There is a kind of grief that does not arrive with a funeral, flowers, casseroles, sympathy cards or the quiet understanding of people around you who know that something terrible has happened. There is no clear moment when everybody agrees that you have lost someone, because technically you have not. The people you grieve are still alive. They are somewhere in the world waking up, making coffee, going to work, getting older, celebrating birthdays, becoming parents and grandparents, laughing, worrying, making memories and continuing on with lives that no longer include you in the way they once did, or perhaps never did in the way you hoped they would.
I think I have been carrying this kind of grief for most of my life, although for a long time I did not know what to call it and I am still not sure I need to. I only know what it feels like. Most of the time life is full and busy enough that the grief sits quietly somewhere in the background. You work, raise children, love people, create things, make dinner, answer emails, laugh until your stomach hurts, worry about ridiculous things and get on with the ordinary business of being alive. You build routines, relationships and places of safety around whatever has been lost, and over time you become very good at functioning alongside the empty spaces.
Then something happens and the grief returns with such force that it can feel almost impossible to understand how you were perfectly fine ten minutes earlier.
It might be a smell that takes you somewhere before you have even worked out why it feels familiar, a song you have not heard in years, an old photograph, a place you pass, a name mentioned in conversation, a birthday, a wedding, a new baby, an achievement, a frightening diagnosis, a piece of good news you instinctively want to share, or something completely ordinary that suddenly brings a person back into your mind. Sometimes the trigger barely seems large enough to explain the reaction, and yet your body knows exactly where it has landed.
This kind of grief can be brutally physical. It can wind you so completely that you breathe and breathe and still cannot seem to get enough air. Your chest aches, your body shakes, your bones hurt and the crying comes from somewhere so deep that it feels as though your whole body is involved. There is no dignity in it and no neat emotional progression. You can feel perfectly capable and grounded one moment and completely undone the next, almost frightened by the intensity of something you thought you had already learnt to live with.
Grief is not linear. I do not think it politely gets smaller in an orderly way while we move steadily forward. It ebbs and flows, sometimes so quietly that we almost mistake the silence for completion. We can spend years building stability, learning what safety feels like, creating homes and relationships that feel solid beneath us, and then one unexpected moment can shake that stability so hard that we wonder whether all the work we have done has somehow disappeared. I do not think it has. Being hit by grief again is not the same as going back to the beginning, even when the body cannot immediately tell the difference.
Perhaps that is one of the cruelest things about grieving someone who is still alive. There is no finality to force the mind into acceptance. You know they exist. You know they are living their lives somewhere. You know there are moments you could theoretically reach for the phone, yet you also know that a relationship cannot survive forever if only one person is willing to cross the distance. Life continues to offer milestones that you would once have imagined sharing with them, and each one asks you to reconcile the same impossible contradiction: they are still here, and yet they are not here with you.
For me, this began very young.
My father left when my brother and I were little, and our entire world changed. What had felt safe, nurturing and familiar suddenly became something else. My mother broke under the weight of what had happened, and as children we were acutely aware of her pain even though we could not possibly understand the adult complications behind it. Children are often far more emotionally perceptive than adults realise. They notice tension, silence, exhaustion, tears behind closed doors and the strange change in the atmosphere of a home long before they have the language to make sense of any of it.
As an adult, I can look back and understand very clearly why my parents' relationship did not work. They were polar opposites in so many ways, undeniably different, and I genuinely believe they would have been miserable if they had stayed together for the rest of their lives. I can see that now without needing to make either of them the villain, and I can even be deeply grateful for where life eventually took us because I would not have the glorious stepdad I have now, a man I adore and consider my hero.
But that is an adult's understanding. A child does not sit quietly analysing incompatibility, emotional maturity or the complicated reasons relationships fail. A child experiences the world from the small space they occupy inside it. Dad was there, then he was not. Mum was okay, then she was not. Home felt one way, then suddenly it felt completely different.
When you are young, it is very easy to make yourself the explanation for things you cannot understand. Instead of knowing that adults are complicated people making painful choices that have nothing to do with your worth, the questions turn inward. Maybe I was too different. Maybe I was too emotional. Maybe I was too needy. Maybe I was simply not lovable enough to make someone stay. Those ideas can settle very deeply before you are old enough to challenge them, and growing up does not automatically remove them simply because the adult mind eventually knows they were never true.
There are still broken pieces of me that I have spent a lifetime learning how to hold together, pieces that did not get the childhood I once imagined everybody was supposed to have. After my father left, I had to emotionally mature far beyond where I should have been at that age. There were adults around me who were grieving and overwhelmed, and children often begin filling emotional gaps without anyone ever formally asking them to. You become careful. You notice moods. You try not to add to the problems. You offer comfort when you do not really know what comfort is supposed to look like, and sometimes you become very good at carrying the feelings of other people while your own confusion gets pushed quietly to one side.
The painful truth is that the child is grieving too.
I do not expect adults going through separation, betrayal, divorce or heartbreak to behave perfectly. Grief is different for every single being, and we will never truly understand the emotional depth of another person. People will have moments when they vent, swear, say something harsh or speak from a place of anger because they are overwhelmed. I am simply asking for some awareness of who might be listening.
Children are already trying to understand why their world has changed. They should not also have to carry the unfiltered adult version of that pain, or feel as though they need to twist and bend themselves emotionally to make either parent feel better. A child should not have to decide whose version of events is the right one, whether loving one parent betrays the other, or whether they somehow caused the chaos surrounding them. Adults are allowed to fall apart, but somewhere in the middle of that grief there are often little people falling apart too, and they need a gentle space held for them where they can be sad, confused, angry or frightened without being given responsibility for fixing anything.
Part of me is still that child, even though I have lived an enormous amount of life since then. She grew up, became capable, learnt to survive things she once could not name, built a life, became a mother, loved people, lost people and kept going. Yet every now and then something reaches straight past all the adult understanding and finds her. I am not enough.
My family history is full of those reminders. My youngest half-brother, who is also my godson, grew up inside a very different version of the same family story. His dad was present. The family he knew was his family, with a past attached to it that existed long before he was old enough to understand what any of that meant. When he was younger he used to write to me, and I remember him as thoughtful, kind and gentle. I once hoped that as we all became adults there might be a way for the distances between us to become smaller.
Recently he became a father to a beautiful little girl, and I found out through social media. I am genuinely happy for him and for this brand-new little person who has arrived completely innocent of all the complicated history around her. I do not want his happiness turned into an accusation, and I do not want him to feel targeted by a story that is really about something much larger than him. The truth is simply that the moment opened a door in me. It reminded me how entire lives can continue inside a family you are connected to but no longer truly part of, and how quickly one piece of news can bring decades of grief back into the room.
There is also my full brother, the person I grew up with, my best friend and favourite person for a very long time. That relationship ended following a betrayal that profoundly changed our family, and I do not need to explain every detail of it here. It is enough to say that another person I loved deeply became someone I had to learn to live without while knowing that he was still very much alive and building a life elsewhere.
The grief connected to those relationships is not confined to the people themselves. It spreads into places, objects, memories and versions of life that disappeared with them. There is the home where I grew up with my brother, a place that once felt like my safe haven and is now tied to somebody I no longer speak to. There are friendships that disappeared as lives changed, businesses that closed through divorce and upheaval, and a school life I did not really get to have in the way I might have because my parents' separation cost my mother almost everything and altered our place in the world socially and financially.
There is the grief of a youth that seemed to end too quickly because emotional maturity was demanded long before most of the people around me had any reason to develop it. There is even the grief of a pet who lived with me and gave me a kind of uncomplicated love at a time when the adults around me were not always emotionally capable of doing that. Losing an animal like that leaves a very particular space behind because animals often love us without asking us to explain ourselves, become less emotional or prove that we deserve to be close to them.
Loss gathers in unexpected places, and it rarely waits politely for us to finish dealing with one thing before something else arrives. One grief reaches back and touches another. A new milestone can carry the weight of something that happened decades earlier. What looks from the outside like an enormous reaction to one small moment can actually be the accumulated ache of many moments finally finding somewhere to surface.
I can see that pattern clearly in my own adult life as well.
I was previously married, and in hindsight that relationship should not have lasted six months. There was betrayal, cheating, emotional abuse and mental abuse very early, yet I stayed for eighteen and a half years. Human relationships are complicated, and I would never reduce nearly two decades of my life to one neat explanation, because there were practical realities, shared history, moments of hope, commitment and reasons for staying that only make sense from inside a life while you are living it.
What I can see now is how familiar the role of fixing things had become to me. A child who learnt to notice emotional gaps and step into them grew into an adult who kept trying to save a relationship that had already told her, very early, that it was not safe. Looking back, the image that makes the most sense to me is that I spent eighteen years doing CPR on a relationship after it had already died.
There is grief in eventually recognising that. You grieve the relationship, of course, but you also grieve the years spent trying, the younger version of yourself who believed she could love hard enough to make something healthy, the friendships attached to that life, the businesses that disappeared with the divorce, the routines, the security and the future you once imagined would eventually arrive if you simply kept going a little longer.
Sometimes we are not grieving a person at all. We are grieving a whole chapter of life that vanished with them.
That has taught me something important about what I want for my son.
I have a glorious, beautiful son who is absolute magic to me, and there are people in our greater family who do not know him. His Grandparents and Uncles have never met him. For a long time that hurt me enormously because I could not understand why people connected to him would not be curious enough to make some effort of their own. It often felt as though the relationship existed only if we were prepared to travel, organise and carry it to them.
I still find that sad, but I also feel something very different now. I do not want him to work hard to be loved or included. I do not want him to learn that if someone makes no effort, the answer is for him to double his own. I am fundamentally aware of the exhaustion of that effort. I do not want him growing up believing that connection requires him to become more convenient, more agreeable or less himself simply to earn a place in somebody else's life.
At the same time, I refuse to make my grief his story. I will not speak badly about members of my former family around him because what happened between us belongs to my life, not his. He is his own person, and if he chooses to explore relationships with his greater family, we will support him fully and in whatever way he needs. I trust that he will be emotionally aware enough to recognise whether a relationship is reciprocal or whether love is being offered with conditions attached to it, and more than anything I want him to know that he never has to prove his worth by working harder than everyone else for affection.
Perhaps that is one of the ways we can carry grief without turning it into an inheritance.
I cannot erase what happened to me, and I cannot pretend the child I was no longer hurts. I cannot undo the years spent trying to hold together things that had already broken, bring back friendships that disappeared, reopen businesses that closed, restore a childhood home to what it once meant, return a beloved animal to my side or recover the youth that ended before I was ready.
What I can do is allow myself to feel those losses when they return instead of treating their return as evidence that I have somehow failed at healing.
There is a tendency to think that if grief hits us hard again, we must have gone backwards, but I do not believe that anymore. I think grief moves with us. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it settles so deeply into the rhythm of our lives that we barely notice we are carrying it. Then something changes, the tide turns, and suddenly it is enormous again. The stability we spent years building can feel shaken, but that does not mean it has disappeared.
Sometimes the most difficult thing is allowing ourselves to fall apart without immediately trying to fix the fact that we are falling apart.
For people who have spent a lifetime being capable, holding others together, making things work and carrying more than they should, vulnerability can feel dangerously close to weakness. I do not think it is. I think being vulnerable enough to feel what is actually happening inside us requires enormous courage, especially when the feeling is ugly, inconvenient, exhausting and impossible to explain neatly.
If we keep forcing grief down because nobody died, because other people do not understand it, because we think we should be over it or because we are embarrassed by how intensely it still hurts, eventually that pressure has to go somewhere. I do not want anyone to hold so much inside themselves that something precious breaks under the weight of it.
Sometimes we need to cry until we shake. Sometimes we need to admit that our chest hurts and breathing does not seem to bring enough air. Sometimes we need to say that we miss someone we have not spoken to in years, or that we are grieving a house, a friendship, a pet, a marriage, a childhood, a sibling, a parent, a future or the person we once believed we were going to become.
We do not have to justify why any of those things hurt as much as they do. We do not have to rank our grief against somebody else's, and we do not need to turn it into wisdom before we have finished feeling it.
If you are carrying this kind of grief, I see you.
I see the part of you that has spent years carefully holding all the broken pieces together because you were afraid of what might happen if you stopped. I see how exhausting it is to appear completely functional while something inside you still aches for people, places and versions of life that are gone in every way except the one that would make the loss easier to explain.
If you need to fall apart for a while, I want you to know there can be safety in that too. You do not have to perform strength every second of your life, and being vulnerable enough to feel is not weakness or surrender. Sometimes it is simply your heart finally being given enough room to tell the truth.
And as painful as that truth can be, I hope you never become ashamed of the depth of your feeling. The fact that grief can reach so deeply into us means that love once reached deeply too. To care enough for something to leave an ache behind is not a failure of strength. It is evidence of an extraordinary capacity to love, to attach, to hope and to remain open to connection even after connection has hurt.
There is something precious in that.
So if today is one of those days when the grief has knocked the air from your lungs and shaken the stability you have spent years building, you do not have to put yourself back together immediately. For a little while, let someone else help hold the together those broken yet beautiful pieces.
I see you.
With Love.......