The Grief in Between

If you're reading this, there's a decent chance you're in the sandwich like I am because there are many of us: watching a parent disappear while your kids are getting ready to leave. If that's you, I want you to know that what you're carrying has a shape and name, even if no one's ever named it for you. I'm still figuring it out myself, but here's what I've learned so far.

The grief that feels like grief, but you’re not sure it can be called grief

You can grieve someone who's still breathing. There's no funeral for this kind of loss, no casserole on your porch, no permission slip. Your mother is still there. You can still visit her, still hold her hand. And yet the person who knew you, who you could call just to talk, who shared your memories with you, is gone. The relationship is gone. What's left is a body you love, wearing the absence of someone you loved more completely. This is ambiguous grief.

And the confusing part is you feel guilty for grieving her, because she's right there. You catch yourself mid tears and think, what right do I have to grieve, she’s here and alive? So you swallow it, and then it comes back later, as it does, when you're not expecting it. That loop of grieving, feeling guilty, swallowing it, and repeating is exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to people who haven't lived it.

If this is you: you're not overreacting. You're not being dramatic. You are allowed to grieve a relationship even while the person is still alive. That's not a betrayal of her. It's just true. It’s even been given it’s own unique name, ambiguous grief, because there is no clear end and a strange mix of feelings come along for the ride.

The grief you're not supposed to feel, because it's good news

At the exact same time, on the other end of your life, something is happening that you actually want. Your kids are leaving. And you want them to. You want the girlfriends or boyfriends, the new cities, the independence, the not wanting to come home for some great adventure. You would never wish otherwise for them.

But wanting it doesn't mean it doesn't cost you something. You're losing the daily version of them and yourself that you have spent years building.  The one who needed you in a particular, uncomplicated way, even as a better, freer version of them is being born right in front of you. That's its own kind of grief, and it's just as real, even though it's dressed up as pride and excitement and Instagram captions about how proud you are.

What's still beautiful, if you look up

There is real beauty in both of these places, when I lift my head up long enough to see it, and it would be its own kind of loss to miss it.

There's something almost innocent about where my mother is now. The person who worried, who carried decades of complexity and history and hurt, some of that has fallen away. What's left, in its own strange way, is simpler. Softer, sometimes. I don't want to romanticize it, because the loss is still the loss and Alzheimer's is hard. But I also don't want to miss the moments of unguarded sweetness that are actually there, right now, because I was too busy grieving what used to be.

And my kids, where they are is so hopeful. There's an innocence to it too, a wide open feeling about the world that I remember having once and mostly traded in for competence and caution. Watching them walk into their lives with that kind of hope is its own gift, if I let myself actually watch it instead of just missing who they used to be.

That's the real work of this season. Not choosing between grieving and noticing the beauty, but doing both, almost in the same breath. Looking up. Not letting the grief be so loud that it drowns out what's still, or newly, wonderful.

Two griefs, same season

Both of these are asking the same thing of me: let go of who someone was, so I can be in relationship with who they're becoming. One direction feels like loss without a silver lining but still innocent and sweet. The other is loss with a silver lining, the tricky mix of loss with excitement and hope.

If you're carrying both right now, you're not alone in it, even if it feels quiet and invisible from the outside. This kind of grief doesn't resolve neatly. You just learn to carry it. Set it down sometimes, pick it back up, and keep going anyway. And when you can, look up.