Grievers Are a Vulnerable Population. We Owe Them Higher Standards.
How workplaces, professionals, and culture at large are failing the grieving—and what we must do differently.
Grievers are a vulnerable population, in my opinion. We’re going to talk about why, and what you can do about it, because it’s very likely you haven’t considered the extra responsibility you carry if you work with grievers.
What is a Vulnerable Population?
Anyone that works with others should have a cursory knowledge of what vulnerable populations are. This knowledge will help you reduce the chance of inadvertently causing harm to others, and it will increase your self-awareness. Put another way, it will help reduce the chance that you yourself are taking advantage of others.
When we say someone belongs to a vulnerable population, it means that person is more likely to experience inequality, prejudice, and disadvantages: economically, socially, and environmentally.
Vulnerable populations are also more likely to receive less healthcare. They are more likely to have chronic illnesses, untreated or unmanaged health concerns, and experience challenges with accessing healthcare resources just in general. Vulnerable populations are also more likely to face financial instability.
These are some examples of vulnerable populations:
Veterans
Children
The Elderly
People with Disabilities
People Experiencing Incarceration, and Their Families
Racial and Ethnic Minorities
Migrant Workers
LGBTQ+ Folks
Immigrants and Refugees
People with Chronic Mental Health Disorders
I believe that grieving people are a vulnerable population.
I believe that dying people are a vulnerable population.
And I believe that the dead are a vulnerable population.
You will probably never find bereaved people on lists of vulnerable populations. I believe the primary reason for this connects to the baked-in cultural taboo we have around grief (not death.)
It is often said that Americans have a taboo around death but I do not believe this is true at all. Americans have a taboo around grief.
Death saturates popular culture. It is in our tv shows and movies, our songs and our artwork. It fills our newspapers, and peppers our social media feeds. Death saturates the true crime genre with endless content for its hosts to pick apart and dissect, taking other people’s trauma and re-packaging it as entertainment they profit off of. American culture has no taboo around death at all.
The taboo is around grief.
When the grief shows up? That’s when we tend to look away.
Sometimes we do this in the name of privacy, but mostly we look away because we don’t know what to say, we don’t like how it makes us feel, and because grief has no clear ending, and we don’t want to be on the hook for an unknown amount of time for an unknown experience.
Death is factual and finite, while grief is fluid and forever.
The reason you won’t see grievers included on lists of vulnerable populations is because our culture itself has a blindspot already baked in for it. When we don’t see the grief, it makes it harder to see the grievers. And when someone is invisible, they are more likely to be exploited or overlooked.
How Grief Makes Us Vulnerable
Earlier models of grief framed it as an emotion, something more akin to a synonym for sadness. We now know that emotions are just one part of what is more accurately described as the grief response.
The grief response is what your body, mind, and spirit does after it experiences loss.
There are 6 categories where you can find ‘signs of grief’, and each person will likely favor one or two categories more than the others. And, across various loss experiences, you’ll discover that the categories you tend to favor change, too.
The 6 categories of the grief response are:
Cognitive (brain farts more than normal, flubbing words, stutters worsening/reappearing, etc.)
Behavioral (changes in sleep patterns, etc.)
Spiritual (existential pain, crises of faith, struggling with meaning)
Social (wanting to be around people more or less than is usual for you)
Physical (there have been 50+ documented physical symptoms of grief, from low back pain to chapped lips)
Emotional (any feeling can be a part of grief—positive, negative, and neutral)
Grief is also a form of stress. This is because the loss (whether it was a deathloss or a shadowloss) had an impact on our life and changed it. It is taxing discovering all the changes beget by the loss, and then the process of figuring out how you’ll adapt; and then actually experiencing the adaptations—stress. That’s a lot of work for the brain—that is stress. It is exhausting and tiring.
On top of that, when the brain is stressed, it has less bandwidth. It has a diminished resource bank to offer.
This is part of why it’s recommended to never make major decisions in the immediacy of a loss. You literally don’t have your typical resources available to you.
And this is what makes grievers vulnerable.
This is what makes grievers a vulnerable population.
Grief and the Workplace: A Missing Layer of Care
Perhaps a controversial opinion of mine is that I don’t think bereavement leave is the problem in the workplace, I think the problem is that we don’t also have a program for a griever in the workplace after the immediacy of a loss. Workplaces should have a Bereavement Leave Benefit (which is designed to support time off to execute the tasks of a loss—travel to and from a funeral, for example, and should range from 5-10 business days off to be used within 30 days) and a Grieving Status Benefit, which should include a package of benefits which runs from 3 months to 12 months (depending on the loss) and are designed to support the employee’s integration process post-loss. Some of these benefits should include Flex Time to allow for simple things like lunch break extensions, late arrivals, and early departures without repercussions. It could include things like additional protection during performance reviews within 90 days of a loss. Job protection for 12 months like exists with FMLA. And things like additional colleague supports to help support very common disruptions in executive function that grievers often experience. This is obviously only a reality for companies large enough to offer benefits, but it’s also scalable even for the tiniest of operations.
Larger workplaces create protections for vulnerable populations already—for both employees and customers. In the United States, it is a standard for a company to support veterans, minorities, and those with disabilities. There’s also FMLA (the Family Medical Leave Act) which gives employees unpaid leave for medical and family related reasons, up to 12 weeks within a 12 month period.
I believe that it is possible to both improve the Bereavement Leave Benefit, and create a Grieving Status Benefit.
Grieving Status should be recognized like we do a short-term disability or major life event.
The Crisis in Deathwork and Griefwork: Why Good Intentions Aren’t Enough
Back in 2016, I took a death doula training and learned that the training program itself was generating more than $250,000 a year in revenue. The students it seemed, almost never went on to generate any income from this new endeavor themselves. There were a few, sure, but not many.
Fast forward to today, and I can not keep track of all the new trainings which claim to prepare their students to work safely with multiple vulnerable populations.
It is unsafe.
People who want to work with the dying, the dead, or the grieving have a responsibility to carry 3 things: education in the field, experience (actual lived experience working with those populations), and a source of accountability.
Coming from a background heavily informed by my experiences working in and around American Funeral Service, Canadian funeral service, as an American mortuary college instructor, and my experiences working in my community as a death companion (my preferred term for this role) didn’t prepare me for the shock at what I heard from my own students.
You see, in 2020, I ended up opening a school, called the School of American Thanatology, sort of by accident. I had had so many students enroll in a class I was offering in response to the pandemic, that it forced me to set up an online learning platform to be able to communicate with everyone effectively, hire an attorney to review and set up my policies and content, and all the other administrative and structural things one should have to support their students.
I’m now in the 5th year of that original course, and I’m also in the 5th year of learning from my students some of the unethical, and even illegal, things they are being taught to do elsewhere.
It is not ok to encourage students to transport bodies across state lines. In the US, that is practicing as a funeral director without a license, and would be classified as a felony.
It is not ethical to target online advertising to users who have recently suffered a loss, so you can exploit their mental state and extract dollars from their pockets, because you are selling your courses or coaching as a solution to their grief.
It is wrong to offer training or coaching to people without any background or experience in the field, without any human interaction.
There is at least one online death doula training I am aware of that is using my material without my permission. This ‘certification’ is not taught by any actual human, and there is no human interaction. People pay a fee to click through online content that has been scraped from actual professionals—and then go off and charge money to vulnerable populations. I believe that the majority of these graduates do not understand that what they are doing is unsafe. It is wrong to certify people to work with vulnerable populations without any human to human interaction.
People who work with any vulnerable population need education, experience, and accountability from somewhere.
A big benefit to moving to a licensure or credentialing model is that it would establish professionals as….professional…and those people would have a third party to evaluate and assess them.
Hell, I’m a Master Gardener in California, which is a volunteer role. It’s a requirement for me to pay a small fee to carry insurance each year. I am fingerprinted, and background checked with the State. I am required to attain 12 hours of continuing education each year. I am required to spend at least 25 hours a year actually doing the work of a Master Gardener. And on top of that—I have to report it all, each month, through an online system. If I don’t, I lose my status. Each year, I have educational requirements, experiential requirements, and somewhere I have to be accountable.
If Master Gardeners are held to this status, why are Deathworkers and Griefworkers not?
The best reason I have as to why not professionalize connects to the preservation of deeply rooted cultural and ancestral traditions which typically have been passed down person to person, in an apprentice style (even if informal). By professionalizing an emerging field, many vulnerable populations will be impacted negatively, however just as we have religious exemptions for things as a standard in the US, I believe there’s a way to provide similar exemptions to minority cultural groups, too.
An important step towards protecting three vulnerable populations (grievers, the dying, and the dead) and reducing the potential for harm, is by professionalizing the emerging fields of Deathwork and Griefwork.
So, What Do You Do With All of This?
First, take a moment to make a list of the vulnerable populations you work with. Does that list include grievers, the dying, or the dead? It is a powerful act to name and see groups of people that are often unseen, and to clarify for ourselves the level of interaction we might have with them.
Second, consider times when you were grieving, and belonged to this vulnerable population. Were there any decisions you made that you felt you were pushed into? Looking back, can you identify anything that made you feel you were taken advantage of, exploited, or unseen? Awareness around personal lived experience is important.
Third, if you are in a leadership role, do you offer any accommodations to grieving people? Even if informally, make a little list of what you’ve done for these folks in the past. What worked, and what didn’t? And might it be possible for you to broach a discussion with decision makers around improving an already existing Bereavement Leave Benefit and offering a new Grief Status Benefit?
Grievers aren’t broken—they’re vulnerable. They deserve to be seen, supported, and protected. The structures our society has built should have grief support baked in from the start.
And for those of us who work with the grieving, the dying, or the dead: it’s time to embrace the responsibility of being held to a higher standard.
We can do better.
Oversight:
I asked several colleagues to read and lightly review this piece to identify inaccuracies, unclear language, or major omissions. Any typos are mine and mine alone, and any remaining problems with this piece belong solely to me!
With gratitude, I thank my colleagues, peers, and students.
Sources:
Gordon, Bruce G. "Vulnerability in Research: Basic Ethical Concepts and General Approach to Review." Ochsner Journal 20, no. 1 (2020): 34–38. https://doi.org/10.31486/toj.19.0079.
Iltis, A. S., & MacKay, D. (Eds.). (2024). The Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947750.001.0001
National End-of-Life Doula Alliance. 2020 Annual Report. 2020. https://www.nedalliance.org/2020_annual_report.html
Nursing: Mental Health and Community Concepts [Internet]. Open Resources for Nursing (Open RN); Ernstmeyer K, Christman E, editors. Eau Claire (WI): Chippewa Valley Technical College; 2022.
U.S. Department of Labor. (n.d.). Family and Medical Leave Act. Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Department of Labor. Retrieved 25 April 2025, from https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla
Notes:
A. In Florida, practicing as a funeral director without a license is classified as a third-degree felony. According to Florida Statutes §497.157(8), any individual who engages in activities requiring licensure under this chapter without being properly licensed commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in sections 775.082, 775.083, or 775.084 of the Florida Statutes.
In California, practicing as a funeral director without a license is a misdemeanor. According to the California Business and Professions Code §7718.5, any individual who holds themselves out as a funeral director without proper licensure is guilty of a misdemeanor. The penalties for this offense can include imprisonment in the county jail for up to six months, a fine not exceeding $1,000, or both .
This varies on a state-by-state basis, but I wanted to provide two examples to highlight how important high educational standards are for any program that encourages its students to work with the dying, the dead, or the grieving.
B. The term “Vulnerable Population” is also a status with federal and legal implications in the United States. I believe because of the impact of grief on the body, mind and social support that grievers should be considered a vulnerable population and should benefit from additional protections against exploitation and abuse, and from things like informed consent and access to things like Legal Aid under this status.
Updates:
Thank you to Charlene Lam for linking to this article from her page dedicated to helping people become Grief Coaches.