Grief is, among other things, a process of cognitive and emotional adjustment to a changed reality — the slow, painful work of restructuring one’s expectations, one’s sense of the future, one’s relationship to the absent person.

This work takes time and effort, and it involves a kind of psychological investment in the new, painful reality.

When false hope interrupts this process — when a person who has been adapting to loss is suddenly told that the loss was mistaken, that the person is alive and returned — the grief work that has been done is not simply paused.

It is partially undone.