The Event May Be Collective. The Grief Is Still Personal.
There are some losses that feel deeply personal, even when they aren't technically ours to grieve.
We experienced this during the pandemic. We have felt it here in Alberta. And many of us are feeling it again with the death of Dolly Parton.
Why can the death of someone we've never met bring tears to our eyes? Why can the story of a child we've never known leave us checking the news, thinking about our own children, or feeling an unexpected heaviness in our chest?
We call this collective grief. And sometimes, collective grief finds its way into our own lives in ways we don't expect.
When the whole world was grieving
During the COVID-19 pandemic, grief became something we shared.
We weren't only grieving the people we lost. We were grieving routines, celebrations, graduations, vacations, physical connection, financial security, and a sense of certainty.
We were grieving the loss of normal.
As a parent, I felt that loss in very specific ways as I missed out on two of my children's graduations.
These weren't simply ceremonies. They represented years of work, growth, anticipation and the opportunity to stand beside my children as they crossed important thresholds in their lives.I knew they were still graduating. I knew their accomplishments were still real. But something was missing.
There was no gathering of family in quite the same way. We did the best we could, with a drive thru grad for a daughter and a smaller, more intimate grad in the school parking lot for my son. But it wasn’t the same.
It was a small piece of a much larger collective loss, but it was still my loss.
And that's one of the things I have come to understand about collective grief:
A shared experience doesn't make our individual grief any less personal.
Then Calgary waited for Parker
More recently, our city experienced another kind of collective grief.
When Parker went missing, something happened across Calgary that was difficult to put into words. People who had never met him began looking, sharing information, watching for updates and hoping alongside his family.
For many parents, the story felt particularly close to home. We imagined our own children and the phone call we never want to receive. We imagined the unbearable uncertainty of not knowing where a child was.
And when the search came to its tragic conclusion, many people felt something shatter.
Most of us had never met Parker. But we had hoped for him. We had watched and waited, and wanted the story to end differently. That is the strange and powerful thing about collective grief: we don't have to personally know someone to be affected by their loss.
And when the person who is lost is a child, the grief can reach even deeper. It can touch our sense of safety, our identity as parents, and the belief that terrible things happen somewhere else, to someone else.
A community can grieve a person it never knew.
And then there is Dolly
Just this week Dolly Parton died and I found myself experiencing this one differently.
Perhaps that's because Dolly was never simply a celebrity to me, but she has been part of my story since before I even knew what her story was.
My dad heard Dolly's song Jolene and decided that was what he and my mom were going to name me.
Jolene.
So when Dolly died, there was a strange intimacy to the loss.I have spent my entire life carrying a name that began with her music. I have been sung to, too many times to count!
Of course, I didn't know Dolly. But her voice and that song have been connected to my identity for as long as I can remember.
And there is another piece of Dolly's story that feels particularly personal to me.
At Off the Beaten Path, we are educators too.
So Dolly's commitment to children and literacy has always resonated with me. Her Imagination Library, which has provided free books to children, represents something we deeply value: the belief that a book can open a door for a child. That access to stories, imagination and learning can change the trajectory of a life.
As an educator, that part of her legacy hits differently. She wasn't simply entertaining people, but was literally putting books into children's hands.
So perhaps I am grieving more than a musician. I'm grieving for someone whose work intersected with parts of my own identity: a woman whose music gave me my name and whose commitment to children and literacy touched something I have spent much of my own life caring about.
And I know I'm not alone in that experience.
For so many people, Dolly Parton wasn't simply a musician. She was part of the soundtrack of their lives. Maybe her songs remind you of your parents. Maybe you watched 9 to 5 with friends. Maybe you remember hearing her music in the car as a child. Maybe you admired her humour, kindness, generosity or unapologetic authenticity. When someone like that dies, we're not necessarily grieving the loss of a relationship.We're grieving a piece of our collective memory.
And sometimes, a collective loss opens the door to our own personal memories.
For me, Dolly's death brought me back to my dad.
It reminded me that before I was a mother, before I was a teacher and a psychologist, before I was all the things I have become, I was simply the little girl whose dad heard a song and thought, That's her name.
That's what grief can do. It connects the present to the past.
Why does this happen?
Humans are social beings. We make meaning through relationships, memories and the communities we belong to.
When something significant happens to a community, we don't experience it entirely on our own. We look around and discover that other people are feeling it too.
"I'm not the only one who feels this."
That recognition can be incredibly powerful. Collective grief can create connection and solidarity. It can remind us that we belong to something larger than ourselves.
But it can also be confusing. We might wonder:
"Why am I this upset? I didn't even know them."
Or:
"Other people have it much worse. I shouldn't be feeling this way."
But grief isn't a competition. There is no hierarchy of grief deciding which losses we are allowed to feel. Sometimes an event simply touches something inside us. A pandemic may remind us of what we lost. A missing child may awaken our deepest parental fears. A celebrity's death may take us straight back to childhood; or to someone we loved who is already gone.
The event may be collective. The grief is still personal.
When collective grief becomes something more
For most of us, collective grief will gradually settle. We talk about what happened, remember those who were lost, reconnect with our lives and slowly make room for the experience alongside everything else we carry.
But sometimes collective grief activates something older. A public tragedy can bring back a previous trauma. A death can reopen an earlier loss.
The pandemic may have left grief that we never had the opportunity to properly process.
A missed milestone may seem insignificant compared with everything that happened during those years, but we may still carry sadness about what we didn't get to experience.
And sometimes we don't even realize that something remains unresolved until another event touches the same emotional place.
This is where therapy can help.
At Off the Beaten Path Psychology & Wellness, we recognize that grief isn't always straightforward. It doesn't always happen after someone close to us dies, and it doesn't always happen in isolation.
Sometimes we are grieving something that happened to us. Sometimes we are grieving something that happened to our community. And sometimes the two become intertwined.
Counselling can provide a place to slow things down, understand what has been activated, process unresolved grief or trauma, and develop the resources needed to move forward without having to erase what mattered.
You don't have to wait until grief becomes overwhelming to reach out. Sometimes therapy isn't about getting over something. Sometimes it's about understanding why it touched you so deeply and finding a way to carry it differently.
The pandemic taught us that an entire world can grieve together. Parker reminded Calgary that a community can hold hope, and heartbreak, together. And Dolly reminded many of us that a person we've never met can still become part of our personal story. For me, she was quite literally part of mine.
The event may be collective. The grief is still personal. And maybe that's what collective grief ultimately tells us: We are far more connected than we realize.
This blog was written by Jolene Siemens, Registered Psychologist | Off the Beaten Path Psychology and Wellness | Airdrie, Calgary, and Cochrane, Alberta
At Off the Beaten Path Psychology, we provide counselling and therapy services to individuals, couples, and families in Airdrie, Calgary, and Cochrane, Alberta. Our team supports anxiety, burnout, relationship challenges, and trauma recovery. Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your mental health journey.