It seems like more and more grief experts are emerging in our country. Some better than others. I spoke to one this week. She was a complete expert on grief in children. You can probably understand why that makes me sit on the edge of my seat a little more. She had taken a course and completed it 14 days before. And now I’m not someone who thinks you can only get expertise from an education, but if you have no previous knowledge and completed your education 14 days prior, that doesn’t make you an expert.
She spoke passionately, though. About attachment, loss, what children need in times of grief. And I felt uncomfortable. Not because she was talking nonsense, but because I found it hard to place the obviousness of her expertise. As if a certificate suddenly earned you a seat at the round table of grief experts.
I asked where her experience came from. “Well, I’ve experienced loss myself,” she said. I get that. Loss shapes you, marks your outlook. But experiencing grief is not automatically counseling grief. Having a broken leg doesn’t make you an orthopedist.
There seems to be a hunger for titles. For the naming of something that demands silence, standing still, being present. Grief cannot be captured in learning objectives. Mourning is mud, not marble. And those who have moved through it, with open hands and modest steps, are the ones you recognize. Who whispers, instead of shouts.
I believe in people who started this work without first calling themselves “experts. Who spent years listening, asking, doing wrong, learning, starting over. Who don’t put themselves at the center, but the other person’s grief. To me, those are the real grief experts. Often without a business card, but with a backpack full of silences that speak.
What makes me an expert, she asked me next.
30 years of work experience, 20 years of research, international collaborations & trainings, reading a lot, making a lot of mistakes. To learn from that, to do better. Not to be sure, but to become less and less sure.
Maybe that is the core of true expertise in grief: to know how little is certain. How unique each story, each child, each grief response is. And how important it is to remain curious. Not to know, but to understand. And sometimes not even that.
I told her how I still feel trepidation when I meet parents who are terminally ill. How, despite all I know, I still have to swallow before I say anything. Because there is nothing that really comforts. That I have learned more often what not to do than what to do. And that sometimes I am silent. Silent. Because that’s often where the most space is.
She looked at me in surprise.
“But then it sounds like you don’t always know either,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said. “And that’s why I’m careful with the word ‘expert.’ Because sometimes it gets in my way. While the very not-knowing invites me to keep listening.”
Perhaps we should ask less about who is an expert, and more about who is willing to dig deeper.
