There are some kinds of grief that people understand quite easily.
When someone's diagnosed with a life-limiting illness,
For example,
And they succumb to their illness.
There's usually a ritual around that loss.
People acknowledge it,
There might be a funeral or a celebration of life.
Generally,
People ask how you are for a while,
And there's an understanding that you might not be yourself.
But there are so many other losses that we carry that just simply aren't recognized or acknowledged in the same way.
Maybe it's the end of a relationship or friendship.
Or perhaps the lonely experience of a miscarriage or your second or third or fourth.
Estrangement from somebody you love or losing your health,
Losing your job,
Losing your home.
Or losing a community that once gave you a sense of belonging.
Sometimes we grieve someone who is still very much alive,
And sometimes what we're grieving is harder to put into words.
The life we thought we would have or the family we hoped for,
The childhood that we desperately needed but didn't get.
Or the person we were before something happened that changed us.
And I want you to know that there's a name for this type of grief.
A grief that isn't fully recognized,
Isn't fully acknowledged,
Or even supported in the same way by the people around us.
And that name is disenfranchised grief.
One of the painful things about disenfranchised grief is that when the world doesn't recognize this kind of loss,
We can start to question it for ourselves as well.
Why am I still affected by this?
Or do I even have a right to grieve this?
Other people have been through so much worse than I have.
But grief doesn't need to meet a particular threshold to be real for you.
We grieve because something mattered to us.
And we don't only grieve what we once had,
We can grieve what never happened.
The apology that never came,
The conversation that never came.
The relationship we kept hoping would change,
The child we imagined in our arms,
The future we had quietly built in our minds.
These types of losses can be especially lonely because there may not be a funeral,
No ritual,
No cards or flowers.
Sometimes there isn't even a word for what has been lost.
And that lack of recognition doesn't make the grief any less real.
So part of living with disenfranchised grief is learning to give ourselves our own acknowledgement.
Even when we don't have an acknowledgement from others.
Acknowledging for yourself,
Yes,
This matters to me.
I lost something.
It has changed me.
And even though we may crave validation from someone else,
We don't need someone else to validate the significance of our loss before we can begin to tend to it.
So let's remember that grief affects every one of us differently.
And there's no hierarchy.
On what grief matters the most.
All of it is real,
And all of it deserves our deepest love,
Attention,
And compassion.
