The Endings We Carry

We tend to understand grief through death. Someone dies and the world acknowledges that something profound has happened. There are funerals, flowers, cards, compassionate leave, rituals and conversations. We have inherited ways of marking the moment when someone who was here is suddenly no longer here.

But some of the most complicated grief I encounter, both in life and in the therapy room, comes from losses where nobody has died. The person is still alive. The place still exists. The life we once inhabited continues somewhere without us. There is no funeral, and yet something has ended.

A relationship finishes and the person we loved begins another life. A friendship that once felt inseparable slowly disappears. A parent or sibling becomes estranged. A career that carried identity and purpose ends through redundancy, retirement or burnout. Children grow up and leave home. We move from somewhere that held a particular version of ourselves. Our bodies change through illness, disability or ageing. Sometimes we grieve something that never existed at all except as possibility: the child we imagined having, the relationship we believed would last, the career we thought we would build, the family we hoped might eventually become different.

These are what we might call living losses. They are endings in which life continues on both sides of the loss.

Psychologist Pauline Boss developed the concept of ambiguous loss to describe experiences in which absence and presence coexist (Boss, 1999). Her original work explored situations where someone might be physically absent but psychologically present, or physically present but psychologically unavailable. The idea has much wider resonance because ambiguity is precisely what makes many relational endings so difficult. Something is gone, but not entirely. Someone may no longer belong to our life, yet they continue to exist in our imagination, memory and emotional world. There may be no single moment when we can say: this was when I lost them. Sometimes there is not even agreement that anything significant has been lost.

Kenneth Doka describes disenfranchised grief as grief that is not fully recognised, socially validated or publicly mourned (Doka, 1989). This can leave the grieving person carrying not only the loss itself, but an implicit expectation that they should have recovered from it. We hear phrases such as “you’re better off without them”, “it was only a job”, “you can meet someone else”, “at least they’re still alive”, or perhaps the most familiar instruction of all: “you need to move on.” But the psyche does not necessarily organise itself according to what should matter.

From a relational perspective, when we lose someone or something important, we are rarely grieving only what has disappeared. We are also grieving who we were in relationship to it. This is why the end of a relationship can feel so destabilising. We lose the person, but we may also lose the self that existed with them: the private language, shared routines, mutual friendships, Sunday mornings, future plans, the familiar message arriving on our phone. Perhaps most painfully, we lose the person who witnessed a particular period of our life. The relationship held a version of us that existed nowhere else.

Sigmund Freud’s early writing on mourning recognised that our emotional investment in another person does not simply disappear when that person is lost (Freud, 1917). Later psychoanalytic thinking moved further from the idea that healthy mourning requires us simply to detach and instead recognised how the people and relationships we lose become incorporated into who we are. We do not necessarily get over significant relationships. Something of them becomes part of us.

This becomes particularly complicated when the other person is still alive. There is a peculiar ache in knowing that someone who once knew the detail of your day is now living a life from which you are absent. Social media has perhaps made this historically unusual form of grief commonplace. We can lose someone and still see them. Their face appears. Their children grow. They move house, fall in love, celebrate birthdays, become older. The relationship has died while the people within it remain alive. There is no coffin to make the ending undeniable. And so, part of us can remain waiting.

In therapy, this waiting can appear in many forms. Someone may repeatedly revisit an old relationship, not because they consciously believe it will return, but because some part of them has not yet understood what its ending means. Another person may remain furious with a parent from whom they have been estranged for years. Someone else may continue to define themselves through a profession they left long ago. Beneath what can appear to be an inability to “let go” there is often something more interesting and more compassionate to discover: what exactly am I being asked to let go of? Perhaps it is not simply the person. Perhaps it is hope.

We can spend years hoping that a parent will finally understand us, that a sibling will apologise, that an ex-partner will recognise what was lost, that a friendship will return to what it once was. Sometimes the deepest grief arrives not when the relationship ends, but when we relinquish the fantasy that it might one day become what we needed it to be. There is enormous sadness in accepting that some stories will never receive the ending we imagined for them.

Boss later challenged the popular idea of “closure”, particularly in relation to ambiguous loss. Her work suggests that when certainty is unavailable, the task is not necessarily to resolve the loss but to develop the capacity to live alongside its ambiguity—to hold absence and presence, love and anger, hope and acceptance at the same time (Boss, 2006). This feels much closer to what I witness therapeutically. Human beings are rarely healed through neat conclusions. We are often changed through learning to tolerate complexity.

The person can have hurt us and still be missed. Leaving can have been necessary and still break our heart. The job can have exhausted us and still have given our life meaning. The parent can still be alive while we grieve the relationship we never had. A relationship can have ended for good reasons while we continue to love the person who is no longer ours to love in the same way. Both things can be true.

Joan Didion wrote powerfully about bereavement in The Year of Magical Thinking, beginning with the devastatingly simple observation that “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant” (Didion, 2005). Death made that truth brutally visible for her, but other losses reveal it too. Sometimes life changes not in an instant but almost imperceptibly. A marriage becomes two people living alongside one another. A friendship becomes an occasional message and then silence. Work that once animated us begins to hollow us out. We look at our parents and realise they are becoming old. We look in the mirror and discover that we are too.

There is grief in becoming. Every life we choose inevitably contains the lives we did not choose. To become one person is, in some sense, to relinquish countless others. Existential psychotherapy has long understood this relationship between living and loss. Rollo May saw human existence as requiring the courage to confront limitation rather than organising our lives around avoiding it (May, 1975). We cannot have everything, remain everyone, keep everyone or preserve every version of ourselves. Perhaps maturity asks something more difficult of us than “moving on”. It asks us to mourn.

Therapy can provide a place for the funerals that never happened: not by manufacturing endings, but by giving language and relationship to losses that may never have been adequately witnessed. To say, perhaps for the first time, this mattered. To understand why it mattered. To recognise what was loved, what was hoped for, what was never received and what can no longer be changed. There can be something profoundly restorative in having another person remain present while we do this. Grief is relational because love is relational. We are changed through our attachments, and their endings change us again. Perhaps this is why grief so often needs witnessing. We need someone to recognise that something existed before we can fully acknowledge that it has gone.

And perhaps this is the funeral these losses require. Not a ceremony of forgetting, nor an insistence on closure, but a place where we can honour what was real. Where we can grieve the person, the possibility, the imagined future and the self we were when we still believed that future would arrive.

Some losses leave graves we can visit. Others leave no marker at all. We carry them quietly within us, not because we have failed to move on, but because certain people, places and possibilities become woven into the fabric of who we are. The work of grief may not be to remove them. It may be to find a way of carrying what has ended while continuing, ourselves, to live.

References

Boss, P. (1999) Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Boss, P. (2006) Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss. New York: W.W. Norton.

Didion, J. (2005) The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Doka, K.J. (1989) Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and melancholia’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. London: Hogarth Press.

May, R. (1975) The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton.