There Is No Value in the Loss. There Is Value in Remembering.

This is a personal reflection. The research cited is part of the public record; the experiences described are my own and those of people close to me. It is not a substitute for professional support.

Almost a year ago, on October 10, 2025, I lost my brother-in-law to cancer. He had been diagnosed with adenosquamous carcinoma of the gallbladder duct, and it had already spread to his liver. Once a cancer like that has spread, its usual course is measured in months, often around six. We thought we had that much time. We had a little more than six weeks.

I was devastated. I still hurt when I think of him, and I think of him often. I am no longer in the constant, low, unrelenting pain of those first months. But the loss still strikes me hard, without warning, several times a month. Something brings him to mind, and it lands all over again.

This is not an article about how to stop grieving. I do not believe that is possible, or even the goal. It is about something I have learned, slowly and against my will, from my own loss and from watching someone I care about carry his for decades.

Two Goodbyes He Never Got to Say Properly

A family friend has lost not one partner, but two. In the mid-1990s, his wife was killed suddenly in a car accident. There was no warning and no chance to say goodbye. Years later, in the 2000s, he found love again, and his long-term partner died of cancer. That loss came more slowly, but no less cruelly.

I have watched him carry both losses for decades. I do not know whether a clinician would call what he has lived with "prolonged grief." I know that it has lasted, and that it has shaped him. Research would not be surprised. Losing a partner, and being unprepared for the death, are both recognized risk factors for grief that does not ease with time.¹ Studies of the bereaved suggest that roughly one in ten people develop prolonged grief after a death from natural causes, and that the rate is far higher, by some estimates close to half, after sudden and unnatural deaths such as accidents.¹ He has lived through both kinds.

Drowning in the Loss, or Letting Yourself Hurt

There is a difference, I have come to believe, between drowning in a loss and letting yourself hurt when you miss someone. Drowning is living inside the loss all the time, every day organized around the absence. Letting yourself hurt is different. It means feeling the grief fully when it comes, without fighting it or apologizing for it, and then, when it passes, letting yourself come back up for air.

Grief researchers have a name for something very like this. In 1999, psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut described what they called the Dual Process Model of grief. They found that people who grieve in a healthy way do not simply march through stages. They move back and forth between two modes: Leaning into the loss, by remembering, yearning and crying, and turning back toward life, by working, adjusting and finding new routines. Both are necessary. Over time, the balance slowly shifts toward life, but the visits to the loss never fully stop, and they are not supposed to.²

That is why the hard moments that still hit me several times a month are not a sign that I am failing to heal. They are part of healing. What would worry me is never being able to come back up for air. Grief experts now recognize a condition called prolonged grief disorder, for when, a year or more after a death, intense longing for the person or preoccupation with them dominates most days and makes ordinary life impossible.³ If that sounds like you, it is not a weakness. It is a sign to reach out for help, and help works.

No Value in the Loss, Value in the Remembering

There is no value in losing someone. I will not pretend there is a silver lining to watching a good man die in six weeks. Nothing about his death was worth anything.

But there is value in remembering what he meant to me. For much of the twentieth century, the common advice was that healthy grief meant letting go of the dead. Since the 1990s, researchers have largely rejected that idea. In their 1996 book Continuing Bonds, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman argued that maintaining a changed but ongoing connection with the person who died is a normal and often healthy part of grief, and one of the forms it takes is carrying the person's qualities forward into our own lives.⁴

So here is what my brother-in-law was: Always willing to help; always forthright, without being rude; always welcoming, and always thankful.

It is precisely the man he was that makes the pain hurt so damn much. The hurt is the measure of what he was worth. If he had been less, it would hurt less, and I would not trade the hurt for a smaller memory of him.

What I have gained is not something from his death. It is something I now understand about his life: How important he was to me, and how much of what I value in people, he simply was. The best way I know to honour that is to try to be a little more of it myself. Willing to help. Honest without being cruel. Welcoming. Thankful.

The Loss You Can Help Prevent

There is one kind of loss I want to speak to directly, because it is among the most severe a person can suffer, and because some of it can be prevented: Losing a child in a car crash. Research on grief consistently finds that the death of a child is one of the strongest risk factors for grief that never eases.¹ When a parent feels that a choice they made played a part, the guilt can make that grief almost unbearable.

If you have already lived through that, this section is not written to blame you. No parent buys a car expecting it to take their child. It is written for the parents who still have a decision ahead of them.

Part of recovering from any loss is knowing you did everything you could. So do not put yourself in a position of regret, should the worst case ever play out. That is not blame. It is simply recognizing that our choices have consequences, and that some of them are ours to make before it is too late.

Sooner or later, a teenager with a new licence will ask for a Mustang or a BMW as a first car. In my view, that is one request every parent should ignore. Not because those are bad cars, but because they are the wrong cars to learn on. You can be the cool parent without your child. Or you can just be a parent, and still have them.

New drivers are at real risk. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), drivers aged 16 to 19 have a fatal crash rate per mile driven about three times that of drivers 20 and older. In 2024, 2,899 American teenagers died from crash injuries. Immaturity leads to speeding and risky habits, and inexperience means teens often do not recognize or know how to respond to hazards.⁵

Choose power they can actually use. This does not mean the slowest car on the lot. A new driver needs a balance of power and torque they can use to learn how a car behaves, how it brakes, turns and feels on a wet road: Enough to merge and pass with confidence, but not so much that a heavy right foot outruns their judgment. The IIHS's annual list of recommended vehicles for teens deliberately avoids "high-horsepower vehicles that can encourage risky driving," along with very small cars that protect their occupants poorly.⁶

The electronic nannies help, but they are not enough. Electronic stability control, which helps keep a car from skidding out of control, reduces the risk of a fatal single-vehicle crash by about half.⁷ But every vehicle on the IIHS teen list already has it, and the IIHS still recommends avoiding high-horsepower cars.⁶ These systems can catch a mistake. They cannot make up for a new driver going too fast for a corner they have never taken before.

Look hard at frontal crash ratings. Frontal impacts are the deadliest kind of crash: In 2024, they accounted for 59 per cent of all passenger vehicle occupant deaths in the United States.⁸ Look for top marks in frontal crash tests from both the IIHS and the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Every vehicle on the IIHS teen list earns a "good" rating in one of the toughest frontal tests and weighs more than 2,750 pounds, because heavier vehicles generally protect their occupants better.⁶ Most vehicles sold in Canada are also sold in the United States, so Canadian parents can use the same ratings. The 2026 list includes affordable choices such as the Mazda 3 and, used, the Hyundai Tucson from 2022 to 2025.⁶

And make sure they buckle up, every time. Of the people killed in frontal crashes in 2024, fewer than half were wearing a seatbelt.⁸

Let the car enforce the rules. In my view, any car driven by a new or young driver should be set up, through its own settings, to limit its top speed and to refuse to shift into drive or reverse until the driver's seatbelt is buckled. Wearing a seatbelt is the law in every Canadian province and territory,⁹ and every U.S. state requires it for drivers under 18, even New Hampshire, the only state without a seatbelt law for adults.¹⁰ It is the law, so make it so.

Some of this already exists. Ford's MyKey lets parents cap a teen driver's top speed at between 65 and 80 miles per hour, and mutes the audio system until the front-seat occupants buckle up.¹¹ General Motors' Buckle to Drive, part of its Teen Driver mode, stops the driver from shifting out of park for up to 20 seconds if their belt is not fastened; when Chevrolet tested it, seatbelt use rose 16 per cent over a warning chime alone.¹² But every manufacturer does it differently, some features only delay rather than prevent, and many parents never learn they exist.

We already have parental controls on phones, televisions, games and the Internet, all of them far less dangerous than a car. None of this needs to be invented. It needs to be required. In my view, a standardized new-driver mode should be mandated by law as standard equipment on every new vehicle sold in Canada and the United States: A top-speed limit, a seatbelt lock that will not let the car be put in gear until the driver is buckled, and a personal release code so a parent can lift the limits when they need the car themselves.

There is a lesson from history in how to do this. In 1974, the United States required seatbelt interlocks on every new car. The backlash was so intense that Congress banned the requirement within the year.¹³ The difference is that this law would require every new vehicle to include the feature, not force it on every driver. It would be switched on for new drivers, by their own parents, with an override for adults. That is not government overreach. It is a parent using the controls that should already be there.

A good first car is one your teenager can learn in, make mistakes in and walk away from. The Mustang can wait. If they still want one in a few years, when they know how to drive, they can buy it themselves, and you will both be there to see it.

If You Are Grieving

Let it come when it comes. Do not apologize for missing someone, even years later. The waves do not mean you are stuck; they mean you loved someone. Talk about the person who died, and say their name out loud. And if the grief stops letting you breathe, reach out.

Where to Find Support

Grief counselling and support groups exist on both sides of the border, and many are free. A good first step in either country is your family doctor, who can refer you to grief counselling, and if you have one, your employer's assistance program, which often includes free, confidential counselling sessions.

In Canada:

AboutGrief.ca, run by the Canadian Grief Alliance, is Canada's bilingual national grief portal, with a searchable listing of more than 400 grief programs and services across the country.¹⁴ MyGrief.ca, from the Canadian Virtual Hospice, is a free online program for grieving adults, built with people who have lost someone and grief specialists.¹⁵ In Ontario, Bereaved Families of Ontario has offered free peer support groups and one-to-one support since 1978, with chapters across the province.¹⁶ Local hospices across Canada also run bereavement programs, many of them free; the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association keeps a national list of grief resources.¹⁷ To find a grief counsellor or psychologist near you, directories such as Psychology Today let you search by city for therapists who specialize in grief.¹⁸

In the United States:

If the person who died was in hospice care, the hospice is required under Medicare to offer bereavement support to the family for at least 13 months after the death, at no cost. That can include phone check-ins, counselling and support groups. Call the hospice and ask.¹⁹ GriefShare runs weekly grief support groups, in person and online, in communities across the country; it is a Christian-based program, and local groups often charge a small registration fee.²⁰ The Association for Death Education and Counseling has a searchable directory of professionals who specialize in grief.²¹ Psychology Today's directory also lists grief therapists by city.¹⁸ And SAMHSA's National Helpline, at 1-800-662-4357, is free, confidential and open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and can refer you to local counselling and support groups.²²

If grief ever brings thoughts of not wanting to go on, call or text 9-8-8 in Canada, or 988 in the United States, any time of day or night.²³

October 10 will be here again soon. I will hurt that day, and I will let myself. Then I will try to be thankful, because that is what he would have done.