When We Skip the Goodbye: Why Grief Needs a Place to Land

It comes from a place of love. A desire to honour a wish, to keep things simple, to spare people the formality of a gathering they might not have wanted. And that impulse is not wrong. But there is something important that often goes unconsidered in that decision — something that has less to do with the person who died, and everything to do with the people still living with the loss.

A Service Was Never Really for the Person Who Died

This is perhaps the most important reframe in how we think about funerals, memorial services, and gatherings of remembrance. The ritual of farewell is not for the deceased. It is for the living — for the people who are now tasked with carrying a loss they didn’t choose and weren’t fully prepared for.

Grief doesn’t disappear because we keep things simple. It doesn’t respect our attempts to be practical, to ‘not make a fuss’, or to move through loss as quietly as possible. It waits. And while it waits, it finds places to sit — in unspoken goodbyes, in stories that were never shared, in a love that had no formal moment to be expressed.



Honouring the wish of someone who didn’t want a service is a beautiful act of love. But it doesn’t have to mean honouring it at the expense of your own need to grieve.

What Happens When We Skip the Pause

There is a growing body of understanding — both in psychology and in lived experience — around what happens to grief when it isn’t given somewhere to go. The short answer is: it doesn’t go away. It goes sideways.

When we skip the collective pause that a service or gathering provides, grief tends to surface later in ways we don’t immediately connect back to the loss. It shows up as exhaustion that doesn’t make sense. As irritability, or emotional numbness, or a low sadness that arrives months down the track with no obvious cause. As an inability to talk about the person who died without feeling like you’re breaking open.

Grief researchers often describe this as ‘unprocessed’ or ‘delayed’ grief — not because the emotion wasn’t felt, but because it was never given a container. It was never witnessed. And grief, more than almost any other human experience, needs to be witnessed to move through us properly.

The people we love deserve to be mourned. And so do we — because the part of us that loved them needs tending to as well.

Remembrance Doesn’t Have to Mean Tradition

One of the reasons families defer to a loved one’s wish to skip a service is that the word ‘service’ itself can feel heavy. Formal. A procession of things one is supposed to do in a certain order in a certain place.

But intentional remembrance can take any shape you need it to. A small gathering at home with the people who loved her most. A walk to somewhere that mattered to him, followed by a shared meal. A private ritual — just family, just one quiet afternoon, just a moment where everyone is allowed to say the things they might not otherwise say.

None of these things contradict the wish to keep things simple. What they do is honour something equally important: the relationship. The love. The fact that this person existed, and mattered, and left a mark on the people who are still here.



A moment of intentional remembrance — however quiet, however private — gives grief somewhere to exist. And it gives love somewhere to be spoken out loud, perhaps for the last time.

The Heart Needs What the Mind Is Still Processing

In the days immediately following a death, the mind is often in a kind of protective fog. There are logistics to manage, calls to make, practical decisions that demand attention. It can feel like you are coping well — because in a way, you are. The busyness of loss keeps you moving.

But the heart works on a different timeline. It processes slowly, in layers, and it needs landmarks along the way — moments that mark the transition from before to after. A gathering, a service, a ceremony of any kind serves as one of those landmarks. It is a line drawn in time that says: this happened. We are acknowledging it, together.

Without that moment, grief can linger in a kind of liminal space — unanchored, unresolved, present but shapeless. The mind knows the person is gone. The heart is still waiting for the moment it’s allowed to respond.



Giving Love the Space It Deserves

Avoiding a service doesn’t eliminate grief. It only postpones the moment grief asks to be felt. And grief, sooner or later, always asks.

Honouring someone’s life — in whatever way feels right, however small or informal — is not about doing more than they wanted. It is about recognizing that the people left behind need somewhere to begin. Somewhere to say goodbye. Somewhere to be held in the presence of others who understand what has been lost.

What would feel right for the people you love? If you're sitting with that question, we're here to help you answer it — in a way that honours both the person who has passed and the people still here. When you’re ready… we’re here.