Meaningfulness and grief: you don’t know what you got till it’s gone

Abstract

What makes a life meaningful and how do we know when our lives have meaning? This paper draws on the experience of grief to provide answer to these questions. It is argued that grief is a unique kind of transformative experience that gives us access to facts about the depth of meaningfulness and value that even the most seemingly mundane aspects of our day-to-day lives have had which often goes largely unrecognized until the source of that meaning is lost.