Losing a Parent as a Child: Why the Grief Returns Decades Later
You were nine, or fourteen, or seventeen when a parent died, and by every visible measure you were “fine.” Now someone else has died and something older has surfaced. Here is why a childhood loss returns in adulthood, what the research actually shows, and why you are not grieving late.
You were nine, or fourteen, or seventeen. A parent died. The adults around you did what adults did then: they got you through the funeral, or kept you home from it, and life resumed. You went back to school. Nobody asked much and you learned not to say much. You were, by every visible measure, “fine.”
Now you are forty or fifty and someone else has died and what has come up is not only grief for that person. It is something older, with the shape of a childhood, and it is louder than anything you expected.
If this is you, you are not unusual and you have not been carrying a secret failure to grieve. Something more specific happened and it helps to name it.
How Common This Is
According to the 2026 Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model from Judi's House, one in eleven children in the United States will experience the death of a parent or sibling before age 18. That is roughly three children in every classroom and most of them grow up to be adults who never received any support specific to the loss.
What the Research Says, and What It Does Not
I want to be careful here because there is a popular story about this that the research does not support. The story goes that grief not expressed at the time gets stored away and eventually surfaces intact, as fresh as the day of the death. When researchers tested that idea by following bereaved adults closely over five years, they found almost no cases of it. Grief does not sit in a reservoir waiting for a crack in the dam.
What the research does find is more useful and more humane.
A UK study followed adults who had lost a parent in childhood, some of them more than seventy years after the death. The lasting difficulties they described, with trust, self-worth, loneliness, and being able to say what they felt, tracked three things closely. Whether their world stayed stable after the death or fell apart (a move, a separation from siblings, a surviving parent who could no longer function). Whether anyone supported them directly rather than focusing only one the grieving adult in the house. And whether anyone told them the truth, in language they could understand, about what was happening.
One participant, seventeen when his father died, put it plainly: everyone assumed a seventeen-year-old boy could cope so nobody said anything at all.
Read that way, the child who lost a parent did not fail to process anything. The conditions for processing were never provided. A child cannot grieve alone what the adults around them will not name.
Why It Comes Back Now
Grief researchers use the term “regrief” for what happens next: a childhood loss gets grieved again at each new stage of life, because the person now has capacities they did not have before, and because the loss keeps taking new things. The wedding your mother should have attended. The first time you held your own child and understood, in your body, what your father had lost. The moment you passed the age he was when he died.
A new death in adulthood is often the largest of these moments. It is frequently the first time you have three things you lacked at nine: the maturity to understand the loss, permission to fall apart, and language for what you feel. So two griefs arrive together, and the older one is sometimes the louder of the two. That is not regression. It is the first real opportunity you have had.
What This Can Look Like
Some patterns I see often in adults who lost a parent young:
Feeling like a fraud in your own grief. The new loss is real and you are grieving it, but you sense that the intensity belongs somewhere else, and you are not sure you are allowed to say so.
Not knowing basic facts. Many people who lost a parent in childhood were never told how the person died, or what the illness was, or what the last weeks were like. Decades later, that gap is still a gap.
A tight, self-sufficient way of being in the world. If you learned early that no one was coming, you may have built a life around not needing anyone. That skill was earned honestly. It also tends to get in the way of being helped now.
Difficulty picturing the parent as a person. You knew them as a child knows a parent. You have never had the chance to know them as an adult would, and the grief now includes that missing relationship. This is one place where continuing bonds can do real work: asking relatives what they were like, finding letters, learning the ordinary details.
What Tends to Help
Start by taking the earlier loss seriously as a loss of its own, not as a complication of the current one. It deserves its own room.
Fill in what you can. Ask the surviving relatives the questions no one answered. Some will not want to talk. Some have been waiting thirty years for someone to ask.
Let the identity questions come. Who you are was shaped by that death more than you may have realized and revisiting it now, as an adult, is part of how a childhood loss finally gets integrated rather than simply survived.
And if you are a parent making decisions for a grieving child right now, the research above is a clear argument for telling them the truth and letting them participate in what is happening. The adults who spared you were trying to protect you. You can do it differently.
A Final Word
If you lost a parent as a child and something old has surfaced now, you are not grieving badly or late. You are grieving a loss you could only meet in part as a child, and you are meeting it again with everything you have become since. That is worth doing carefully and it is worth doing with someone.
I offer a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No pressure, no commitment, just a conversation.
How to Support a Friend After a Suicide Loss (and the One Question Not to Ask)
"Did you see the signs?" is the question suicide loss survivors most wish no one had asked. Here is why well-meaning people ask it, what it does when it lands, and what to say instead, including how to repair it if you already asked.
Someone you care about has lost a person to suicide. You want to show up. You are not sure how, and you are afraid of making it worse.
That fear is reasonable. Suicide loss is different from other bereavements in ways that most of us were never taught, and the ordinary instincts we bring to grief, the ones that work well enough after a long illness, can land badly here. This post is for the friend, the sibling, the coworker, the neighbor. It is about what actually helps, what quietly wounds, and why one very common question should be retired from your vocabulary.
The Question That Lands as a Verdict
When I facilitated a support group for survivors of suicide loss, one of the questions survivors were asked that often hurt the most was: Did you see the signs?
It is almost always asked gently. The person asking is not trying to accuse anyone. But here is what the survivor may hear: did you miss something. You were close enough to know. And here is what the survivor thinks, sometimes out loud and sometimes only at 3 a.m.: if I had seen the signs, I would have done something.
That sentence is both true and unbearable. It is true because of course they would have. It is unbearable because it puts them on the witness stand of a case they have already been prosecuting against themselves for weeks.
Why People Ask It
Understanding why the question comes so naturally does not excuse it, but it can help you catch it before it leaves your mouth.
When someone dies by suicide, the people around the loss reach for a story that makes it make sense. A missed sign is a story. It converts something unbearable and unexplained into something that could have been caught, which means it could be prevented, which means it could not happen to me or to the people I love. The question is, at bottom, a bid for the questioner's own safety. It is the same reflex that makes grief drive people away, sharpened by a death that seems to have happened inside a mind where no one could reach it.
Neither the question nor the retreat is about the survivor. Both land on the survivor anyway.
What the Research Says About Showing Up
The evidence here is consistent. People bereaved by suicide receive less support from friends and family than people bereaved by other sudden deaths. Fewer people show up and the survivor notices. When researchers asked survivors which encounters helped and which hurt, two kinds made people feel most alone: avoidance, and intrusive curiosity about the circumstances of the death. Notice that those are opposites. Most people, afraid of prying, retreat into silence. The survivor experiences both as the same thing: being left alone with it.
What to Say Instead
You do not need a script for the whole relationship. You need a way to open the door that does not require the survivor to explain, defend, or reassure you. Here is the one I give to group members to pass along to their own friends, and you are welcome to use it exactly as written:
"I don't know the right thing to say, and I'm not going to ask you what happened. I'm just going to keep showing up. Can I bring dinner Thursday?"
Every clause is doing a job. The first sentence names your uncertainty so the survivor does not have to manage it for you. The second takes the interrogation off the table: no why, no signs, no circumstances, and it signals that you know those questions are not yours to ask. The third is a promise about time, which is what suicide loss survivors most often say they lack from the people around them. The fourth is concrete and closed-ended, so a yes costs them nothing and a no is easy.
Then do it. Then do it again in three weeks, when everyone else has gone quiet.
A few other things that reliably help:
Say the person's name. Survivors often find that the person who died becomes unmentionable, as if the manner of death has erased the life. Ask about them. Share a memory. Let the person remain a person.
Ask how they are and mean it as a real question. A surprising number of survivors report that after the funeral, no one asked again. "How are you doing with all of it?" is enough. Then stay for the answer.
Take something off their plate without being asked what. Mow the lawn. Handle the school pickup. Suicide loss often comes with logistics that other deaths do not, and decision-making is one of the first capacities grief takes.
Keep your questions about the death to yourself. If they want to tell you what happened, they will. If they do not, it is not yours to know. This includes the method, the note, the timeline, and anything that begins with "did you notice."
If You Already Asked
Maybe you are reading this and realizing you asked the question. Maybe you asked it weeks ago and have been vaguely uneasy since.
You can repair it and the repair is simple. "I asked you a question about signs a while back and I've been thinking about it. I'm sorry. That wasn't fair to you. I'm still here." That is all. Do not explain what you meant. Do not ask them to tell you it was fine.
Most survivors will forgive the question quickly. What they remember is whether you stayed.
What This Grief Needs From You Over Time
Suicide bereavement does not run on a schedule and the research is clear that survivors are at higher risk of getting “stuck” in it than people grieving other deaths. I often hear people say they are surprised that the second year feels in some ways harder than the first. The anniversary will be hard. The birthday will be hard. The ordinary Tuesday four months out, when the casseroles have stopped and the card is still on the counter, may be the hardest of all. Everyone shows up once. Almost no one shows up at week twelve.
If you can be the person who does, you will be doing more than you know. And if your friend is carrying the weight of the unanswerable question, the why that has no answer, it may help to know that there are specific supports for this particular kind of loss, including groups made up of people who have carried it themselves. You can gently mention that. You do not need to push.
A Final Word
You will not say the perfect thing. There is no perfect thing. What a survivor of suicide loss needs from you is not eloquence and it is certainly not a theory about what could have been prevented. It is presence, repeated over time, without conditions.
If someone you love is grieving a suicide and you are trying to figure out how to help, or if you are the one grieving and the people around you keep asking the wrong questions, I would be glad to talk. I offer a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No pressure, no commitment, just a conversation.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Understanding Anticipatory Grief: Why You're Already Exhausted Before They're Gone
You don't need someone to have died for the grief to be real. Anticipatory grief, the exhaustion, fog, and waves of sadness that arrive while someone you love is still here, is more common than most people realize, and rarely named for what it is.
You are still making dinner. You are still driving to appointments, filling prescriptions, answering the same question for the fifth time today. Your person is still here. And yet some nights you catch yourself crying in the car before you've even pulled out of the driveway, grieving someone who hasn't died yet.
If this is familiar, you are not confused about the order of things. You are experiencing what researchers call anticipatory grief: the grief that begins before a death, while someone you love is still alive but declining. It has a name, it is well documented in the clinical literature, and it is far more common than most people realize.
Why This Doesn't Feel Like "Real" Grief
Most of what we're taught about grief assumes a clear before and after. Someone dies, and grief follows. Anticipatory grief breaks that timeline, and breaking it tends to produce a particular kind of confusion. You are mourning a person who is still asking you about your day. You are missing someone who is sitting three feet away from you. That contradiction alone can make the experience feel illegitimate, like something you're not allowed to feel yet.
But anticipatory grief is not a rehearsal for the real thing. It is its own experience, with its own physical and cognitive toll, and it deserves to be named as what it is.
What It Actually Feels Like
What comes up far more often than anything else is exhaustion. A tiredness that sleep doesn't fix. A fog that makes it hard to hold a thought, finish a sentence, or remember what you walked into the room for.
This tracks with what the clinical literature describes. Anticipatory grief symptoms span physical, emotional, and cognitive domains, and the physical and cognitive symptoms in particular, disrupted sleep, appetite changes, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, are consistently among the most reported.
There's a reason for this. Your nervous system doesn't distinguish neatly between "grieving a death that happened" and "grieving a death that hasn't happened yet." Watching someone you love decline, especially over months or years, keeps your stress response activated for an extended period with no clear endpoint. Unlike acute grief after a death, which has a beginning you can point to, anticipatory grief often has no defined start and no predictable length. That open-endedness is part of what makes it so depleting. You are not just carrying sadness. You are carrying it indefinitely, with no way to know how much longer, while also managing appointments, medications, and the person's day-to-day needs.
The Sadness Comes in Waves, Not a Straight Line
Anticipatory grief doesn't move in one direction. Some days the person in front of you feels mostly like themselves, and grief recedes into the background. Other days, a small moment, a word they can't find, a task they can no longer do alone, brings the full weight of what's coming back into the room. This isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's closer to how grief actually works: in waves, not a straight line down.
Anger and guilt can show up in this mix too, sometimes directed at the illness, sometimes at the unfairness of it, sometimes at yourself for a moment of impatience on a hard day. If either surfaces for you, it doesn't mean something has gone wrong. It's one thread among several, not the center of the experience for most people.
What Tends to Help
Name it without waiting for permission. You don't need the death to occur for the grief to be real. Calling it anticipatory grief out loud or just to yourself can loosen some of the confusion around why you feel the way you do.
Take the fatigue seriously as a physical symptom, not a character flaw. If your body feels heavy and your mind feels slow, that is a predictable response to a nervous system that has been on alert for a long time. It is not a sign that you are not trying hard enough.
Build in rest before you're depleted, not after. Because there's no clear finish line, it's easy to keep pushing until collapse feels like the only option. Regular, planned breaks, even brief ones, matter more here than they would in a shorter-term crisis.
Let the waves come without fighting them. Trying to stay composed at all times takes energy you don't have to spare. A hard day doesn't undo the steady days around it.
Find someone who understands the specific shape of this grief. Anticipatory grief can be a lonelier experience than grief after a death, partly because the people around you may not know what to say to someone whose loss hasn't "officially" happened yet. Support that's specific to what you're carrying, rather than general reassurance, tends to help more.
A Final Word
You are allowed to grieve someone who is still here. The exhaustion, the fog, the waves of sadness that arrive without warning, none of it means you are grieving wrong, or too early, or without cause. It means you are living alongside a loss that has already begun, even while the person you love is still beside you.
You do not have to carry this alone. I offer a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No pressure, no commitment, just a conversation.
When One Loss Leads to Another: Grieving a Miscarriage and the Loss of Fertility That Follows
She had grieved the miscarriage as best she knew how. Then her doctor told her she needed a hysterectomy, and there would be no next pregnancy to hope for. Here is what happens when one reproductive loss is followed by another, and why the grief does not simply add up the way you'd expect.
She had grieved the miscarriage as best she knew how. She was still in the middle of that when her doctor told her she needed a hysterectomy. There would be no next pregnancy to hope for. Not this year, not ever. The first loss had barely finished announcing itself before the second one arrived and changed what the first loss even meant.
This is a pattern I see clinically that often gets little attention: a pregnancy loss followed, sometimes months later, sometimes years later, by a second and different loss of fertility itself. A hysterectomy. A diagnosis. A closing door where there used to be a possibility. These are not two separate griefs that happen to occur in the same life. They compound each other and the second loss often changes the meaning of the first one in ways that catch people off guard.
Why This Isn't Just "More Grief"
It would be reasonable to assume that grieving a second reproductive loss works the same way as the first, just with more practice. That is not what tends to happen.
A miscarriage, even a devastating one, usually still holds the possibility of trying again. That possibility, even when it is not consciously named, often functions as a kind of scaffolding. Some part of the mind is holding onto a future that could still include a pregnancy. When a hysterectomy or another loss of fertility follows, that scaffolding is removed. The grief is not simply added to. It is retroactively changed. The miscarriage stops being "a loss on the way to a family" and becomes, in a much more final way, the loss of a particular child who will never have existed, full stop.
This retroactive shift is part of why the second loss can feel disproportionately heavy, heavier sometimes than people expect or than they feel permitted to express.
The Hysterectomy Is Its Own Grief, Not Just a Medical Event
This is worth saying directly because it is often missed: the loss of fertility through hysterectomy can be a significant grief event on its own, separate from anything that came before it.
Research following over 1,100 women scheduled for hysterectomy found that the roughly one in ten who would have wanted a child, or another child, showed significantly higher depression, anxiety, and anger than the rest of the group, an elevation still present two years later.
What this tells us clinically is that grief following a hysterectomy is not automatically resolved by the fact that it was medically necessary or that it addressed a genuine health problem. A surgery can be the right medical decision and a real loss at the same time. Those two things are not in conflict and a person does not need to choose between understanding the medical necessity and grieving what it closed off.
When the Losses Layer, the Grief Is Not Simply Additive
I want to be honest about something here. I am unaware of research that specifically studies a miscarriage followed later by a hysterectomy or similar loss of fertility as its own combined phenomenon. That specific research gap is real and I would rather say so plainly than imply a study exists that ties the two together directly.
One analysis of self-reported miscarriage narratives found grief symptoms often persist well past the first year, with worse outcomes the longer the gap before they're addressed and standard screening tools used in reproductive healthcare are known to miss this kind of prolonged, complicated grief.
Put together, this points toward a reasonable clinical picture, even without a study on the exact sequence: grief that is already delayed or unprocessed from a first reproductive loss does not simply pause while a second loss is absorbed. It tends to resurface, reshaped by what has happened since, at the same time a new grief is beginning. The two do not take turns. They occupy the same space.
What This Can Look Like
A few patterns show up often in this kind of layered loss worth naming so they don't feel as disorienting when they appear.
Grief for the first loss can intensify after the second. It is common to think you had "finished" grieving a miscarriage, only to find it returning with new force once a hysterectomy or fertility diagnosis makes clear that this child, this specific loss, will never be followed by another pregnancy the way you once assumed it might be.
The second loss can feel harder to name as grief. A hysterectomy, especially one framed by medical providers primarily around symptom relief or cancer risk, does not always come with permission to grieve it. You are allowed to be relieved about your health and grieving the fertility you lost in the same breath.
Identity questions tend to surface hard here. Who you are after a loss that closes a door permanently, rather than one that theoretically could have gone differently, often asks harder questions of a person's sense of self and future than a single loss does on its own.
Support tends to thin out precisely when it's needed most. People around you may have shown up for the miscarriage and assume, understandably but incorrectly, that a later medical procedure does not carry the same emotional weight. It often carries more.
What Tends to Help
Naming both losses as real, distinct griefs, rather than folding the second into the first or dismissing it as "just medical," is usually where things start to loosen. They are related. They are not the same loss wearing two different coats.
It also helps to expect, rather than be alarmed by, the resurfacing of the earlier grief. If the miscarriage feels suddenly sharper again after a hysterectomy or a fertility diagnosis, that is not a sign you failed to grieve it the first time. It is a sign the ground underneath that grief has shifted, and grief naturally responds to that.
And it is worth finding support that understands reproductive loss specifically, whether that is a therapist, a support group, or both. General grief support is a good starting point, but the layered, compounding nature of this kind of loss often benefits from someone who has sat with this particular pattern before.
A Final Word
If you are carrying a miscarriage and a later loss of fertility together, you are not required to rank them, or to have finished grieving one before the other arrived. Both are real. Both deserve room. And the fact that the second loss might look, from the outside, like a resolved medical matter does not make what it took from you any less significant.
You do not have to carry this alone. I offer a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No pressure, no commitment, just a conversation.
The Grief Nobody Talks About: Surviving the Loss of Someone to Suicide
When someone dies of cancer, people bring food and sit with you. When someone dies by suicide, conversations stop mid-sentence and friends pull back. You carry the loss and a second, quieter burden: the sense that your grief is too complicated for anyone to hear.
There is a particular kind of grief that arrives wrapped in silence.
When someone you love dies of cancer, people bring food. They call. They sit with you. The loss is visible, the mourning is communal, and the world, imperfectly but genuinely, shows up.
When someone you love dies by suicide, something different often happens. People don’t know what to say, so they say very little. Friends pull back. Conversations stop mid-sentence. And you are left to carry not only the devastating weight of your loss, but a second, quieter burden: the sense that your grief is somehow too complicated, too uncomfortable, too charged with questions that nobody wants to ask out loud.
This is the grief that nobody talks about. And that silence, more than almost anything else, is what makes it so hard.
You Are a Survivor of Suicide Loss
If you have lost someone to suicide, a parent, a child, a partner, a friend, a sibling, you are what the grief community calls a “suicide loss survivor.” The term matters, because naming what you are going through is the first step toward not being alone in it.
Suicide loss survivors are not a small group. Research published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior found that as many as 135 people are significantly affected by each suicide death. These are not strangers. They are people who loved the person who died, who are now navigating a form of grief that is, in important ways, unlike any other.
Understanding what makes this grief distinct is not about ranking losses or suggesting that suicide loss is worse than other bereavements. It is about being honest that it is different, and that those differences matter for how you grieve, what you need, and why the ordinary supports so often fall short.
Why This Grief Is Different
The Stigma Is Real, and It Has Consequences
Suicide carries a stigma that has deep historical and cultural roots. For centuries, suicide was treated as a moral failing, a sin, even a crime. Those frameworks have largely been discredited, but their residue remains, in the awkward silences, in the phrases people reach for, in the questions that hang unspoken in the air.
When that stigma surrounds a death, it surrounds the grief as well. Survivors often report feeling as though they must protect the circumstances of the death, telling some people the truth, giving others a vague explanation, managing a kind of double life in which the full story is never fully told. This concealment, however understandable, comes at a significant cost. Grief that cannot be spoken openly is grief that cannot be fully processed.
Dr. Jack Jordan, one of the leading researchers in suicide bereavement, has described this as a kind of “disenfranchised grief,” grief for a loss that society does not fully sanction or support. When your grief is disenfranchised, you don’t just lose the person. You lose access to the ordinary rituals and community support that help people move forward.
The Questions That Don’t Have Answers
Grief after most deaths involves questions. Grief after suicide involves a particular kind of question that can become consuming: Why?
Why did this happen? Was there a sign I missed? Could I have said something, done something, changed something? Did they know how much I loved them? Did I fail them?
These questions are not signs of weakness or irrationality. They are the mind’s attempt to make sense of something that often resists sense-making. But they carry a unique feature that distinguishes them from other grief questions: they are unanswerable. And living with an unanswerable question, with what researchers call “ambiguity” at the heart of your loss, is one of the most psychologically demanding aspects of suicide bereavement.
The search for a reason is understandable. But it is worth knowing that the absence of an answer is not the same as the absence of meaning, and that the questions themselves, over time, can shift from instruments of self-punishment into something quieter and more bearable.
The Guilt Is a Special Kind of Painful
Guilt is common in grief. After a suicide loss, it can be overwhelming.
Survivors frequently carry the weight of things said and unsaid, decisions made and unmade, moments they wish had gone differently. The “if only” loop, if only I had called that day, if only I had taken it more seriously, if only I had said the right thing, can run almost continuously in the early months of loss.
It is important to say this clearly: suicide is the result of a complex convergence of biological, psychological, and circumstantial factors. It is not caused by the failure of the people who loved the person who died. The responsibility does not belong to you. And yet grief rarely responds to logical argument, and knowing this intellectually is very different from feeling it.
Part of what grief therapy can offer is a space to sit with the guilt, not to dismiss it, but to examine it honestly, to distinguish between genuine regret and the distorted self-blame that loss so often generates, and to begin, slowly, to put it down.
The Trauma Layer
For many suicide loss survivors, especially those who discovered the body or were among the first to know, the loss carries a traumatic dimension that adds another layer of complexity to the grief. Intrusive images, hypervigilance, difficulty sleeping, a heightened startle response: these are not unusual, and they are not signs that something is permanently wrong with you. They are signs that your nervous system has been through something profound.
When trauma and grief are intertwined, they tend to complicate each other. Trauma responses can make it difficult to engage with the grief work that supports integration, and unprocessed grief can intensify trauma symptoms. Recognizing this interplay, and finding support that addresses both, is an important part of the path forward.
What Integrating This Grief Can Look Like
None of this is meant to suggest that integrating a suicide loss is impossible. It is not. Survivors of suicide loss can and do find their way to lives that are meaningful, even joyful, lives in which the person they lost remains present in memory and love, without the grief being a constant emergency.
But grief integration after this kind of loss tends to require a few things that are worth naming.
Permission to grieve fully. You do not need to protect others from the circumstances of your loss, or from the intensity of your grief. You are allowed to mourn completely and openly, even when the world around you seems uncertain how to hold that.
Connection with others who understand. There is something that happens in a room full of people who have experienced the same kind of loss, a recognition, a relief, a sense that you are not alone in the specific texture of what you are carrying. Survivor of suicide loss support groups exist for exactly this reason, and the research consistently shows they help.
A space to sit with the unanswerable. A good therapist will not try to give you answers you cannot have. They will help you develop a different relationship with the questions, one that allows you to carry them without being crushed by them.
Time, and patience with the non-linearity of it. Suicide bereavement research suggests that the mourning process after this kind of loss often takes longer than after other deaths, and that the path is rarely straight. The second year is often harder than the first. Grief that seemed to be softening can resurface sharply around anniversaries, holidays, and milestones. None of this means you are stuck. It means you are grieving something real.
A Final Word
If you are reading this because you have lost someone to suicide, I want to say something directly: your grief is real, it is valid, and it deserves to be seen.
The silence around this kind of loss is not a reflection of its significance. It is a reflection of a cultural discomfort with suicide that has nothing to do with the depth of your love or the enormity of your loss. You are allowed to grieve loudly, or quietly, or in whatever way is true to you. And you deserve support that meets you where you actually are.
You do not have to carry this alone.
___
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Certified Grief Counselor specializing in grief therapy in Boulder, Colorado. I also have the privilege of facilitating a survivor of suicide loss support group in the Boulder community. If you are a suicide loss survivor and wondering whether individual therapy, a support group, or both might help, I would welcome a conversation. You can schedule a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org, no pressure, no commitment, just a chance to talk.
The Unseen Griever
Nobody sends flowers when a marriage ends. There is no bereavement leave when a friendship dissolves or an estranged parent makes clear they will never see you. These losses are real, they are grief, and you do not need anyone's permission to mourn them.
There is a kind of loss that nobody sends flowers for. No one shows up at your door with a casserole when your marriage ends. There is no bereavement leave when your friendship quietly dissolves. The world doesn't pause when you lose a job that gave your days meaning, or when a parent you always hoped would finally see you makes clear that they never will.
And yet we can grieve these losses deeply. And, sadly, often grieve alone.
We have a narrow cultural script for grief. It involves death, a funeral, a period of mourning that is socially sanctioned and, above all, time-limited. But grief doesn't follow that script. And many people who are quietly devastated by losses that go unseen, often leaving the person with the belief they don't even have permission to grieve (we sometimes refer to such grief as “disenfranchised grief”.
The losses we forget to name
Therapists use the term "ambiguous loss" to describe losses that lack the clarity of death: the parent lost to dementia who is still physically present, the estranged sibling who is alive but gone, the version of your life you had to abandon when illness or circumstance intervened. Pauline Boss, who coined the term, observed these losses are often the hardest to heal precisely because they are unacknowledged. There is no ritual. No community. No shared language for what you are going through.
A divorce is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can go through. You are not just losing a partner. You are losing a future you believed in, a family structure, a home, a daily rhythm, sometimes an entire social world. And yet grief after divorce is frequently minimized, even by the people experiencing it. "At least you didn't lose a child." The comparison closes the door before you've even had a chance to open it.
Job loss carries a grief that often goes unnamed too. For many people, work is not simply income. It is identity, structure, community, and purpose. When it disappears, something foundational can collapse in ways that feel frightening and embarrassing in equal measure. Grief and employment collide in other ways too, including what happens once bereavement leave runs out.
And then there is the grief that comes from people who are still alive: the estrangement from a parent or sibling, the slow unraveling of a friendship that once felt permanent. This kind of grief can be the loneliest of all, because the person is still there. You can't mourn them the way you mourn the dead. But you are mourning something just as real.
Why it matters to call it what it is
Naming grief as grief is not self-pity. It is accuracy.
When we don't name what we're carrying, we often don't give ourselves the care we need. We push through. We tell ourselves to be grateful. We wonder why we feel so heavy and hollow, and we conclude that something must be wrong with us rather than recognizing that something happened to us.
Grief is the natural response to losing something that mattered. It doesn't require a death certificate or anyone else's validation to be real.
What this might mean for you
If you are reading this and feeling something loosen in your chest, it might be because you have been carrying a loss without permission to grieve it.
Whatever you have lost, whether it is a person, a relationship, a version of your life, a dream, a role, a future you had counted on, you are allowed to grieve it. You are allowed to take it seriously. You are allowed to be changed by it.
And if you have been wondering why you can't simply get over it, it might be because no one ever told you that what you went through was a loss worth grieving in the first place.
It was. It is.
Pregnancy Loss and Grief
There is often no funeral, no mourning period, and sometimes not even adequate language for the enormity of it. Parents are met with “at least you can try again,” which invalidates a bond that was entirely real. Your grief is real too.
There is an urban legend about Ernest Hemingway betting his fellow writers that Hemingway could craft a full story in six words. After the bet was accepted, Hemingway wrote, “For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”
Regardless of the story’s origins, I think it captures the deep grief that arises from pregnancy loss (the clinical terms are “reproductive grief” or “reproductive trauma” which includes not only pregnancy loss but also the grief arising from infertility).
As a grief therapist, I have supported individuals through the depths of grief following death and loss. One area that consistently demands more recognition and understanding is grief following pregnancy loss. Whether it's an early miscarriage, a stillbirth, or the heartbreaking conclusion of infertility, the pain is profound, yet often profoundly minimized by society. This minimization of pregnancy loss and reproductive trauma results in disenfranchised grief.
Disenfranchised grief refers to any loss that is not openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. Pregnancy loss fits this definition tragically well. There's often no funeral, no official mourning period, and sometimes, even the language to articulate the enormity of the loss feels inadequate. A parent's arms ache for a child they never held, a future they envisioned, and dreams that were shattered in an instant. Yet, they might be met with well-meaning but hurtful phrases like, "At least you can try again," or "It wasn't a real baby yet." These words, though perhaps intended to comfort, only serve to invalidate the very real bond that was formed and the deep grief that remains.
The impact of this disenfranchisement can be devastating. Individuals experiencing pregnancy loss may feel isolated, ashamed, and as if their grief is somehow "wrong" or unwarranted. They might struggle to process their emotions, feeling compelled to "get over it" quickly and silently. This lack of external validation can lead to anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
Our society has a collective responsibility to change this narrative. We must create spaces where this grief is seen, heard, and honored.
If you are experiencing pregnancy loss, please know that your grief is valid. It is real. You have every right to mourn the loss of your child and the future you envisioned. Seek out support – whether it's a therapist specializing in reproductive loss, a support group, or trusted friends and family who can simply listen without judgment.
And for those supporting someone through pregnancy loss, remember the power of presence and validation. Instead of trying to "fix" their pain, it is important to acknowledge someone’s grief and loss. Allow the person who is grieving the space and time to grieve in their own way, for as long as they need. By doing so, we begin to chip away at the disenfranchisement, allowing people to cope with their grief and learn to integrate the grief into their lives.
Grief is not something you have to figure out on your own. If you're in the thick of it right now — exhausted, overwhelmed, or just unsure what you're even feeling — I'd be honored to sit with you in it. Reach out for a free 15-minute consultation. Let's talk.
The Road Less Traveled: Grieving a Lost Future
The career you planned and had to abandon. The family you imagined. The version of yourself that got sidelined by circumstance. These futures were never real and losing them still produces genuine grief that deserves to be named as such.
Life, in its often-unpredictable way, constantly presents us with a myriad of paths. Each decision we make, each fork in the road we take, inevitably means leaving other paths untrodden. While we often celebrate the journey we embark on, there's a quieter, less acknowledged form of grief that many experience: grieving a lost future, the echo of "what might have been."
This grief is not necessarily about regretting choices, but rather acknowledging the very real sense of loss for a future that, for whatever reason, never materialized. It could be the career path you meticulously planned but had to abandon due to unforeseen circumstances. Perhaps it's the vision of a life with a person who died, or the dream of a particular family dynamic that shifted. It might even be the version of yourself you envisioned becoming, a self that was sidelined by life's detours.
The "road less traveled" often sounds romantic, but sometimes, the pain comes from not taking that road, or having it taken from you. We invest emotions, hopes, and dreams into these imagined futures. They become part of our identity, even before they become reality. When those futures vanish, whether through a breakup, a career setback, a health crisis, or simply the passage of time, the emotional residue can be profound. It’s the mourning of possibilities, the quiet ache for experiences that will now never be.
Allowing yourself to grieve these lost futures is just as important as grieving other losses. It's not a sign of weakness or a failure to accept your current reality (I will write about the importance of acceptance, or more accurately radical acceptance, in a future post). Instead, it's an acknowledgment of your capacity for hope, planning, and love. Give yourself permission to feel whatever emotions may arise - sadness, disappointment, and even the anger that can accompany such a loss. Talk about it if you can, write about it, or simply sit with your emotions.
While the future you envisioned may no longer be, recognizing and honoring that loss can help you move forward, not by forgetting, but by integrating that experience into your life. It clears the space for new possibilities, new dreams, and new futures to emerge. The echo of what might have been doesn't have to be a haunting; it can be a reminder of your incredible capacity to dream and to adapt.
Pets and Grief
The loss of a pet can produce grief that mirrors the loss of a human loved one and the world rarely treats it that way. The brain fog, the sleep trouble, the void where the morning routine used to be: all of it is real, and all of it deserves to be mourned.
The bond we share with our pets is one of unconditional love, comfort, and routine. They are family members, confidantes, and constant presences in our lives. When that bond is suddenly broken, the emotional fallout can be devastating, often mirroring the pain experienced after the loss of a human loved one.
It’s crucial to understand that the grief process for a pet is fundamentally similar to any other loss. You may be experiencing a wide range of emotions, including intense sadness, denial, guilt, and anger. The guilt might stem from second-guessing medical decisions or the circumstances of their death, while anger might be directed toward the world for taking them too soon. These turbulent emotions are a normal and natural part of your grief journey.
It is also important to remember that grief is not just emotional; we experience physical changes and our brain struggles to make sense of a loved one’s absence (for a great exploration of grief and biology, I highly recommend Mary-Frances O’Connor’s books, The Grieving Brain and The Grieving Body). Many of my clients report brain fog, challenges with sleep, and fatigue.
The absence of our routines—the morning greeting, the daily walk, the evening snuggle—creates a vast, painful void. Acknowledging your intense, multifaceted grief is one of the important tasks of mourning. Give yourself permission to mourn fully and openly, just as you would for any significant loss. Be kind to yourself, seek support, and honor the deep love you shared.
The Toll of Dementia Caregiving
Sixteen million Americans provide unpaid dementia care and they do it longer and at higher cost to their own health than other caregivers. Respite genuinely helps, even a few hours a week, and there is a specific way to ask for it that works better.
The majority (80%) of people with dementia are receiving care in their homes. To put this in perspective, 16 million Americans provide more than 17 billion hours of unpaid care for their loved ones. It is notable that dementia caregivers provide care for a longer duration than caregivers of people with other types of conditions.
Caregiving takes its toll and this is especially true for dementia caregivers. Dementia caregivers report higher levels of stress, more depression and anxiety symptoms, and lower levels of subjective well-being, self-efficacy, and anxiety. Further, caregivers experience worse physical health outcomes, including higher levels of stress hormones, compromised immune response, antibodies, greater medication use, and greater cognitive decline.
So what can we do?
There are protective factors for stress and depression: Larger social networks, frequent social contact, and the ability to arrange for assistance from friends are moderators of depressive symptoms and caregiver burden. Respite care is especially important. Research shows that even a few hours of respite a week can improve a caregiver’s well-being. Respite care can take the form of different types of services in the home, adult day care, or even short-term nursing home care so caregivers have a break or even go on vacation.
It is critical that caregivers make their needs known. For example, identify a caregiving task or a block of time that you would like help with. Perhaps there’s a book club meeting you’d like to attend or some time alone to read a book. Be ready when someone says, “What can I do to help?” with a specific time or task, such as, “It would be really helpful for me if you could stay with mom on Tuesday night so I can go to my book club for 2 hours.”
Be understanding if you are turned down. The person may not be able to help with that specific request, but they may be able to help another time. Don’t be afraid to ask again. If you have trouble asking for help face to face, try writing an e-mail to your friends and family members about your needs. Set up a shared online calendar or scheduling tool where people can sign up to provide you with regular respite.
Need more suggestions or resources? Boulder County offers support for caregivers through its AAA Caregiver Initiative. Alzheimers.gov provides helpful tips for dementia caregivers.
Can an Adult be an Orphan?
The death of an elderly parent is often treated as just part of life, which leaves adult children grieving without acknowledgment. One client put it precisely: when one parent dies it is a semicolon, when the second dies it is a period.
In the often cringe-worthy but hilarious show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, the lead character Larry David challenges his friend Marty Funkhouser’s statement that, with the death of his mother, he is now an orphan. "An orphan? You're a little too old to be an orphan."
I suspect that Larry’s reaction is not uncommon. Indeed, since it is expected that adult children will survive their parents, there is often the belief that when an elderly parent dies, “it’s no big deal - just part of life.” Unfortunately, the failure to recognize the impact of a parent’s death, regardless of the age of the child, can lead to disenfranchised grief, i.e., grief that is not openly acknowledged, socially supported, or publicly mourned.
This is tragic because, regardless of your relationship with your parent, their death can trigger strong emotions: sadness, relief, anger, guilt, regret. Further, there is a finality when both parents die that can shake our world. One client phrased it especially well: “When one parent dies, it’s a semi-colon. When the second parent dies, it is a period.”
The death of our parents can bring families closer to together and move them farther apart. Many times our parents are the “glue” that keeps a family together and, with their death, old wounds become raw again.
We also can experience a loss of identity and find new roles emerge. We may feel that we are no longer someone’s child. We may grieve the fact that we will have unanswered questions about our parents’ lives and history, or feel unable to resolve longstanding challenges.
As with all grief journeys, it is important to remember you have the right to express and experience your grief in your own way, including the right to express and explore your feelings. It may be helpful to note when you engage in rumination about what we “should have” done differently and accept that we did our best in the moment. And always remember there is no expiration date on our grief.
