Since the loss, something in him has closed. He kept going, stayed busy, seemed okay to everyone else. But you can see it: something behind his eyes has gone still. He won't bring it up, and when you do, he changes the subject.
Young men are often among the least supported grievers. Cultural expectations of strength and stoicism, the developmental pressure to appear capable and self-sufficient, and the relative absence of models for male grief conspire to create young men who carry loss in silence. The grief gets channeled into other things: anger, substance use, a driven hyperactivity, or the opposite, a flattening and withdrawal from life that looks like laziness rather than mourning.
For parents watching this, it can be deeply difficult to reach. Every attempt to talk about the loss may be deflected, answered with 'I'm fine,' or met with irritation. He's not necessarily protecting you from his grief, though he may think he is. He may simply not have the language or the permission to let it be what it is.
Young men often grieve better through activity than through sitting still: through physical engagement, through action, through being in nature, through shared experience with people who understand the loss. Rituals that acknowledge and mark what has been lost, even simple ones, can help create the psychological structure that grief needs to move rather than stagnate.
Peer support is often more accessible to young men than parental support in grief. A friend who experienced the same loss, a counsellor at school or university, a grief group specifically for young people: these can provide a different quality of presence than family can. Encouraging connection in these directions, while maintaining your own warmth and presence without demand, is often the most useful contribution.
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Browse all programs →Often yes. Anger is one of the primary expressions of grief in men, particularly young men who have more access to anger than to tears. The anger may be at the person who died, at himself, at circumstance, at you. None of that is necessarily about you, even when it comes toward you. Holding it as grief rather than behaviour to be corrected often allows it more room to move.
For some people, sustained conversation about the loss is not how they process it, and that's genuinely okay. What matters more than whether he talks about it is whether he seems to be moving through the grief over time, not stuck, not worsening, maintaining enough functioning to stay connected to his life. If it's been a long time and he seems frozen, that's worth gently exploring.
If the grief is significantly and persistently affecting his functioning, if substance use has increased substantially, if there are any signs of suicidal thinking, or if it's been more than several months with no visible movement: those are signs that professional support would be valuable. A GP can assess, and grief counselling with experience in young men is available and effective.
Most men who've done a retreat or started working with a coach say the same thing afterward: I wish I'd done this years ago. The barrier isn't usually deep resistance — it's that nobody told them something like this existed.
Browse the directory, find someone whose approach might land with him specifically, and offer one low-pressure introduction. One link. One question. One conversation he can decide whether to have.