Why we need to stop ranking our grief | Kelly Cervantes | TEDxNortheasternU

Kelly Cervantes opens by describing her personal experience losing her nearly 4-year-old daughter Adelaide to a neurodegenerative disorder, while her husband performed in Hamilton — a show that ironically deals with the loss of a child. She recounts how people would tell her that their own losses were 'nothing compared' to hers, which initially felt validating but later troubled her when she heard the word 'unimaginable' used in Hamilton's song 'It's Quiet Uptown.'

Cervantes introduces the concept of the 'Grief Olympics,' arguing that humans naturally compare and rank losses due to an evolutionary tendency toward comparative judgment, as noted in a 2014 Neural Report article. However, she contends this behavior is harmful in the context of grief. When others crown someone else's grief as the worst, they simultaneously downgrade their own grief, often serving it with a side of shame and self-perceived weakness. She also invokes Leon Festinger's social comparison theory to explain how upward social comparison typically leads to negative self-esteem.

She identifies a critical side effect of labeling certain losses as 'unimaginable': it gives society permission to avoid engaging with those topics altogether. Cervantes found herself anxious about Adelaide being mentioned in conversation, not because she didn't want to talk about her daughter, but because she feared making others uncomfortable. Her then 8-year-old son inadvertently illuminated this dynamic when he said he wasn't afraid of movie monsters, but of people's reactions to them. She also shares that a publishing editor told her agent that her grief book would be more marketable if she had lost a husband instead of a child — illustrating how society's hierarchy of grief even affects commercial viability.

Cervantes then addresses the opposite problem: self-crowning, where individuals decide their own loss is worse than anyone else's and use it to justify staying stuck in grief. She references speaking at a grieving parents retreat where some attendees had clung to their grief for comfort, resisting forward momentum years after their losses. She notes that researchers James Pennebaker and Joshua Smith found that verbalizing or writing about emotions moves them to a part of the brain where they can be processed, and that sharing grief helps people realize their emotions — though not their stories — are not unique.

Finally, Cervantes argues that loss cannot be meaningfully compared because grief is deeply personal and contextual. Two people losing the same person will not grieve identically — she and her husband Miguel lost the same child but grieved very differently. Using the example of Tom Hanks' character losing a volleyball named Wilson in Cast Away, she illustrates that the depth of loss is not determined by the object lost but by its meaning to the griever. She concludes by urging people to replace the urge to compare with compassion — simply saying 'I'm so sorry, that sucks, tell me about them' — arguing this does more for a griever than any gold medal ever could.