It Almost Feels Taboo: On Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive

It almost feels taboo, doesn't it… to grieve someone who is still alive. To admit to the pain of grief when you're expected to just "move on." But that's the thing about grieving the living, it almost feels impossible to let go when maybe… just maybe things could be different.

And that maybe is not weakness. That maybe is your attachment system doing exactly what it was built to do, hold on to the people it has bonded with, scan for possibility, resist the finality of loss.

Psychologists call this ambiguous loss: a term coined by therapist Pauline Boss to describe grief that exists without a clear ending. No funeral. No obituary. No socially sanctioned mourning period. Just the ongoing, disorienting reality of grieving someone who is still out there, still living, still reachable...and somehow completely gone.

It is one of the most painful and least validated forms of grief that exists. And it is what almost every person going through a significant breakup is experiencing, whether they have language for it or not.

Ambiguous loss is grief without closure... and it may be the hardest kind of all.

"Grief isn't linear and closure is a myth." Two things I've always said and I want to elaborate on today. Heartbreak is this deep grief, the kind that feels like physical pain, the kind that makes you wish you could erase your memories just to get a moment of peace… but then you'd lose the good times too.

That physical pain is REAL. Research out of Columbia University found that the brain processes social rejection and physical pain in the same neural regions. When you lose someone you are attached to, your body registers it as injury. The chest tightness, the inability to eat, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, these are not signs that you are being dramatic. They are your nervous system responding to a genuine threat to its sense of safety.

Your attachment system, the neurological architecture built in early childhood that governs how you bond and what you do when those bonds are threatened, does not distinguish between death and breakup. Loss is loss. And the body grieves accordingly.

The anniversaries of the good moments, and the anniversaries of the loss. The birthdays and holidays where you want to reach out but you know it won't help ease the pain… even if it did so temporarily. These moments hurt, and they come and go because grief isn't linear.

Anniversary grief is encoded in the body, not just the mind. The nervous system is a time-keeper. It remembers the season, the quality of light, the temperature of the air. It remembers what safety felt like this time last year, and it notices when that safety is no longer present.

Couple that with what psychologists call positive memory bias--- the brain's tendency to amplify warm memories and soften painful ones after attachment loss-- and you have a nervous system that is actively, involuntarily serving you the highlight reel. Not because you are choosing to romanticize the past. Because your brain is trying to make sense of a loss that still doesn't fully compute.

The urge to reach out on those days is real. It is your system seeking the one thing that historically made the discomfort stop. Understanding that doesn't make it easier to resist. But it can help you stop interpreting the urge as a sign that you should go back.

The urge to reach out to your ex is not evidence that you should. It's evidence that your nervous system remembers what comfort felt like.

And it doesn't matter if the relationship was healthy or not. It doesn't matter if he hurt you. It doesn't matter if you knew, deep down, that it wasn't right. Grief doesn't grade relationships before deciding how much pain they deserve. You can mourn someone who wasn't good to you just as deeply as someone who was. The heart doesn't work on logic. And the timeline doesn't move faster just because the relationship was imperfect.

That grief is real… and it's not linear. It comes in waves. And I want to honor that pain.

And the hard truth is you'll never truly get the closure you want after a breakup. So many things go left unsaid....and maybe that's part of the pain, maybe it's part of the growth. Either way… closure needs to come from within. And I know that in the depths of heartache, this feels like a big ask… but it will lead to the relief you're so desperately craving.

Closure Can Look Like…

• Writing the letter you will never send, saying everything that went unsaid, for yourself, not for them. You do not need them to receive it for it to be real.

• Naming what you needed that you didn't get, not to assign blame, but to finally give those needs language. Unmet needs that stay unnamed tend to drive the next relationship.

• Accepting the ambiguity. Not every relationship ends with understanding. Sometimes closure is deciding you can live with not fully knowing why... and choosing yourself anyway.

• Returning to your own story. Closure often comes not from understanding what happened with them, but from reconnecting with who you are outside of it.

• Grieving the future, not just the person. You are not only losing them, you are losing the life you imagined. Acknowledging that loss specifically can unlock grief that has been stuck.

• Choosing, on the hard days, not to reach out... and surviving it. Every time you do, you prove to your nervous system that you can tolerate the discomfort without them. That is closure, built one day at a time.

Grief Can Look Like…

• Crying in the car for no reason on a Tuesday and every reason at the same time.

•  Feeling fine for three weeks and then completely undone by a song, a smell, a specific quality of afternoon light.

•  Missing them and knowing it's right at the same time... and not being able to explain how both things can be true.

• Anger that comes out sideways...at your friends, at yourself, at nothing in particular.

• Numbness. The flatness that follows too much feeling for too long.

• Dreaming about them and waking up disoriented, reaching for a version of reality that no longer exists.

• The anniversaries. The could-have-beens. The anniversary dates that pass in silence.

• And slowly, eventually... good days. Not because the grief is gone, but because you are growing around it.

Grief is not something you get over. It is something you learn to carry differently.

If you are in the thick of this right now... the waves of grief, the anniversaries, the reaching for your phone and putting it back down... I want you to know that what you are feeling is not a sign that something is wrong with you.

It is a sign that you loved something real. And that love deserves to be grieved properly, without apology, without a timeline, without anyone telling you that you should be over it by now.

You are not behind. You are not broken. You are human, doing one of the hardest things humans do.

Hang in there 🩶