Grief at the Edge of Pain, Conscience, and Wonder

Grief at the Border of Pain, Conscience, and Wonder

(A Psychological-Existential Reading of the Experience of Loss, with Reflections on the Views of Nima Ghorbani, Mostafa Malekian, and Azarakhsh Mokri)

Mostafa Soleimani[1]

Abstract:

Grief is often defined as an emotional reaction to death and loss, as though the mourner's central problem were bearing the sorrow of another's absence and gradually adjusting to the reality of the loss. Yet lived experience shows that what happens after the death of a loved one is not confined to "the sorrow of absence." Loss can simultaneously engage the body and the emotional system, reopen the moral ledger of the relationship with the deceased, return the lost possibilities of past and future in the form of regret, and finally confront the person with questions about death, the world, life, and the meaning of being. Using a review-analytic method, this article offers a three-layered reading of the experience of loss. To articulate these three layers, three intellectual currents in contemporary Iranian psychological and philosophical thought are placed in conversation with the scientific literature on grief: Nima Ghorbani's distinction between the pain of reality and the suffering that arises from fleeing and defending against it; Mostafa Malekian's distinction among the sorrow of loss, moral remorse, and regret over lost opportunities; and Azarakhsh Mokri's attention, in her reading of Dacher Keltner's work on awe, to the possible emergence of an enigmatic, existential experience in the face of the deaths of loved ones. These three currents are reconstructed in this article under the headings "pain," "conscience," and "wonder." Research findings on experiential avoidance, rumination, grief-related guilt, unfinished business with the deceased, meaning reconstruction, and the emotion of awe show that although these domains are distinct from one another, they can affect one another in the actual experience of grief. The article's central argument is that not all grief is necessarily a crisis of meaning, and that meaning-making should not become an urgent duty imposed on the mourner. Sometimes the first necessity is to bear the pain; sometimes the main issue is to face the conscience of the relationship and what remained unsaid and undone; and sometimes, at another level, death disrupts a person's horizon of understanding of life so profoundly that the question of meaning arises naturally. On this basis, grief can be understood not as a linear path from sorrow to acceptance but as a complex movement among pain, relationship, conscience, and an existential encounter with the limits of life.

1. Introduction: Is Grief Only Sorrow?

When someone dies, something seemingly clear has happened: a person who was present in our world until yesterday no longer has a bodily presence. Yet the experience of grief shows that the consequences of this absence are not limited to that simple proposition. The death of a human being, especially one who held a fundamental place in the network of our identity, affection, habits, and future, can disrupt several worlds at once. The body still expects to hear the person's voice; the mind is accustomed to projecting their presence into the future; memory brings back scenes that have now taken on a different meaning; conscience summons finished conversations and undone deeds once more before our inner court; and at a deeper level, another's death can place before us a question we perhaps knew only in the abstract: if they can cease to be, what is my own being, and where is this life headed?

One of the problems with simplistic approaches to grief may be that they place every domain under a single word, "sorrow." Yet longing for someone who is no more is not the same experience as remorse over a sentence we once said to them, and neither is the same as the wonder that sometimes takes shape before the mystery of death, the fragility of life, or the grandeur of existence. If we call all these experiences merely "sorrow," an important part of the inner architecture of grief goes unnoticed.

Modern psychological literature, too, has for years moved away from uniform, stage-based models. Contrary to the common notion that grief is a passage through a fixed series of stages, longitudinal and review studies have shown that people's responses to the death of a loved one are highly varied. In Bonanno and colleagues' prospective study of spousal bereavement, distinct trajectories were observed, including chronic grief, common grief, recovery, and resilience, and in a later review Bonanno showed that resilience after loss is neither rare nor pathological and is found in many people. Thus there is neither a universal emotional sequence for grief nor a single prescription of "healthy mourning" that can be written for everyone.

Stroebe and Schut's dual process model points to the same complexity. In this model, the bereaved person oscillates between two orientations: "loss orientation," which involves confronting pain, memories, and longing, and "restoration orientation," which involves life tasks, new roles, and adjustment to a changed world. The important point is that even temporary distance from sorrow can be part of adaptation; health is formed not in constant confrontation with grief but in the flexibility to move back and forth between loss and everyday life.

Even so, a question remains: "If grief is not a single experience, what are its most important layers?" To answer this question, the present article places three currents alongside the scientific literature:

First, in his piece "Pain or Suffering and Torment?", Nima Ghorbani distinguishes between the pain that arises from reality and the suffering that can take shape from defending against and fleeing the experience of reality, and he explicitly counts loss, illness, and death among the unavoidable pains of life.[2]

Second, regarding the deaths of loved ones, Mostafa Malekian separates three kinds of sorrow: the sorrow of loss, the remorse arising from moral failings toward the person who is gone, and the regret over opportunities we could have experienced in their presence but have lost.[3]

Third, in her review of Dacher Keltner's book Awe, Azarakhsh Mokri points to a less noticed aspect of the encounter with death: that the death of a loved one, alongside sorrow and fear, can in some experiences confront a person with a kind of wonder before life, death, and the mystery of being.[4]

The aim of this article is not to fashion a "shared theory of grief" from these three figures; no such theory exists, and the standing of these scholars is not the same: Ghorbani speaks here from the standpoint of psychology and psychotherapy, Malekian formulates the issue chiefly within the horizon of ethics and the philosophy of life, and Mokri, in the section on awe, is an interpreter and transmitter of Dacher Keltner's research and narrative.

What this article proposes is an integrative reading: using the three concepts of "pain," "conscience," and "wonder" to distinguish three domains of the experience of grief, and then testing this distinction against contemporary research findings.

The article's central argument is that one common assumption must be resisted: not every grief is necessarily a crisis of meaning. Some griefs, before they turn into a question about the meaning of life, are fundamentally a problem of bearing pain, and others, rather than being a matter of "why life?", are a matter of "why did I do that?", "why didn't I say that?", or "why didn't I make more time with them?" Only in some experiences does death so upend a person's system of understanding the world that the question of meaning comes to the fore. From this perspective, the path of this article does not begin with meaning; it begins with pain, arrives at the conscience of the relationship, and then opens onto the possibility of wonder and the question of meaning.

2. Method and the Logic of the Integrative Reading

This essay is of the review-analytic type. The Persian sources used in the section on the three thinkers have been drawn on only where an official, retrievable text or file from the thinkers themselves, or from the official publisher of their works, was available. By contrast, wherever a claim about prevalence, correlation, psychological mechanism, or clinical consequence is made, the main reliance is on peer-reviewed articles and research sources. This separation is necessary because the words of a thinker or interpreter, however inspiring, do not in themselves count as empirical evidence.

In selecting English-language sources, several theoretical and research clusters were considered: the diversity of grief trajectories and resilience; the dual process model; meaning reconstruction; experiential avoidance and emotion regulation; guilt, regret, and unfinished business in grief; and the psychological literature on the emotion of awe. For the axis of meaning, Neimeyer's theory of meaning reconstruction and Park's integrated model of meaning-making are the main foundations. For the axis of meaning threat, the meaning maintenance model has also been used.

This article deliberately refrains from claiming to "prove" the pain–conscience–wonder model. This triad is a proposed theoretical formulation, not a standardized scale and not a model that has so far been directly tested in empirical research. Its value lies in distinguishing questions that are often conflated in grief: the pain of absence, the judgment about the relationship, and the encounter with the existential horizon of death.

3. Grief as a Multilayered Experience: Neither an Illness nor a Single Path

In everyday speech, grief is often seen as a phenomenon with a relatively definite beginning, peak, and end. A person loses a loved one; for a while they are sad, they "come to terms" with the loss, and then they return to their former life. The problem with this narrative is that neither does a "former life" necessarily exist after the loss, nor is the person who adjusts to the loss the same one who existed before.

The death of some people does not simply subtract something from our lives; it changes the structure of life. The death of a spouse is not merely the removal of one individual; it may be the end of a role, a way of making decisions, a set of daily habits, a network of social relationships, and a shared image of the future. The death of a child can call into question not only the parent–child relationship but also the parent's conception of the world's justice, their personal future, and even their identity as a father or mother. In such losses, what is lost is not only "the other"; part of the order of one's personal world is also damaged.

Neimeyer explains this feature of grief through the concept of "meaning reconstruction." In his view, the death of an important person, especially if sudden, violent, or untimely, can shake a person's assumptive world and relational world and drive them to try to understand the loss and the life that follows it. In this approach, the person must gradually discover how this death fits into the story of their life, what their relationship with the deceased will be, and who they themselves are after this event. But even a theory of meaning, if overgeneralized, can become problematic.

Crystal Park distinguishes between "global meaning" and "situational meaning"; global meaning comprises fundamental beliefs about the world, goals, and values, while situational meaning concerns the interpretation of a particular event. When an event is incompatible with a person's global meaning system, a discrepancy arises and the effort at meaning-making begins. Even so, Park also distinguishes between "the effort to make meaning" and "the meaning that has been made"; a repeated, unresolved effort to understand an event does not necessarily lead to better adjustment.

This very point steers us away from a cultural and even therapeutic error: asking the bereaved to "find the meaning of their loss" very quickly. Sentences such as "there must have been a wisdom in it," "this was meant to make you stronger," or "you should see what lesson this loss held for you" may be spoken with the intention of consolation, but they can create a kind of secondary pressure; the person must not only bear the suffering of their loved one's death but also feels obliged to extract growth, wisdom, or meaning from it! It may be that in the first phase of the experience, what truly exists is only pain.

On the other hand, not everyone collapses to the same degree in the face of loss. Bonanno's findings show that a considerable number of people, even after severe loss, maintain a relatively stable level of functioning without suffering a prolonged period of impairment. This is neither a sign of emotional coldness nor necessarily of denial. This very fact compels us to distinguish among "pain," "disorder," and "chronic suffering."

The term "multilayered grief" takes shape in this article from here. A person may be highly active in the layer of pain yet have little moral business with the deceased. Another person's intensity of longing may have diminished, yet they may live for years with an unspoken sentence; and a third person, after the loss, may be neither particularly caught up in guilt nor showing severe signs of prolonged grief, yet death may permanently change their view of existence, time, and the value of life. Hence the more precise question may not be "Is the person still grieving?" but "In this grief, which domain is now the more problematic or the more alive?"

4. The First Layer: Pain; Nima Ghorbani and the Problem of Fleeing the Experience of Loss

A) The Pain of Reality and the Suffering of Resistance:

In his piece "Pain or Suffering and Torment?", Nima Ghorbani begins from a simple yet fundamental fact: the human capacity to bear the realities of life is not unlimited. We encounter events that produce feelings more intense than our present capacity, and the mind resorts to defenses in order to distance itself from these experiences. Ghorbani distinguishes between the pain that arises from reality and the suffering that is intensified by fleeing from feelings and defending against reality, and he counts loss, illness, and death among the unavoidable pains of life.[5]

The importance of this distinction for grief lies in the fact that two questions can be separated:

The first question is "What has happened?" and the answer may be "My loved one has died." This part of reality is unchangeable.

The second question is "What are my mind and psyche doing with this reality?" The mind can deny reality again and again, flee from every stimulus that recalls the deceased, or conversely become trapped in images and memories of the loss. It can refuse to accept anger, because the person thinks, "I shouldn't be angry at someone who has died." It can throw away all the photographs so that nothing reminds it of the deceased, or keep their room untouched for years, because any small change is experienced as the final acceptance of their absence.

The literature on emotion regulation in grief partly confirms this intuition. In their systematic review, Eisma and Stroebe examined 64 studies with a total of 7,715 bereaved individuals and found relatively strong evidence for the role of experiential avoidance and rumination in the persistence of complicated grief reactions. Experiential avoidance refers to attempts to escape, control, or suppress unpleasant inner experiences such as feelings, thoughts, or memories.

But it should not be concluded from this finding that every time a bereaved person turns away from thinking about the deceased, they are harming themselves. This reading is incompatible with the dual process model. In that model, "taking a rest from grief" and attending to restorative tasks are part of adaptation. The problem arises when avoidance becomes a rigid and dominant pattern; that is, when the person can no longer approach the experience of loss when necessary. Hence Ghorbani's distinction can be formulated with a theoretical refinement: persistent suffering can intensify not merely because of moving away from pain, but when a person has no recourse except fleeing from pain. Sometimes distancing from sorrow is care for the psyche, and sometimes, when distance becomes the only way of living, it becomes the problem.

B) Why the Body Waits:

One of the secrets of the pain of grief is that our cognitive awareness usually accepts the reality of loss sooner than the deeper systems of the psyche and body do. A person knows that their spouse has died, yet for a moment, hearing a key in the door, they wait for them to come in. They know their mother is no longer alive, yet on receiving important news, they reach for the phone to call her. These moments are not necessarily signs of pathological denial; rather, they show that a relationship with another is not stored merely at the level of logical propositions.

We have learned the presence of important people in our habits, predictions, bodily movements, paths of attention, and daily patterns of life. For this reason, loss is not merely a piece of news but a kind of "relearning of the world." The person must learn again and again, in different situations, that in the new world old expectations no longer receive a response. Pressure to "accept" death, if it ignores these layers of learning, may oversimplify the bereaved person's experience.

C) Pain Is Not Necessarily Pathology:

At this point we must avoid one of the most important errors: "equating intense pain with mental illness." If, after the death of someone very important in their life, a person has disturbed sleep, intense crying, reduced concentration, or a disinclination for daily activities for a time, these symptoms cannot be considered illness without attention to duration, intensity, and degree of functional impairment. One reason for the importance of Bonanno's work was precisely that it showed that the absence of a prolonged period of intense "grief work" does not necessarily mean repression, and at the same time, the presence of pain is not in itself a disorder.

Therefore "confronting pain" should not become yet another task that we place on the shoulders of the bereaved. A person is not required, in order to prove their mental health, to constantly approach images of death or to produce intense emotions. The principle is flexibility: the ability to draw near when the experience needs to be seen, and the ability to move away when life demands attention.

D) The First Conclusion: Grief Precedes Meaning; It Is Body and Feeling:

If we take this section seriously, an important conclusion emerges: perhaps one of our mistakes is that we turn grief too quickly into a problem of "meaning." When someone has lost their spouse only a short while ago and still wakes each morning to the shock of their absence, the question "What meaning does this loss have for your growth?" may not only be unhelpful but a kind of conceptual pressure. At this stage, the main issue may be whether the person can stay with their longing without having to flee from it or drown in it. Before the mind can reinterpret the world, it must sometimes be allowed to feel reality.

5. The Second Layer: Conscience; Mostafa Malekian and the Three Sorrows After the Death of Loved Ones

If the first layer of grief concerns a person's relationship with the reality of loss, the second concerns their relationship with the relationship itself. In a footnote on page 170 of his book The Earth from the Window of Heaven, Mostafa Malekian offers a brief classification that has considerable analytic capacity for the psychology of grief; he says that in the death of loved ones one may encounter three sorrows: "the sorrow of loss," "remorse over failing in one's moral duty toward the person who is gone," and "regret over the opportunities we could have had with them and have lost."[6]

The value of this classification lies in separating three experiences that in everyday language are all called "sorrow." "I miss my mother" is not the same as "I wish I hadn't shouted at her that day," and neither is entirely the same as "I wish we had taken one more trip together." In the first, the issue is absence; in the second, the issue is me and my responsibility; and in the third, the issue is what could have been but will never be.

In this article the word "conscience" is used to name this layer; not in the sense that all feelings after loss are necessarily moral, but because death sometimes turns the relationship into the scene of a kind of reckoning. When the other is alive, we imagine that time remains: we can apologize, make the trip next year, call tomorrow, or say "I love you" in a more fitting moment; and death suddenly closes this possibility of "later," and the closing of "later" is one of the most merciless features of loss.

A) The Sorrow of Loss: The Pain of Absence:

The first sorrow in Malekian's classification is what generally comes to mind on hearing the word "grief": the pain of absence. The person can no longer be seen, touched, spoken with, or be present in a shared future. In the same text, Malekian holds that this sorrow fades with time, whereas the other two sorrows may continue to torment a person's conscience. This part of his claim must be accepted with caution; contemporary research does not permit us to say that the sorrow of loss inevitably vanishes in everyone. The trajectories of grief differ, and in some people longing and separation distress can last a very long time.

The value of Malekian's classification, then, lies more in distinguishing kinds of suffering than in predicting their timeline. The sorrow of loss may subside without ever disappearing entirely; even years later, a scent, a song, or a street may bring back the old longing for a few minutes. A decline in the intensity of grief is not necessarily the removal of the relationship; it may be a sign that the relationship has changed form.

B) The Second Sorrow: Moral Remorse and the Rise of the Inner Court:

For Malekian, the second kind of sorrow is remorse arising from moral failing. This sorrow is not of the kind "you are no more"; it is of the kind "what I did to you or failed to do." In grief, time sometimes turns back in a strange way. The mind reopens a scene from years ago and this time judges it with knowledge it did not have then: Why was I not more often at their side? Why, when they were ill, did I think they were exaggerating? Why did I not answer their last call? Why did I say that?

Guilt in grief is a well-known phenomenon. The review by Li, Stroebe, Chan, and Chow, covering 34 quantitative and 9 qualitative studies, showed that grief-related guilt is common in some bereaved groups and is associated with adverse mental health outcomes. A larger study has also examined the relationship of guilt with complicated grief and depression; even so, "guilt" is not a single construct, and every "if only…" should not be reduced to pathological guilt.

In a longitudinal study, Stroebe and colleagues distinguished between self-blame and regret. The results showed that the two do not necessarily have the same consequences and that self-blame shows a more direct association with the severity of grief. This finding is a reminder that the sentence "I wish I had seen them more" can be an expression of the relationship's worth, not a confession of guilt. The problem becomes complicated when a person fails to distinguish between "I was not perfect" and "I am responsible for their death or suffering."

Death removes the possibility of directly mending the relationship, and this very fact can drive the mind toward endless reconstructions of the past: if I had taken them to the hospital that day; if I had found another medication; if we had not argued; if I had loved them more, and so on.

The structure of all these sentences is an attempt to build an alternative version of a past that can no longer be changed. Painful as it is, guilt sometimes also preserves an illusion of control: for some minds, the belief "perhaps I could have saved them" is more bearable than accepting "my control was limited."

C) The Third Sorrow: Regret and the Mourning of Futures That Did Not Happen:

The third sorrow Malekian speaks of is, existentially, the most complex: regret over opportunities that will never come to pass. Grief is not only for the past; we also mourn for the future. A parent who loses a young child grieves not only for the years they had together; they also mourn the graduation they will not see, the wedding that will not take place, the grandchild who may never be born, and all the "ifs" they had built for that child's future. A bereaved spouse has lost not only the memories of past trips but also the trips they were meant to take ten years from now; thus death closes not only one actual life but a whole set of possible lives.

Research on "unfinished business" with the deceased comes close to this domain. Klingspon, Holland, Neimeyer, and Lichtenthal relate unfinished business to incomplete, unspoken, or unresolved relational matters with the deceased. In their study of 224 bereaved individuals, the presence and especially the intensity of distress from unfinished business were associated with worse grief outcomes. In another study of 229 bereaved individuals, "grief-related regret" and "unfinished business" were overlapping but distinct, and distress from unfinished business showed a strong relationship with symptoms of complicated grief.

These findings extend Malekian's classification. Not all the "if onlys" of grief are moral: "I wish I had been kinder" can be moral remorse, but "I wish we could have gone on one more trip together" is not necessarily guilt; it is mourning for a lost possibility, and the two are not met in the same way. Moral remorse may require a realistic reassessment of responsibility and self-forgiveness, whereas regret over an unrealized future may, before anything else, require mourning that very future.

D) Why "Conscience"?

The word "conscience" in this article carries a wider meaning than "feeling guilty." Conscience is the place where, after another's death, the relationship is reassessed: Who was I to them? Who were they to me? What was completed between us? What remained half-finished? Where did I hurt them? Where did I withhold my love? What possibilities were closed forever?

While the other lives, the relationship flows, and many of these questions go unseen in the bustle of daily life; death halts the flow, and this halt suddenly makes the structure of the relationship visible.

In many griefs, a person mourns not only the "person" but also a version of themselves within that relationship; a woman who has lost her husband may also mourn the woman she was in his presence. A child who has lost their mother may grieve for the part of themselves that could emerge only in conversation with her. Another's death sometimes also shatters one of the mirrors in which we used to see ourselves.

E) The Boundary Between Responsibility and Self-Torment:

Here a distinction must be drawn between moral responsibility and perpetual condemnation. A person may indeed have erred in the relationship. Grief is not meant to erase moral reality or always to end with the sentence "it was not your fault." Such a sentence is not true in every situation. Human beings hurt one another, lose opportunities, and sometimes realize the worth of a relationship only when direct repair is no longer possible.

But the constructive question is not "How do I punish myself for the rest of my life?" but "Given what I now know from this relationship, how shall I live?" At this point, meaning slowly begins to appear, though it still does not mean finding "the reason for the death." Perhaps the moral meaning of grief is not knowing why they died but asking "How should their death change the way I relate to the living?" Someone who suffers over love left unspoken cannot change the past, but this awareness may make them a person who postpones love less in later relationships; in that case, remorse is transformed from a "prison" into a "responsibility."

6. The Third Layer: Wonder; Azarakhsh Mokri and the Enigmatic Experience of Death

If "pain" concerns contact with the reality of loss and "conscience" concerns the unfinished account of the relationship, the third layer begins when death no longer remains merely a personal event and becomes a rupture in our understanding of life itself.

In her review of the book Awe by Dacher Keltner, Azarakhsh Mokri addresses an important personal part of the book: the illness and death of Keltner's younger brother, Rolf, and the fact that Keltner himself, in facing the end of his brother's life, reports, alongside sorrow and anxiety, an experience of awe regarding life and death. Mokri even describes the book as in part a blend of scientific research and Keltner's personal mourning.[7]

At first glance this idea may seem strange: how can death be linked with "wonder" without romanticizing its suffering? The answer lies in the scientific definition of awe. In their classic article, Keltner and Haidt regard two components as essential to awe: "encountering a kind of vastness" and "the need for accommodation," that is, an experience for which the mind's current frameworks are insufficient and in which the person is compelled to expand or alter their mental structures.

This definition fits some experiences of grief. The death of someone we love is sometimes far too vast to be absorbed into our everyday schemas; yesterday they were a human being and today they are not! The mind can explain medically that the heart stopped or that brain activity ended, but these explanations do not necessarily resolve the existential question: what was this "being" that now is not? What is the status of a relationship that is still alive in me with someone who no longer has a bodily presence? How can the world continue as usual while my personal world has been transformed?

Here a scientific boundary must be kept clear: direct and extensive evidence on "awe in grief" is not as abundant as the literature on experiential avoidance or grief-related guilt. The present connection rests above all on Keltner's narrative of his brother's death, Mokri's analysis of it, and more general research on the structure and function of the emotion of awe; therefore, it should not be concluded from this section that awe is a universal stage of grief or a common and necessary outcome of it. This domain is a possibility, not a rule.

A) Awe Is Not Necessarily a Positive Emotion:

One possible misunderstanding is to regard awe as a beautiful, serene, or spiritual feeling that compensates for the pain of grief, but the Keltner–Haidt model shows that awe can also be accompanied by threat and fear. Mokri, too, in her account of Keltner's book, stresses that awe is not always wholly positive and that, in the face of vastness or death, some people experience anxiety and dread.[8]

The more precise form of the claim, then, is this: in some people, death produces, in addition to sorrow, an experience of the inadequacy of customary frameworks of understanding, and this cognitive-affective opening can be experienced as awe, fear, a sense of mystery, or an existential question. This experience is neither necessarily pleasant nor necessarily conducive to growth, nor does it license the beautification of suffering.

B) When Another's Death Makes One's Own Real:

From childhood we know that human beings die, but knowing the proposition "everyone dies" is far from an existential encounter with death. The death of someone close can suddenly turn this abstract knowledge into bodily knowledge. If my father, who was once a symbol of stability, can be removed from the world, then the stability I attributed to the world is not absolute. If a friend my own age suddenly dies, death is no longer an event belonging to the "very distant future."

Awareness of death has also been studied in social psychology under "mortality salience" research. In an Iranian study, Nima Ghorbani and colleagues tested the effect of mortality salience on self-esteem; their results showed no significant difference in self-esteem between the experimental and control groups, and the researchers themselves discussed the finding in relation to the cultural and personality structure of the sample. The importance of this study for the present discussion lies not in proving a particular effect but in showing that reactions to reminders of death depend on context and person and should not be imagined as linear and universal.

The experience of grief is, of course, far richer than a laboratory manipulation concerning death. In grief, death enters a person's world not as a word or a question but with a human face, and this experience can, in some people, change priorities: things that once seemed very important shrink, and simple matters such as presence, relationship, or time acquire new weight. Even so, this change is not a necessity. Loss can also make a person more anxious, more embittered, or more bereft of meaning. Growth after suffering is not the bereaved person's assignment.

C) Awe and the Question of Meaning:

Recent research has identified awe as one of the emotions potentially connected to meaning-making. In six studies with a total of 1,115 participants, Yuan, Du, and Jiang showed that the relationship between awe and the meaning of life is neither simple nor direct, but that awe can be linked to an increased sense of meaning through pathways such as an orientation toward the "authentic self." The effects also depended on individual characteristics. This research caution matters for grief: "awe" is not equal to "meaning"; "death" is not equal to "growth"; "suffering" is not equal to "transcendence."

At this point the discussion of awe can be placed alongside the meaning maintenance model of Heine, Proulx, and Vohs. This model emphasizes the human need to experience the world in terms of comprehensible relations and expectations. When meaning coherence is threatened, the mind may turn to reaffirming meaning in the same domain or in another in order to restore order, a process the authors have called "fluid compensation." Death, especially when experienced as untimely or incomprehensible, can create such a threat.

In her program "The Book of Finding Meaning," Azarakhsh Mokri has also introduced Steven Heine's new book Start Making Sense, a book that extends Heine's decades-long project on the human need for meaning into more popular language.[9] This source is important for the present article because it sees meaning not merely as a philosophical answer to "the purpose of life" but as a psychological process for building coherence among the self, events, and the world.

D) Must We Find Meaning for Death?

At this stage a critical question must be raised: must every death have meaning? This article's answer is no. One of the dangers of the discourse of meaning is that the bereaved may feel that if they have not been able to find a reason, a message, or a positive outcome for their loved one's death, they have not passed through grief correctly; yet Park's distinction between the effort at meaning-making and the meaning made shows that intense searching for meaning alone is not always accompanied by better adjustment.

Sometimes the healthiest sentence may be: "I don't know why this happened," or "I cannot find any justification for this death." These sentences are not failures; they can be forms of existential honesty. Perhaps the meaning that finally takes shape is not "the meaning of death" but the meaning of life after another's death. A person may never answer why their child died, yet gradually come to understand how they now wish to live in a world in which their child is absent. This difference is fundamental: we do not necessarily make death meaningful; sometimes we only make life after it livable again.

7. From Pain to Conscience and from Conscience to Wonder: The Proposed Integrative Model

Having examined three distinct domains, we can now place them in a single framework, with the warning that this framework is not an empirically tested model but the theoretical formulation proposed by this article. These three domains are not necessarily stages; a person is not meant first to "finish" pain, then enter conscience, and finally arrive at wonder. All three may appear in a single day or even a single hour: in the morning, "the pain of absence"; at noon, "the torment of a memory"; and at night, "a question about how death is possible." Thus "pain–conscience–wonder" should be understood not as a three-rung ladder but as three axes of experience that can be active simultaneously, whose intensity may change over time, or one of which may not become salient for the person at all.

A) The First Axis: I and Reality:

The layer of pain concerns the relationship of "I" to the reality of loss. A reality has occurred that is incompatible with my wishes: I wanted them to stay, but they did not; I wanted the illness to be cured, but it was not; I wanted to see them one more time, but it proved impossible. At this level, the fundamental issue is contact with the unchangeable. Ghorbani's distinction between the pain of reality and defense against it, together with the evidence on experiential avoidance, illuminates this part.[10] The principle of health on this axis is not constant confrontation but flexibility in drawing near and moving away.

B) The Second Axis: I and You:

The layer of conscience concerns the relationship between "I" and "you." Here the question is no longer just "How do I bear the reality of death?"; it is "What passed between you and me?" Love, anger, negligence, gratitude, ingratitude, unspoken words, unfulfilled promises, and lost opportunities are reassessed. Malekian's classification is helpful at this level, because it separates moral remorse and regret over lost opportunities from mere longing, and the literature on guilt and unfinished business shows that this distinction is meaningful from a research standpoint as well.[11]

On this axis, the main issue may be the "reconstruction of the relationship": not bringing the person back, which is impossible, but finding a new form for a relationship that can no longer be outward and reciprocal. This is where memory, values, inner dialogue, and continuing bonds become important.

C) The Third Axis: I and Being:

The layer of wonder concerns the relationship of "I" to the world. Death sometimes does not break only one relationship; it shakes our understanding of being. The questions take another shape: What kind of place is the world, that such a loss is possible in it? What is time? If everything is finite, what has value? What am I to do with the limits of my own life?

At this level, Mokri's reading of Keltner and the psychological models of meaning become important.[12] Here meaning may appear, but not as a command; as a question.

8. The Article's Most Important Claim: Not All Grief Is a Crisis of Meaning

This claim is perhaps the principal point that distinguishes the present framework from some extreme, meaning-centered readings. The theory of meaning reconstruction rightly shows that major losses can challenge a person's meaning system, but it should not be concluded from this that the core of every experience of grief is the "collapse of meaning."[13]

Imagine an elderly woman who loses her elderly husband after decades of shared life and a long illness; she may be profoundly bereaved and struggle for months with the void of a shared life, yet her fundamental meaning system about the world may not have collapsed. Her husband's death is painful for her but comprehensible; by contrast, the sudden death of a child may be for a parent not only a loss but an assault on their belief in justice, the future, the order of the world, and personal identity.

These two experiences cannot be distinguished merely by "intensity of sorrow"; in the first, the dominant issue may be the pain of separation, and in the second, pain merges with a crisis of meaning. Hence the better research and clinical question may not be "What meaning does this grief have?" but "What exactly has this loss broken in this person's world?" For one it is habit, for another identity, for another conscience, for another trust in the world, and for yet another none of these has been severely broken and they are mainly longing.

9. The Question of Time: Why Should Meaning Not Be Demanded Too Soon?

Contemporary culture is often restless in the face of pain, and we want to find a quick explanation, technique, cure, or lesson for it; this haste is seen in the face of grief as well. Soon after a death, those around the bereaved say: "Be strong!", "Life goes on!", "They wouldn't want to see you like this!", "There must have been a wisdom in it!" or "You have to live for the others." What many of these sentences share is the speaker's inability to bear pain's remaining unanswered; yet grief sometimes needs a time in which no conclusion is yet possible.

The pain–conscience–wonder model can in this respect prevent premature meaning-making. If we know that the first domain may be only contact with pain, we allow the person for a while to experience "not knowing." Later, the moral question of the relationship may arise, and after that, perhaps, the question of the meaning of life may appear, or perhaps never appear at all. There is no necessity for every bereaved human being to become a philosopher of death.

This point matters from the standpoint of the ethics of care: we must not use another person's suffering to construct our own preferred narrative. If we believe that "every suffering has a wisdom," that belief belongs to us, not necessarily to the person who has buried a loved one.

10. Where Does the Meaning of Life Enter?

If "meaning" is not the article's main subject, why should it enter the discussion at all? Because in some griefs, sooner or later, the question does appear. In the session "Happiness, Satisfaction, and the Meaning of Life," Azarakhsh Mokri separates three concepts: happiness or positive emotion, life satisfaction, and the sense of meaning and purposefulness. The important point is that these three can be measured separately and do not necessarily coincide.[14] This distinction matters greatly for grief.

If we equate the reconstruction of meaning with "becoming happy," the bereaved will imagine that they have failed every time they grieve anew; yet a person can still weep for the deceased while their life has direction, and can long for them while living meaningfully. At this very point, meaning takes a more precise form: perhaps meaning is not the answer to the question "Why did they die?"; it can be the answer to the question "Though they have died, what do I now want to go on living for?" The first question may never have an answer, while the second remains within the domain of choice of the living.

A) Meaning as Direction, Not Justification:

If we take meaning to be a "justification of death," many losses reach a dead end. What justification could make the untimely death of a child satisfactory? But if we take meaning to be "a direction for life after loss," another possibility opens. A person may change the way they love; continue a work the deceased held to be valuable; deepen their relationships with the living; or build no grand project at all and simply learn to take people's presence less for granted.

Meaning is not always founding a charity or writing a book about the deceased; sometimes meaning is simply that, after facing an ending, a person decides to live everyday life with greater attention.

B) The Danger of Heroizing Grief:

Society loves the stories of those who, after the death of a loved one, have done great things and turned their suffering into success; but this narrative can inadvertently create a new standard for grief, as if a person who does not become stronger, deeper, or more successful after loss has missed the chance to grow. Research on the diversity of grief trajectories is a reminder that no single path is the measure of health. Sometimes a person's great achievement is that they get out of bed in the morning, cook a meal again, return to work, or laugh for the first time without feeling they are betraying the deceased; these are not small things.

11. From Remorse to Responsibility: The Moral Possibility of Grief

Of the three proposed layers, the layer of conscience may offer a special opportunity for linking moral philosophy and psychology. If remorse turns into nothing but self-blame, it imprisons the person in the past; but if a question for present life is drawn out of it, the possibility of moral transformation arises.

In his lecture "From Pain to Meaning," Malekian devotes a section to ways of giving meaning to suffering. The official audio version of this lecture, delivered on 28 Azar 1404 [19 December 2025] at a conference in support of cancer patients, formulates "three methods for giving meaning to suffering" as the twelfth teaching, beginning at minute 25:46.[15] This discussion is not necessarily about grief over the death of a loved one, but it has conceptual capacity for turning remorse and suffering into a moral direction in life after loss.

Without regarding all suffering as meaningful, one can ask: can grief make us more sensitive to living relationships? Someone who has tasted the pain of a lost opportunity may postpone love to the future less; someone who has understood that a conversation may be the last one may speak a little more carefully in later quarrels with living people; and someone who suffers over an unspoken apology may no longer put off apologizing until tomorrow.

In this sense, death does not teach lessons; it is the living human being who learns something from the encounter with death. We do not say "They died so that you might become better!", which would turn another's death into an instrument of our growth; rather we say, "They died, and you now live with a painful knowledge of the limits of time; what will you do with that knowledge?" Here grief is transformed from a passive event into a moral question.

12. Does the Relationship with the Deceased Really End?

If we regard a relationship merely as a connection between two living bodies, death ends it; but psychologically, those who are lost can remain for years in a person's decision-making structure, identity, and inner dialogue. A person may ask themselves: "What would my father have said?", "Would my mother have been pleased with this decision?", or "What would my husband have wanted me to do?" These questions are not necessarily illusions; they show that the psychological representation of the other is still part of the person's own structure.

In his meaning reconstruction approach, Neimeyer stresses recalibrating the relationship with the deceased, not merely eliminating it. Within the pain–conscience–wonder framework, this continuing bond can appear in all three layers: in pain, the person still longs for the bodily presence; in conscience, unfinished conversations continue with the inner image of the deceased; and in wonder, the person may redefine the place of the lost one within the larger story of their own life.

Adjustment to grief, from this perspective, may not mean "the end of the relationship" but a change in the kind of relationship: from one that received outward responses to one that now continues in memory, identity, values, and choices.

13. What Does the Pain–Conscience–Wonder Model Add to Our Understanding of Grief?

This model does not claim to replace existing theories; its value lies chiefly in differentiation:

First, it separates pain from meaning: a person has the right to be in pain without yet having to think about its meaning.

Second, it separates the sorrow of loss from the feelings that belong to the history of the relationship: longing, guilt, and regret are not one thing.

Third, it separates meaning from satisfaction and happiness: life after loss can still hold sorrow and, at the same time, acquire direction.

Fourth, it brings wonder into the discussion, a domain that has been less prominent in many common accounts of grief.

Fifth, it allows us to speak of differences among individuals: for one person the main axis is pain, for another conscience, and for yet another the existential question.

This differentiation can also be useful for clinical work, though not as an independent diagnostic tool. If a therapist fails to identify what the person's dominant issue is, they may offer a disproportionate intervention. For someone whose main problem is guilt and unfinished business, merely saying "Let yourself feel your sorrow!" is not enough. For someone who is newly in the shock of loss, a philosophical discussion of the meaning of death may be out of place, and for someone who after years is wrestling with existential questions, confining the intervention to emotion regulation may overlook the main issue.

14. Critique and the Limits of the Three Views

Theoretical integration is valuable only when accompanied by critique. Regarding Nima Ghorbani, the distinction between the pain of reality and the suffering arising from defense is useful, but defense and avoidance should not always be taken as "conscious choice." Many defenses are not consciously chosen, and attachment history, learning, trauma, and the capacity for emotion regulation can all be involved in them. The dual process model also reminds us that some distance from loss is a natural part of adaptation.

Regarding Mostafa Malekian, the separation of the three sorrows is conceptually fruitful, but the temporal claim that the sorrow of loss inevitably fades while the other two remain cannot be accepted as an empirical rule. Research on grief trajectories shows both that longing can become chronic for some people and that remorse and self-blame can change over time.

Regarding Azarakhsh Mokri, too, it must be clear that the discussion of awe is not her own specific theory of grief. Here Mokri is an interpreter of the book and research of Dacher Keltner; the main scientific reference for the definition and structure of awe should therefore be Keltner and Haidt and related research, with Mokri used as a Persian reading that links it to Keltner's experience of grief.[16] Moreover, direct evidence on the role of awe in adjustment to grief is not yet as extensive as in areas such as experiential avoidance or grief-related guilt; consequently, this section should be presented as a research horizon and an interpretive possibility, not a definitive conclusion.

15. Conclusion: What Continues in Us After Loss

The death of a loved one does not merely remove someone from our outer world; it can change the form of our relationship with the body, the past, conscience, the future, and even the world. Sometimes what remains after their departure is pain: the simple, unexplained pain of the absence of someone whose presence had become part of the organization of our life. At this level, perhaps the most important task is not making meaning but being able to remain in contact with a reality we have no way of changing. Nima Ghorbani's distinction between the pain of reality and defense against it, together with the evidence on experiential avoidance, is a reminder that the quality of our relationship with pain can influence the course of grief, without equating healthy confrontation with perpetual drowning in sorrow.

Sometimes what remains is conscience. Death halts the relationship, but it does not necessarily close its account. Unspoken sentences, postponed apologies, moments of negligence, and possibilities that never came to be can gain new power after loss. Malekian's distinction among the sorrow of loss, moral remorse, and regret over lost opportunities, once separated from its temporal claim, provides a precise conceptual tool for seeing this layer. Research on guilt, regret, and unfinished business also shows that these experiences should not be equated with simple longing.

And sometimes what remains is wonder. Another's death can open a rift in our ordinary understanding of the world. Suddenly questions that until yesterday seemed philosophical and remote become personal reality: What is being? How long is time? If the end is inevitable, what has value? Azarakhsh Mokri's reading of Keltner's experience opens a window onto this less examined domain, one in which grief can be accompanied by fear, a sense of mystery, and the need to rebuild the framework through which we understand the world.

From these three domains an important conclusion can be drawn: grief is not necessarily a search for meaning. Sometimes it is only pain; sometimes the unfinished account of a relationship; sometimes the collapse of an image we held of the future; and sometimes, after all of these, the question of meaning emerges. Therefore, giving meaning to loss should not become a moral or psychological duty of the bereaved. No human being is obliged to prove that they have "learned a lesson," "grown," or "become better" from the death of a loved one.

But in its own time, another question may be born from that very loss: not "Why did they have to die?" but "Now that I know people depart, how do I want to live with those who are still here?" Perhaps at this point grief turns away from the effort to solve the riddle of death and becomes a kind of awareness of life: an awareness that love cannot be postponed forever until tomorrow; that an apology cannot be entrusted, guaranteed, to next week; that no meeting is a given, and no relationship is limitless.

The limits of life do not necessarily make it meaningless; they may be precisely what gives weight to presence, relationship, and our choices. In this sense, grief is neither an illness to be gotten rid of, nor an examination to be passed with honor, nor even necessarily a journey whose end is "acceptance." Grief may be the name of a process in which a human being learns to live in a world in which someone is no longer present, while the imprint of the relationship with them still continues in the structure of one's being.

References

1. Amirbeigi, Mahmoud, Ghorbani, Nima, and Besharat, Mohammad Ali (2016), Journal of Psychological Sciences, 14(56).

2. Ghorbani, Nima (2016, 17 January), "Pain, or Suffering and Torment?", official website of Dr. Nima Ghorbani.

3. Malekian, Mostafa (1397 [2018]), The Earth from the Window of Heaven, Tehran: Soroush Mowlana (especially the footnote on p. 170).

4. ــــــــــ (1404 [2025], 28 Azar), "From Pain to Meaning," audio recording of lecture, official channel of Mostafa Malekian, Farzaneh Cultural Institute.

5. Mokri, Azarakhsh (1400 [2022], Dey), "At the Time of Self-Knowledge 8: Happiness, Satisfaction, and the Meaning of Life," podcast no. 295, official website.

6. ــــــــــ (1402 [2023], Farvardin), "A Review of Dacher Keltner's Book Awe, Part One," podcast no. 339, official website.

7. ــــــــــ (1404 [2025], Khordad), "The Book of Finding Meaning," podcast no. 381, official website.

1. MA in personality psychology and moral philosophy, PhD student in Islamic philosophy and theology, researcher and graduate of the Qom Seminary: mostafasoleymani110@gmail.com

[2]. Ghorbani, Nima (2016, 17 January), "Pain or Suffering and Torment?", official website of Dr. Nima Ghorbani.

[3]. Malekian, Mostafa (1397 [2018]), The Earth from the Window of Heaven, Tehran: Soroush Mowlana, footnote on p. 170; the text "Facing Three Sorrows at the Time of the Death of Loved Ones" has also been republished on the official channel of his works with the same reference.

[4]. Mokri, Azarakhsh (1402 [2023], Farvardin), "A Review of Dacher Keltner's Book Awe, Part One," podcast no. 339.

[5]. Ghorbani, "Pain, or Suffering and Torment?", 2016.

[6]. Malekian, Mostafa (1397 [2018]), The Earth from the Window of Heaven, Tehran: Soroush Mowlana, footnote on p. 170.

[7]. Mokri, Azarakhsh (1402 [2023], Farvardin), "A Review of Dacher Keltner's Book Awe, Part One," no. 339. In the official text of the podcast, Mokri refers to the death of Keltner's brother and his experience of awe regarding "What is life? What is death?"

[8]. Mokri, "The Book Awe," no. 339.

[9]. Mokri, Azarakhsh (1404 [2025], Khordad), "The Book of Finding Meaning," podcast no. 381.

[10]. Ghorbani (2016).

[11]. Malekian (1397 [2018]), p. 170.

[12]. Mokri (1402 [2023]), "The Book Awe."

[13]. This article explains "meaning reconstruction" especially in tragic or untimely losses, but does not regard the presence of a crisis of meaning in every grief as a universal law.

[14]. Mokri, Azarakhsh (1400 [2022], Dey), "At the Time of Self-Knowledge 8: Happiness, Satisfaction, and the Meaning of Life," podcast no. 295, official website mokri.org.

[15]. Malekian, Mostafa (1404 [2025], 28 Azar), "From Pain to Meaning," official audio version: section "Three Methods for Giving Meaning to Suffering," from minute 25:46.

[16]. Mokri (1402 [2023]), "The Book Awe."

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This text was first published in the twenty-eighth issue of the quarterly Hayat-e Ma'navi [Spiritual Life]. To obtain the electronic edition of this issue, you may visit Taaghche at the following address:

https://taaghche.com/magazine/340891