Continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman and Nickman)
The finding that many bereaved people keep a relationship with the person who died: talking to them, keeping their things, asking what they would do, sensing them in a room. Klass and colleagues argued that grief does not have to end in letting go, and that the older ‘detach and move on’ model reflected 20th-century Western values more than how people grieve.
What drives it
It takes the shame out of the conversation at the grave or the voice note kept for years. For identification the question shifts from whether a bond exists to what it does: comfort that lets life go on, or a pull that keeps the person out of the present.
How it shows
Work
Wearing a father’s watch to an interview. Asking ‘what would she say?’ before a hard decision. A dead colleague’s mug left on the shelf, and the team leaving it there.
Relationships
A new partner finds photos of a late wife still on the wall and doesn’t know if they’re allowed to mention her. Families split between those who visit the grave weekly and those who think it is time to stop.
Self
Notice when you speak to the person, out loud or in your head, and how you feel after: steadier, or pulled out of the day you are in.
What tells it apart
Prolonged grief disorder (ICD-11, DSM-5-TR): A bond that sits beside a full life may be a continuing bond. Yearning every day, a year or more after the death, with life organized around the absence, is more likely prolonged grief.
Denial: Talking to the dead while knowing they are dead is a bond. Acting as though the death has not happened, such as laying their place and expecting them home, may point to denial.
Four tasks of mourning (Worden): Worden’s fourth task in later editions is finding a lasting connection with the person, so the two ideas overlap. The tasks treat the bond as one job among four, where continuing bonds research studies the bond itself.
A test
Ask what the person does to stay connected and how they feel in the hour after. Comfort and a return to the day may suggest a bond that supports them, while dread or pulling away from the living may suggest the bond is tied up with grief that has not eased.
Questions to carry
- The last time I spoke to them in my head, what did I ask?
- After I feel close to them, am I more in my life or further from it?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
mixed. A systematic review of 79 studies (Hewson and colleagues, Death Studies, 2023) found bonds brought both comfort and distress, and said the research could not yet confirm whether keeping a bond helps more than letting it go. In a five-year study of 39 widowed people (Field, Gal-Oz and Bonanno, 2003), stronger bonds went with more grief symptoms over the five years, so the strength of a bond says little on its own about how well someone is doing.
Where it comes from
Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman (editors), Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, Taylor and Francis, 1996, with chapters on widows and widowers, bereaved parents, children and siblings, adoptees and birth parents, and bereavement in Japan