Ambiguous Grief: On Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive

Ambiguous grief is the sorrow of losing someone who has not died. It is grieving a person who is still alive but no longer present in your life the way they once were, whether through estrangement, divorce, illness, addiction, or a slow change that leaves them unrecognizable. It is one of the loneliest kinds of loss, because so few people have words for it.

I want to give it some words.

When someone you love is still here, but gone

For most of my life, I was close with my mother. After my dad passed, I saw her nearly every day while my children were small. She was woven into the fabric of our ordinary life.

And then, slowly, she became someone I did not recognize. The details are hers to keep, and I will not put them here. What I will say is that the mother I knew receded, and in her place was someone I could no longer reach. She is still living. She is simply not the same woman she once was. There is no funeral for that. No casserole shows up at your door. But the grief is real, and it is heavy, and it deserves to be named.

What is ambiguous loss, and who named it?

Ambiguous loss is the name that family therapist and researcher Pauline Boss gave, in the 1970s, to any loss that has no clear ending. She describes two kinds. In the first, a person is physically gone but still vivid in your mind and heart, as when someone goes missing, or a family is split apart. In the second, the person is physically here but psychologically gone, changed into someone you no longer recognize, as can happen with dementia or addiction.

Ambiguous grief is what it feels like to live inside either one. My own loss has pieces of both.

Boss is blunt about one thing. In a loss like this, closure is a myth. The work is not to get over it. The work is to learn to live alongside it.

Why is ambiguous grief so hard to carry?

Ambiguous grief is hard to carry because it resists the ending that ordinary grief eventually offers. When someone dies, the world acknowledges it. When someone is alive but absent, the loss keeps happening, over and over, with no ending to grieve toward. You hold hope and heartbreak in the same hand, and neither one ever fully wins.

Every fall, for Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, I build an ofrenda, a home altar, for the people I have lost. I set out their photographs. I say their names. There is no ofrenda for someone who is still living. That is the whole problem, in a single image. Every ritual we have for grief assumes an ending.

Is it normal to grieve someone who is still alive?

Yes. It is disorienting. It can come with guilt, with anger, with a strange, low-grade sadness that never quite resolves. All of that is normal. All of that makes sense.

Grief researchers even have a name for mourning that the world around you does not recognize, disenfranchised grief. No one sends a card. No one asks how you are holding up. That silence is a large part of why this kind of loss can make you feel as if you are inventing it. You are not.

Protecting your own peace

One of the hardest lessons I have learned is that love does not require you to keep standing in a place that harms you. Setting boundaries with someone you still love is not cruelty. It is survival. I reached a point where I had to protect my own peace and choosing that did not make me love her less. It just meant I finally chose myself too.

I still feel sad. I still miss her. And I am sure she misses me too. It has been hard to lose my mom this way, and I know that somewhere in it she grieves the loss of her daughters as well. I have made peace with the fact that all of that can be true at the same time as my boundaries. Grief and boundaries are not opposites. Sometimes they are the same act of love, pointed in two directions.

A resource, if you need it

If any of this sounds like your life, please know you are not imagining it and you are not alone. An excellent book that helped me more than I can say is Soulbroken by Stephanie Sarazin, which speaks directly to ambiguous grief and gives it the language it so badly needs. Read it slowly. Be gentle with yourself. And if the weight ever feels like too much to carry alone, a good therapist can help you hold it, I know mine did.

This grief is one of the losses that Monarch of the Heart grew out of. The novel is about loss of every kind, the kind the world sends flowers for and the kind it does not. If you would like to sit with a story for a while, you can read the first chapter free.

You are allowed to grieve someone who is still here. I do, every day.

With much love for the journey,

Carrie

This is a tender subject. If you are struggling, please reach out to a licensed therapist or someone you trust. In the United States, you can call or text 988 at any hour to talk with someone.