Grief in Jamaica has long been a deeply personal and cultural experience, but it has grown into something bigger: a public health concern.

Grief has a way of changing everything. It does not knock before it enters; it crashes in. I know this intimately. In 2023 I lost my mother suddenly — an avoidable death that still sits like a stone in my chest. She went to the hospital at a time when dengue was spreading fast, and because the system was overwhelmed they made what I call a “mass diagnosis”. They concluded she had dengue. But when I did a private autopsy it was revealed that she actually had pneumonia.

The simple step of doing a chest X-ray, the standard way to detect pneumonia, could have saved her life, but instead, negligence robbed us of her. Her cries as she went into heart failure went unanswered. She died of a pulmonary embolism: a blood clot that formed because the untreated pneumonia pushed her heart into failure and set off a chain reaction — something preventable.

Then, in February this year, grief visited again. My close friend, just 34 years old, died from complications of kidney disease. He was successful, ran a thriving business, ate healthy, went to the gym, and took care of himself. I mourned him quietly. I was traumatised and heartbroken.

And just a few months later, in the summer, my cousin, a young man I helped raise, died at 22. He was starting to find himself, about to embark on his passion and his purpose. He was hit after a careless driver created a blind spot on the road. A vibrant life ended in seconds because someone decided to park without care in a corner.

Three deaths. Three people I loved deeply. All sudden. All unnecessary. All forever altering my world.

Jamaica has a culture of gathering when death comes: dead yards, nine nights, and big funerals. We’ve learnt to incorporate mourning into our daily rhythm. People show up in numbers. There is singing, storytelling, plates of food, and rum bottles passed around. But beneath the noise I’ve come to understand how superficial that support often is. It’s just another “dead yard”. Another “nine night”. Another body in the ground.

But grief doesn’t leave when the tents come down. It lingers in quiet corners. It tightens your chest at 3:00 am. It reshapes how you see the world.

And in this country, where so many deaths are sudden — some caused by the system, some by negligence on the road, some by preventable diseases — we rarely talk about what happens after. How do we cope? Do we keep fighting the system? Do we go to court and spend years chasing accountability? Or do we learn to live with the emptiness?

For me, Bible study at Andrews Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church has become a kind of balm, a way to breathe when the grief feels unbearable. But not everyone has that outlet.

If we’re serious about the health and well-being of our people, we have to start talking openly about grief. It cannot be something we only perform at funerals. Real support means building systems of care and community that go beyond sympathy cards and nine nights.

We need structured grief support programmes in every parish — through churches, community centres, schools, and workplaces — where people can process loss with guidance and without stigma. We need a national bereavement policy framework that recognises sudden death as a public health issue, because it is. And within that, we need bereavement leave to be formally incorporated into employment law and public service policy.

When my mother died and I wrote to request leave, my human resource department informed me that the Government of Jamaica has no official bereavement leave. However, I was fortunate; my company exercised humanity and gave me time off, but that was out of compassion, not legislation. Many others are not so lucky. At the very moment people are least able to function, they could be forced to choose between their grief and their jobs. That is unacceptable.

Hospitals should be mandated to provide bereavement counselling when deaths occur due to medical complications or negligence. Police and road safety authorities should not only investigate fatal crashes, but also link families to trauma support. Our churches, which are already a central part of our cultural response to death, should be equipped and supported to offer trained grief ministries, not just prayers.

We also need to shift the language around grief to make it okay to talk about pain months later, to check in long after the funeral, and to help each other live with the loss and not just acknowledge it for a night.

Grief cannot remain an invisible thing we “just live with”. It is a national wound that needs care. We can do better than perfunctory gatherings and quick condolences.

Behind every “dead yard” is a family trying to figure out how to breathe again. It’s time Jamaica builds systems that help them do so.

kenneisharenae@gmail.com