Note: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned

A Common Story Heard Over...

At our first meeting Gina described herself as “frozen by what happened” and unable to grieve. And she wanted to grieve.

For 10 years Gina had been her widowed mother’s main caregiver, providing a home and the emotional and financial support her mother needed. When her mother’s physical and cognitive health rapidly declined, Gina made the hard decision to move her mother into a memory care facility.

“Suddenly Mom had a hard time talking. She was falling a lot and all the sudden didn’t like food,” said Gina. “I knew I didn’t have the training or skills to help her any longer. I researched care facilities and found a place with a really good reputation. Mom died three months later. It turned out she had some kind of dementia that rapidly shrinks the brain which is why her health deteriorated so fast at the end.”

Gina hadn’t seen her brother Lance in over eight years. He never visited their mother or her, never called, never wrote. Unsure as to how to contact him, Gina sent Lance an email to an old email address informing him of their mother’s death and funeral details.

“At first I was relieved when Lance showed-up at the funeral,” said Gina. Her relief quickly turned to “horror” and “devastation” when Lance “in front of everyone started yelling ‘Mom would still be here if you hadn’t put her in that place’ and ‘Mom’s death is on you’. Since then I haven’t been able to cry or grieve for Mom. Whenever I think of her all that comes to mind is what happened at the funeral and what Lance said. That’s what I cry about.”

… and Over…

Carla’s 40-year-old husband Zack was hospitalized with an intestinal infection.

“It was shocking,” Carla told me, “how he seemed fine and his usual healthy self one day and then the next day I had to take him to the hospital because he was in so much pain.”

Two weeks later Carla was confronted with a harsh reality: her comatose husband was going to die due to multiple organ failure from an infection that was now out of control. “He wasn’t going to make it,” said Carla. “The doctor’s told me it was my decision when to turn off life support.”

It was a decision Zack’s parents couldn’t accept, compounding Carla’s grief by suggesting that “if only I had waited Zack would have been fine. Then they started thinking I wasn’t a fit mother to raise our son because I had let their son die. It was horrible.”

Carla wanted to mourn with her in-laws over their shared loss but couldn’t because “Their blaming froze me out. So I kept my grief to myself until I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I contacted you.”      

…and Over Again  

At an in-hospital family meeting a week before he died, my 89-year-old father-in-law Jerry was told by his doctor that he was “actively dying due to multiple organ failure.” As the predominant caregivers for Jerry, my husband Michael and I were unsurprised by what the doctor said and immediately put our energies toward securing a bed for Jerry at a hospice with a reputation for high-level compassionate care.

While Michael and I grasped the reality of Jerry’s imminent death, Michael’s brother Paul, and sister-in-law Kim, did not. (Or could not?) Their response to the doctor’s prognosis was to search for an in-patient rehabilitation care facility that would provide Jerry with some sort of turn-around cure.

As the doctor predicted, Jerry died peacefully seven days after our family meeting. I had been at the hospice all week long and was with Jerry when he died. Just before Jerry drew his last breath I called Michael at work and Paul at home to tell them to quickly come to the hospital as Jerry’s nurse believed Jerry would die within the next few hours; instead he died just a few minutes after my phone calls.  

Paul arrived at the hospice first. When he sat down across from me in the waiting room I thought he would commiserate with me over our family’s loss; instead he calmly and in a matter-of-fact way told me: “Kim thinks you killed Dad.” The cruelty of Paul’s words propelled me into a state of shock and speechlessness that for weeks rendered me unable to feel, cry or initiate the grieving process.

The Attitude of Blame

Blame is a common grief response, an attitude stemming from the emotion of anger and a desire to hold someone or something responsible for the discomfort and pain of loss - and even the loss itself.

In the context of grief, anger can sometimes take the form of guilt or shame or resentment. For example: Through our work together, Carla came to understand Lance’s accusations as a way to assuage his feelings of guilt and shame over being absent from his mother’s life for so long. And I came to accept Paul’s unkind words as a manifestation of his resentment at not having the skills and inner resources needed to be present to his father’s dying process – skills and inner resources I possessed.

Feelings of helplessness foster a sense of lack of control that can also lead to blame as a grief response as they did for Zack’s parents; they could do nothing to save Zack from the infection that ravaged his body and ultimately took his life and in their grief Carla became a target of blame for their loss.

Blame Complicates the Grieving Process - For the Blamer and the Blamed

Even when we think we are prepared for the finality of death we can find ourselves unable to cope skillfully with the intense emotions, unregulated thoughts and deeply uncomfortable physical sensations that are expressions of our inner pain. Directing our discomfort outward at others in the form of blame can act as a sort of emotional pressure release valve, providing temporary relief from inner discomfort.

The key word here is temporary, as holding onto blame as a predominant expression of loss hinders and complicates the blamer’s ability to process grief and can also serve to isolate the blamer from those who could be a source of comfort and support during mourning. Getting stuck in blame can keep the blamer stuck in grief – and grief needs to flow in order to heal.

Blame also hinders and complicates the grieving process for those who are blamed. For example, I, Carla and Gina all had to first work through grief regarding the pain and confusion (confusion can been seen here as a trauma response to being blamed) that arose when we became targets of blame before being able to turn our attention toward grieving the death of those we loved.  

The Blamer and Blamed - Different Roads to Healing

We all bring our history - what has gone before and who we are – to any loss experience. This means that grief is an individual experience different for everyone.

For some people, especially those like Paul and Kim prone to anger as a primary stress response, blame shows struggle with the reality of what has happened and was a stage of grief they had to navigate before undertaking the hard work of accepting the reality of loss. As I had been with my father-in-law throughout his decline, dying process and death, I accepted the reality of his death but still needed to process the deep sadness I felt at losing a man who had become a father to me.

Blame can also highlight that there is something unresolved that needs to be attended to. For example, for Gina’s brother, Lance, healing blaming feelings of guilt and shame were part of his grief-healing journey but not Gina’s who experienced no guilt or shame but rather a deep loneliness that someone who had been a constant presence in her life was no longer there. Healing loneliness was part of Gina’s grief-healing journey but not Lance’s.  

Letting go of the illusion that things should have somehow been different was a grieving task assigned to Zack’s parents by loss as was recognizing that the pain they felt was not necessarily anyone’s fault. It took time but Zack’s parents were eventually able to do this; letting go of blame opened the door to deeper relationships with Carla and her children, thereby lessening Carla’s burden of grief and her fears regarding navigating single parenthood without support from Zack’s parents.  

Blame is also more likely to arise when there are difficult family dynamics already in place as there were in all the examples I have cited.

Letting Go of Blaming or Being Blamed Can Move Us Forward

Whether we are blaming or blamed, learning to sit with the uncomfortable emotions, thoughts and physical manifestations of grief is part of the work before us as we navigate the four tasks of mourning:

  1. Acceptance of the reality of loss.
  2. Processing the pain of grief.
  3. Adjusting to a world without the deceased.
  4. Finding an enduring connection with the deceased/ moving forward with loss.

Learning to be with - sit with – uncomfortable emotions can take many forms such as:

  • Prayer
  • Meditation
  • Doing healing place and other calming and renewing guided visualizations
  • The practice of self-compassion techniques
  • HeartMath techniques
  • Mindfulness practices
  • and more…

Learning to let go of the attitude of blame or the fallout of having been blamed may require seeking help from a grief support professional (someone who can act as witness to our pain), so that grief does not remain complicated, compounded or unprocessed.

Learning to let go of blame or being blamed can help us to find healing as we traverse our individual experience of grief.  

Related Blog Posts

The Process of Accepting Difficult Grief Emotions
Part IV: The Healing Power of Art – Visual Journaling
How to Deal with Difficult Family Dynamics at End-of-Life
Healing Regret after the Death of a Loved One
Grief – Am I Doing It Right?
Grief Composting
Mindful Self-compassion is Essential Self-care for Grief
The Four Tasks of Mourning

July 2025