memory instead of taste, relying on other people’s reactions. They’re grieving not just a career but a way of experiencing the world. This is a subtle example of grief, but no less intense than a funeral scene.

7. The grief wrapped in humor

Some of the best examples of exploring grief in personal essays use humor—not to minimize the pain, but to survive it.

Think of a writer whose family copes with loss by making wildly inappropriate jokes at the wake. The essay might recount the moment someone balances a beer on top of the urn, or the aunt who says, “He’d be mad if we played sad music; put on Springsteen.”

The humor doesn’t cancel the grief; it sits right next to it. The writer can show how laughter feels like betrayal one second and relief the next. This kind of tonal mix is a vivid example of how grief actually sounds in many families.

8. The grief of collective loss

In the last few years, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing global conflicts, more personal essays have tackled collective grief—mourning strangers, communities, or ways of life.

A writer might describe scrolling through social media in 2020, seeing daily death counts and memorial posts, and realizing they’re grieving people they never met. Or they might write about climate-related disasters—wildfires, floods—and the grief of losing a hometown landscape.

Here, the essay can braid personal story with data, maybe pointing to mental health resources from the National Institute of Mental Health to show how widespread trauma and grief responses have become. This is one of the clearest recent examples of exploring grief in personal essays that are rooted in 2024–2025 realities.

Techniques drawn from the best examples of grief essays

If you study real examples of exploring grief in personal essays, certain craft moves show up again and again. You can borrow these without copying anyone’s story.

Ground big feelings in one vivid scene

Instead of starting with, “Losing my brother changed everything,” start with the moment you ironed his shirt for the funeral, or the last text he sent that you never answered.

The best examples include:

• A specific setting (the hospital hallway that always smells like lemon cleaner)
• A sensory hook (the weight of the folded flag, the squeak of church shoes)
• A small, concrete action (deleting a contact, canceling a subscription, packing up a desk)

From there, you can zoom out to reflection, but the reader needs a doorway into your feeling—and that doorway is almost always a scene.

Let time be messy

Real grief doesn’t move in a straight line. The old five stages model is widely misunderstood; modern research shows grief is more like a looping, unpredictable process (NIMH overview on grief).

Strong examples of examples of exploring grief in personal essays jump between past and present, between “before” and “after.” You might:

• Start in the present, then flash back to the moment of loss
• Use an object (a voicemail, a shirt, a recipe) as a time machine
• Move forward to show who you are years later, still shaped by that loss

This non-linear structure mirrors the way grief pops up unexpectedly, which readers recognize as emotionally true.

Tell the emotional truth, even if it’s not flattering

In many of the best examples, writers confess to thoughts they’re not proud of: relief that a long illness is over, envy of people who still have their parents, boredom at a funeral service.

These “unacceptable” feelings are often what make an essay unforgettable. If you’re looking for real examples of exploring grief in personal essays that land with readers, notice how often the writer admits, “I didn’t cry,” or “I was angry at the wrong person,” or “I was thinking about lunch during the eulogy.”

Your job isn’t to present a polished version of yourself; it’s to show the raw, contradictory human being you were in that moment.

Use structure to echo the feeling

Some writers use fragmented paragraphs, white space, or repeated lines to mirror the disorientation of grief. Others structure the essay around a ritual—each section named after part of a funeral service, a medical form, or a recipe the person used to make.

For example, an essay about a lost friend might be broken into sections named after the songs on a playlist they shared. Each section tells a story tied to that song. The structure becomes another example of how to explore grief in personal essays in a way that feels fresh and personal.

Prompt-style examples to spark your own grief essay

If you’re not just analyzing examples of exploring grief in personal essays but trying to write one, prompts can help you slip past the pressure to be profound.

Try building an essay around one of these starting points:

• The last ordinary day: Write about the very last normal day before everything changed, without mentioning the loss until the end.
• The object you can’t throw away: Focus on a single item—ticket stub, voicemail, sweater—that you’ve kept. Let your memories spiral out from there.
• The thing you never said: Build the essay around a sentence you wish you’d spoken. Let each paragraph be another version of that missed conversation.
• The ritual that saved you (or didn’t): Maybe it’s a religious ceremony, a daily walk, a playlist, therapy, or journaling. Show how it helped—or failed—to hold you together.
• The moment you realized you were still alive: The first laugh after the funeral. The first time you noticed the weather again. Explore the guilt and relief tangled up in that.

Each of these is an example of how to frame grief without starting from the heaviest part. You sneak up on it sideways, which often feels safer and more honest.

FAQ: examples of exploring grief in personal essays

Q: What are some strong examples of exploring grief in personal essays I can read?
Look for Joan Didion’s writing on loss, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay collection Notes on Grief, and contemporary pieces in outlets like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Modern Love in The New York Times. These are widely cited as some of the best examples of literary grief narratives.

Q: How personal is “too personal” when writing about grief?
Ask yourself: will I regret sharing this in a year? Am I exposing someone else’s secrets, or just my own? Many real examples of grief essays protect certain details—names, locations, medical specifics—while still telling the emotional truth.

Q: Can I write about grief if the person hasn’t died (for example, after a breakup or estrangement)?
Absolutely. Many of the most powerful examples of exploring grief in personal essays focus on non-death losses: divorce, lost communities, identity shifts, even moving away from a beloved place. Grief is about attachment and change, not only death.

Q: Is it okay to include humor in an essay about grief?
Yes. Some of the best examples include moments that are painfully funny. As long as you’re not mocking the person who died or someone else’s pain, humor can make the essay feel more real and more readable.

Q: How do I avoid clichés when writing about grief?
Skip phrases like “time heals all wounds” and “I was devastated.” Instead, show what that devastation looked like at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. The more specific you are, the less your essay will sound like anyone else’s.

If you take anything from these examples of exploring grief in personal essays, let it be this: you don’t have to sound wise, healed, or poetic. You just have to be specific, honest, and willing to sit with the parts that don’t resolve neatly. That’s where the real story lives.