Nobody told me that grief could feel like this. I'd been through loss before — the kind that comes with a funeral and casseroles and people saying "I'm so sorry for your loss." I knew that kind of grief.
But this grief was different. It didn't have a name. There was no ceremony for it, no socially sanctioned period of mourning. Just a quiet, persistent ache that I didn't know what to do with.
I've come to think of it as ambiguous grief — the grief that comes from losing something that was never fully yours, or something that didn't end the way you expected, or someone who is still alive but no longer in your life the way they once were.
The hardest part was that I didn't feel like I had permission to grieve it. It wasn't a "real" loss, people might say. You should be over it by now. At least you have...
But grief doesn't care about permission. It shows up anyway. And the longer you try to push it down, the louder it gets.
What helped me was finally giving myself permission to name it. To say: this is a loss. It matters. I am allowed to grieve it.
If you're carrying a grief that doesn't have a name, I see you. It's real. You're allowed to feel it.