Grief — What Nobody Tells You

On love, loss, and the permission we never got to feel it

STEVE WALKER

APR 27, 2026

I was twelve years old when the phone rang just before Christmas, 1975.

My dad was on his way back from a business trip. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Grampy was dead.

My grandfather had been my best friend in a childhood full of loneliness and moving around. He took me fishing. He took me to my first Red Sox game. He was larger than life to the whole family — funny as hell, the kind of person who fills a room without trying. He had a stroke when I was ten and was partially paralyzed, but he was still funny and sharp. After we moved to Florida the next year, he and my grandmother came to live with us each winter, returning to Massachusetts for the warmer months. I spent more time with him than almost anyone.

That night, I heard my dad cry for the first time.

We flew back to Massachusetts for the funeral and stayed through Christmas. My dad and the whole family sobbed. I was a rock — supporting my family, holding things together, stoic. That was my role and I played it.

A couple of weeks after we got back to Florida, it hit me. I didn’t know what to do or how to let it out, but I told my dad and asked to stay home from school. I was a straight-A student who never missed school. My dad told me to suck it up. That I’d be okay.

I was devastated. He got to grieve. So did everyone else. I had been there for all of them. But now that it hit me, I needed to suck it up?

I carried that with me for a long time — the grief for my grandfather, yes, but also the grief of feeling abandoned in the moment I needed permission the most. Permission to feel what I felt. Permission to fall apart, even briefly, for someone I loved.

That’s what nobody tells you about grief. You don’t get to schedule it. And not everyone will give you space for it when it arrives.

My dad died years later. At almost the same time, a significant relationship in my life was coming to a final end. And somewhere in me — I think I know this now — I was almost relieved that both losses arrived together. If I could grieve them as one big thing, maybe I wouldn’t have to face either one separately.

It didn’t work that way. While I was a mess at my dad’s burial — sobbing over the casket, mourning my dad, the things left unsaid, the relationship I always wanted us to have and now never would, and mourning in some ways the end of my childhood — I didn’t grieve either of them properly. And for years, both losses kept coming back, the unfinished business of each loss surfacing at unexpected moments, causing problems I couldn’t always trace back to their source.

Here’s what I’ve learned about that: when multiple losses hit at once — or stack up over time — we need to create space to grieve each one separately. Otherwise we’re not really doing the grieving for each of those people or situations. We’re just having this general experience of being overwhelmed. And the grief for each of those losses will keep coming back until we do. I spent years paying the price for that.

We never talked about that Christmas when Grampy died either, my dad and I. That moment — twelve years old, asking to stay home from school, being told to suck it up — stayed between us, unspoken, until he was gone.

A year and a half ago, sitting alone at home, working remotely, I realized I was lonely in a way I hadn’t expected.

I missed my LIFE School community. Sure, I had missed my colleagues and students — the people — but I now realized that I missed having my community. Having a sense of community is increasingly rare these days, so it is even more special when you are able to find it or create it. Mine was gone and I now worked alone in my home office. The daily rhythm of a place that had been my community for decades, the love, the sense of connection and belonging —all gone. There was no funeral for it. No ceremony, no casseroles on the doorstep. Just a quiet absence where something enormous used to be. And the strange, slightly embarrassing feeling that I was grieving — really grieving — something that wasn’t a person.

But that’s exactly what it was.

Grief isn’t only about death. It’s about any significant loss — a relationship, a career, a community, an identity, a version of yourself you expected to keep being. We move across the country, change jobs, watch our kids leave home, end marriages, retire from work we loved — and we don’t always give ourselves permission to grieve any of it.

I grieved for an adopted sister who was returned to the adoption agency after just a couple of weeks when I was just a toddler. I have no memory of her and did not even know about her until I was in my 30s, but I still grieved for that loss when I found out.

The technical term is what Kenneth Doka called “disenfranchised grief” — the losses nobody validates. The job. The friendship that quietly ended. The identity you built over twenty years that one day just stopped existing. If it mattered to you and it’s gone, you’re allowed to grieve it.

Frequently, a big part of what needs to be grieved — and this is something that comes up a lot in my coaching work — is a change in or a loss of identity. We might grieve the person, or job, or relationship that ends, but we don’t grieve the part of ourselves that is gone or changed. And that’s often what hangs over our heads moving forward. A lot of people don’t do the healing or grieving for that part. And they wonder why they feel stuck.

Jamie Anderson described grief in a way that resonates with a lot of people:

“Grief is just love with no place to go.”

When someone or something that mattered deeply is no longer present in the same way, the love doesn’t disappear. It has to reorganize. That reorganization is a part of grief.

Some people talk about grief as love without a person to actually express it to anymore. And so it’s this love that feels unmet in a way — but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Because part of grieving is not moving on from the person or the relationship. It’s moving on with that love, with that sense of loss, with that acknowledgment that that person, the memories, the experiences, the impact they had on you all goes forward with you. It has changed you. It is a part of you.

You don’t move on from grief so much as you move forward with it. You carry it with you —along with the memories and the love —as you write a new chapter in your life.

Grief isn’t linear. The famous five stages are real in some ways, but they’re not a checklist and we don’t follow them neatly — by any means. Grief can feel more like a spiral. It can come in waves — different sizes, different intervals, sometimes years apart. You can feel like you’ve gone through the grieving process and then have it revisit you weeks, months, years, even decades later. So it’s different. The patterns are different. And there’s no right or wrong way to grieve — other than don’t repress or suppress your emotions. Don’t judge them. Whatever you’re feeling, you’re feeling.

There’s nothing to fix. Grieving is not about fixing something. It’s about experiencing the loss and acknowledging it.

But grief isn’t only about love. We can grieve for people with whom we had complicated or even toxic relationships. We can even grieve for people we never met.

The range of emotions grief brings might surprise you at first glance, but upon reflection many will feel familiar. We often associate grief with sadness. But there’s a whole range of emotions — anger, guilt, shame, regret, confusion, tenderness. And how about this one: relief. Of course, sometimes that relief makes us feel guilty. But it’s natural to feel all of those emotions when you’re grieving. Totally natural. You may not experience all of them, but if you do — whichever ones — it’s okay.

Relief can be the hardest one to admit to because it feels disloyal. But if a relationship was painful toward the end, there’s going to be some sense of relief when it ends, even alongside the heartbreak. If someone passed after a long or difficult illness, feeling relief that they’re no longer suffering — or that your life is no longer consumed by being their caretaker — is a perfectly natural thing to experience.

Sometimes we need to hold two emotions that feel contradictory at the same time. Heartbroken and relieved. Devastated and grateful. We live in a day and age where we tend to avoid discomfort — we reach for our phones, we distract ourselves, we escape. But discomfort is a part of life. And grief does this a lot — it asks us to hold what feel like contradictory emotions simultaneously. That’s part of being human.

With that wide range of emotions accompanying it, grief can look like and feel like sadness, exhaustion, anger, numbness and more.

When we experience grief stacking — more than one loss at the same time, like I did when my dad died and a relationship ended —it can feel catastrophic. But it’s important to try to create space for grieving each of those people or situations separately, rather than treating it like one big catastrophe. Otherwise we’re not really grieving for each. And the grief will keep coming back until we do. Like it did with me.

Because grief and depression can look similar, especially when there’s grief stacking or we are feeling particularly isolated, it’s important to get clarity when we can’t tell the difference. If you’re ever concerned that the sadness that comes with grief is crossing into depression, that’s a good time to reach out to a therapist or psychiatrist to get some professional help.

Sometimes the most complex grief situations involve ongoing challenges rather than a single clear loss. A child’s struggles with mental health or addiction. A family member’s brain injury requiring lifelong care. An elderly parent slipping into dementia. In those situations there’s grieving to be done — but also, often, crisis management happening at the same time. And we’re somehow expected to handle all of that simultaneously, which is almost inhumane.

In those situations I think about a few things. First, radical acceptance — not of the situation as permanent or acceptable, but as the baseline you’re starting from. This is where things are right now. What can I do from here? A lot of our suffering in those situations comes from the expectations we had that aren’t being met. When we can shed those expectations and say, okay, this is who this person is right now, I need to love them for who they are right now, that can be the most helpful shift available. Not easy. But real.

Second, the difference between empathy and taking on someone else’s emotional load. There’s a line between feeling compassion for someone and absorbing their pain as your own. Crossing that line — carrying what isn’t yours — doesn’t help them and depletes you. Trying to create some moments where you’re feeling empathy and compassion without taking it on as your own emotion is not a betrayal of love. It’s self-preservation. And as a parent, I know how unbelievably difficult that is. But we need to buy ourselves those moments of peace, those moments of grace.

Third, what are the concrete things you can actually do to help? Do those. And then practice radical acceptance for the rest.

Many of us don’t know what to do with grief —not only our own but that of others, as well —or the discomfort that accompanies it. So we tell others to “suck it up,” like my dad told me, to “be strong” and move on.

What we can do for other people when they’re grieving is simpler than we tend to make it.

We might try sitting with them in their grief. Asking them about the person or situation they are grieving, maybe sharing our own memories of them. We might be afraid of upsetting them, but often it can be such a relief to let it out, to cry, and have someone sit with you and just witness it and be with you amidst the grief. To not pretend like the person or loss never happened.

One of my favorite people experienced a devastating loss a few years ago. When I shared a draft of this article with her, she told me, “One of the most crushing feelings about grief is feeling like the world forgets about that person, or experience. Letting the griever talk about them/it is hugely soothing and healing. Even if there are tears.”

Be present. Help them feel seen and heard and loved. That’s most of it.

For sure, don’t tell them to “move on.” There’s a lot of expectation — from family, from society — that people should get over it, get on with their lives, leave the person or the experience behind. That’s not how it works. The goal isn’t to move on from the love. It’s to move on with it. That person and that love is always with you. It’s one of the beautiful things that helps us heal and carry on — that we don’t have to leave them behind. They’re a part of us.

Don’t say “let me know if there’s anything I can do.” I know it’s well intentioned — but you’ve now given them another job. Most people who are grieving don’t know what they need. And even if they do, they won’t ask. Instead, just do something. Have dinner delivered. Offer to pick up their kids. Show up. Don’t make them manage you.

If we’re afraid of heartbreak, afraid of loss, afraid of grief — we will hold people at arm’s length to protect ourselves. And in doing so, we’ll miss the very thing we’re here for. Real connection. Real love. The kind that leaves a mark.

My grandfather has been gone for almost fifty years. He still comes with me.

To the Red Sox games. To the moments when something is genuinely funny and I feel it in my whole body the way he used to. To the times I’m with young people and trying to be the kind of presence for them that he was for me — the person who makes them feel like they matter, like the world is a little larger and warmer than they thought.

Grief is the mark. It’s proof that something mattered.

Let it matter.

I’m a life coach and founder of Integrity and Joy. If this resonated, I’d love to connect — book a free consultation at https://calendar.app.google/CsBx5mnpX7g9PFuP9 or find me at https://www.integrityandjoy.com.

Or just reach out — I’d love to hear what resonated with you.