“Grief Without Goodbye”
There’s a grief no one really talks about—the grief of losing someone who is still alive. It doesn’t come with casseroles or sympathy cards. There’s no funeral to mark finality. Instead, it shows up quietly and without invitation and remains like a shadow that follows you through the ordinary rhythms of life.
Maybe it looks like the ache of an estranged child. You wonder if they’re doing okay, if they’re happy, if they ever think of you. And then there’s the deeper ache—the grandchildren you may never meet, the family gatherings where their chair will sit empty. The loss stretches beyond them into futures that will never unfold.
Or maybe it’s watching a friend or family member disappear into substance abuse. Their body is still here, but their laughter, their light, their them-ness has gone dim. You grieve the friend who used to show up at your door with a devious smile and too many stories, the one who once knew you in a way no one else did. Now you grieve someone who walks around wearing the mask of the person you once knew.
Maybe you have drifted apart from your spouse to the point that you find yourself sleeping next to a stranger. You find yourself mourning conversations that will never happen, milestones that will never be celebrated, the comfort of a presence that has become absence in disguise. The road maps you drew in your mind are suddenly erased, leaving you stumbling through unfamiliar terrain… alone with just a vacant hole in your chest where they used to live and empty picture frames for memories that will never take place.
And sometimes, the one you lose is yourself. The person you thought you’d be by now. The marriage you thought you’d still be in. The dreams that never made it off the ground. There’s a unique kind of heartbreak in realizing the version of you that lived in your imagination is gone or was never really there in the first place. Or perhaps was pushed aside for a later time over and over again until the window of time started closing and you realize now you’ll never get to meet her.
Grieving the living is a confusing thing because they’re still here. You might see them in the grocery store or stumble across their name online. And suddenly the wound opens all over again. Unlike death, there’s no closure—just a pendulum that swings back and forth between hope and despair without warning or reason.
But maybe there’s a hidden invitation in this kind of grief—to learn to hold paradox. To honor both the sorrow and the gratitude. To remember that the love you gave and the lessons you learned were real and tangible, even if the person you shared them with is no longer within reach.
The fact is that grieving the living is a practice in release. It asks us to unclench our fists from what was, so that, slowly, painfully, we can make space for what is. To accept that sometimes, love shifts form. Sometimes presence becomes memory. Sometimes closure never comes, and we have to choose peace anyway.
If you’re carrying this kind of grief, be gentle with yourself. Name it for what it is. Let yourself cry the tears no one thinks you’re entitled to. Write the letters you’ll never send. And when the ache comes back—as it will—remember: grief is not a sign of weakness, but a testimony that you loved deeply and without conditions.
And maybe, in time, this grief—like all grief—can become ash. Pain breaking down and burning into something that, somehow, makes new growth possible.
Because even in the hollow spaces loss leaves behind, something tender can take root. And when we nurture it with faith and conviction, it grows stronger—because we’ve already walked through the flames and risen on the other side, being a better person than before having dared to love in the first place.
With You in the Burning Spaces,
Emily
Ash and Bloom