For the person grieving

Is it normal to talk out loud to someone who died?

A 1996 book helped change how grief professionals understood continuing bonds. Talking to the person you lost can be part of that bond.

By Emily J. Pearson · August 26, 2026

You still talk to the person who died. Out loud, in the car, at the sink, with a quick check that nobody heard you. And some part of you has filed this as a guilty secret, a thing you’d be embarrassed to be caught doing.

Nothing is wrong with you, and you are not the only one. This page exists to show you the receipts on both of those claims.

Why does it feel like something you should hide?

Because older professional models often treated the bond with the person who died as something to be severed. Cutting the tie was seen as the job of grieving, and holding on was seen as unhealthy. That idea leaked out of the clinics and into the culture, and the culture kept it long after the clinics abandoned it. When you check over your shoulder before you talk to them, you’re flinching at a rule that expired.

Notice what that means. The embarrassment isn’t coming from the behavior. It’s coming from an older professional idea that later work challenged.

What changed in 1996?

A book came out that challenged the old assumption. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, edited by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, was published in 1996, and it turned the field’s assumption on its head. Instead of asking how grieving people sever the bond, it documented how they keep it, and it argued that keeping it is normal rather than a problem to be treated.

The reversal wasn’t a one-off. The textbook that grief counselors train on rewrote its own let-go instruction along similar lines, so the shift runs right through the field. The bond doesn’t end at the death. It changes shape. Talking out loud is one of the shapes it takes.

What does a continuing bond look like?

It can be a running commentary in the car, a sentence said at the sink, a tradition kept or a decision made with the person in mind. The point is not that everyone should do these things. It is that the relationship does not have to be treated as something you must erase in order to grieve properly.

None of this requires any belief about whether the person can hear you. The research isn’t a claim about the dead. It’s a claim about the living, and what the living naturally do with a bond that mattered.

Do you have to stop?

No. You don’t have to stop, and you don’t have to explain it. Not to the people who might overhear you, and not to yourself at the sink.

You may notice the talking gets busier in some weeks than others. That tracks the way grief arrives in waves, and the quiet stretches don’t mean the bond is fading any more than the busy ones mean you’re stuck.

If the talking ever stopped feeling like connection and started feeling like drowning, that would be worth taking to a professional, the way any part of grief is when it gets too heavy to carry alone. But the behavior itself, the running commentary in the car, the sentence said to an empty kitchen, sits inside the range described by continuing-bonds research.

So the commentary in the car can stay, and so can the sentence said to the empty kitchen. If anyone ever does catch you at it, the most you’ll have to explain is that you were thinking out loud.

Sources

• Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman and Steven L. Nickman, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Routledge, 1996).