Walnut Creek, California
When it happened without warning.
There is a particular kind of loss where there was no illness, no goodbye and no chance to say the thing. People who have not had that cannot quite tell it apart from other grief. It is not the same.
This might be you if
- You keep going back to the last ordinary moment before you knew
- You are functioning well and people have stopped asking
- You are angry in a way that embarrasses you
- It has been long enough that you feel you should be further along
I am not speaking about this from the outside
My husband Jim and I were married forty two years. He dropped from a heart attack, suddenly, at sixty. A later partner of mine was killed in a plane crash. I know the specific silence of a house where somebody was supposed to be walking in the door.
The stages are not a timetable
You were probably handed a list and then quietly measured yourself against it. Sudden loss does not move through it in order and there is nothing wrong with you for that. Much of what people carry after a shock is not sadness at all. It is the moment of finding out, still lodged where it landed.
What can actually be helped
Grief is not something to be removed and I would not try. What can come down is the sharpness of the moment itself, the images that arrive unasked, the replaying, the guilt about what you did or did not do that day. When that settles, what is left is the loss, which you are allowed to carry, and love, which you get to keep.
How I would work with this
You do not have to be finished with it. You do have to be able to breathe.
Start with a free 15 minute call
We talk, you ask questions, and you decide if this is right for you. No pressure either way.