Grief and the Latino/a/x Community

Grief is often tangible and can take over a person’s life. Culturally speaking the Spanish-speaking community carries its grief in a very different way than the English-speaking community. This difference could have to do with the way that grief is talked about in those communities. For English speakers, grief is sadness related to a loss. You can grieve relationships, people, jobs, youth, etc. This externalizing concept of grief allows people to move through grief in a specific way. Grief is the expression of sadness that the thing that you loved is no longer available to you. The vessel that you used to put your love into is gone and now you have no place to put all that love and it turns to sadness. 

In Spanish grief is translated to pesadumbre, which is routed in the word pesado meaning heavy or weighty. This word reflects the burden of carrying your grief with you and living your life for those who have gone before you. 

There are other words for grief, such as gand dolor (great hurt), or tristeza/penna profunda (deep sadness), and while those translations do describe the pain and sadness that one experiences, I find that pesadumbre is a more accurate translation because it describes how many Latinx community members experience grief; not as an external thing, but as a burden to be carried with you. 

Easing this burden is not easy, and the strong family dynamics in a Latinx community can create an opportunity for profound healing. If a family is brought together to grieve and they are able to have open discussions about how you are feeling, creating a back-and-forth of equitable disclosure, normalizing the variety of grief responses and timelines and allowing each other to have a sense of hope can help heal the family. 

There can be a lack of expression in some family members over their grief, which may go unnoticed as the family group takes precedence over the individual. So while the overall resiliency of the family may be high, it does not take into consideration those who have trouble expressing their grief, which can lead to feelings of isolation. 

Processing grief is difficult for anyone. The loss of someone is hard. Loving someone and no longer having that person to love turns that unrequited love to sadness. You can honour that person by putting that love into a project to remember them. You can carry that person with you in your thoughts and in your intentions. You can write a letter to the person to tell them how you feel, or you can do an empty chair exercise to talk to that person. 

However you process your feelings, and however you honour the person know that they want you to live a healthy, whole life, without carrying your grief with you. Carry the love of that person and know that through you, that person continues to live. Your memories, your conversations, your love, hold that person close. Honour the dead without carrying the pesadumbre with you.