The thing nobody tells you about grieving a difficult person is that you're going to grieve them at all.
Grief has its own way of showing up, and there's no getting out of it when you care, even more so when you love.
Charlotte died in June, and I've spent the last few months getting acquainted with a kind of grief I understood intellectually long before experiencing it quite this way.
If you've been following along, you know Charlotte and I had a complicated relationship. We spent about fifteen years estranged before coming back into each other's lives toward the end of hers. I found myself helping her navigate the increasingly difficult realities of Alzheimer's disease, and we had an opportunity to know each other in a new way and bring peace to our dynamic before she passed. I'm grateful for that.
It's a peculiar kind of grief that comes with losing someone with whom you've had a difficult or contentious relationship.
When we lose someone we're close to, we grieve the relationship we had. When the relationship has been difficult, we also grieve the relationship we wished we'd had. The conversations that never happened, the understanding we never arrived at, and all the memories that never got made.
Perhaps most painfully, we grieve the possibility that someday things might have been different.
As long as somebody is alive, there's always that possibility, isn't there? Maybe they'll change, maybe we'll find the right words, or somehow arrive at the relationship we've been hoping for all along.
And then they die, and the possibility dies with them.
There's something incredibly confronting about realizing that the best it ever was is as good as it's ever going to be. The story is complete, and now it's our job to find a way, in our own hearts, to let that be enough.
To be at peace in your present, you cannot continually long for a better past.
Love is a funny thing. It leaves a mark on your heart one way or the other. A relationship can be deeply meaningful even when it's been deeply disappointing, especially when we're talking about parents and family.
The people around us may have trouble understanding this kind of grief. They know about the estrangement, the disappointment, the conflict, and by their math, that means it probably doesn't hurt very much.
But you know that's not true. It just hurts differently.
Sometimes they have no idea how much we're hurting, and I think it's important to give people some grace. I've certainly had my own moments of falling short when someone else needed support. Grief is a messy experience, and we're all doing our best to navigate it.
Sometimes we're the ones who have trouble understanding our own grief.
I spent years working through accepting this relationship, developing boundaries, gaining perspective, and coming to terms with what happened. And then when she passed, it still knocked me on my ass.
Why am I upset? I knew it was coming. I thought I'd already dealt with all of this.
Grief is the natural response to loss and significant changes in the familiar patterns of our lives. We can understand why a relationship was unhealthy, feel relieved that certain difficulties are over, and still be heartbroken that things turned out the way they did.
One of the things I've been particularly grateful for is my knowledge of grief recovery practices. It's work I've been doing with other people for years, and knowing what to expect hasn't exempted me from the process, but it has given me a path to follow, and that's been enough.
There's no fixed or appropriate duration of grief. Some days are terribly sad. Others are surprisingly peaceful. You might experience relief, gratitude, anger, disappointment, and love, sometimes all before you've finished your morning coffee.
It's important to be mindful of isolation, too. Grief can be incredibly lonely, especially when we believe nobody understands why we're hurting. We each have to take these steps for ourselves, but that doesn't mean we have to take them by ourselves.
I've also come to appreciate how incomplete grief can keep us attached to things that have already died or moved on. We revisit old disappointments, rehearse conversations, and wait for resolutions that may never arrive.
Sometimes we organize entire parts of our identities around what happened to us. When our ability to move forward depends on something outside ourselves changing, we give away an enormous amount of personal freedom.
Completing grief asks us to tell the truth about what happened, what we wanted, what we received, and what we're finally willing to stop waiting for. It's confronting work, but incredibly liberating. The energy we've invested in the past becomes available for the life we're living today.
Something I'd invite you to consider is whether there are places in your own story where you're still identifying primarily as a victim. Those are some of the best places to start looking for incomplete grief.
What happened that you still wish had happened differently? What were you hoping to receive that you never got? Are you still waiting for something to change before you can fully move forward?
There's a world of difference between acknowledging the ways we've been hurt and continuing to organize our lives around those experiences.
There's no way around grief, but there is a direct way through it.
