Grief and loss

Grief that has a name

This is the kind people accept. The kind they send flowers for. The kind they mention at work.

It doesn’t make it easier. It just means you don’t have to fight for permission to feel it.

• The death of a parent. Sometimes both, in the same decade. Sometimes the same year.
• The death of a partner.
• The death of a sibling, a friend, a child.
• The death of an aunt or uncle or family friend who wasn’t blood, but felt like family.
• The death of a pet who grew up with your children.

You may be grieving more than one of these at once. In midlife, that is normal in the worst sense of the word, common, expected, and not made easier by being either.

The orphan years

There is a season in midlife when the older generation goes. Sometimes one parent. Sometimes both, in the space of two years. Sometimes parents-in-law in the same window. Sometimes aunts, uncles, the family friend who used to come for Christmas, all of them.

You become the older generation. Without warning, you are the one who is supposed to know what happens next. The cousins call you. The funeral directors ask you. Your own children watch you to learn how to grieve.

You are also working. Parenting. Possibly in perimenopause. Possibly the youngest in a meeting where nobody knows your mum died eight weeks ago.

You are not losing your parents. You are losing the person who knew you longest, and the person who knew you first.

Losing your mother

Losing your mother in midlife is its own particular grief. The first person who knew you. The one who remembered the version of you nobody else met. The unspoken understanding, even if your relationship was complicated. Especially then.

If she had dementia or was unwell for years, you have been grieving her twice over. If she went suddenly, you didn’t get the chance.

Either way, mothers’ birthdays, Mother’s Day, the smell of her perfume in a shop, finding her handwriting on an old card, these things become land mines for years. Not forever. But for years.

Losing your father, which we talk about less

Loss of a father in midlife gets less language thrown at it. The cards say less. The conversations are shorter. People assume it’s easier because we don’t expect men to have been the day-in-day-out parent.

It might not have been easier. It might be exactly as hard, or harder, or different. There may be things you never got round to saying. There may be a version of him you only met when he got ill.

Your grief does not have to fit the size other people give it.

When losses pile up

When two losses happen close together, the second one does not knock politely and ask if you’re ready. They land on top of each other.

You may find yourself in a funeral car planning the next one. You may find that the second loss feels both harder and stranger, because you weren’t done with the first.

This is not you failing to grieve correctly. This is the maths of midlife.

You weren’t done with the first one. You don’t have to be. Grief is not a queue you finish.

The admin of death

Nobody tells you that grief comes with paperwork. The probate. The registrar appointment. The bank, the pension, the utility companies. The house clearance. The inheritance argument with the sibling you thought you were getting on with.

Hundreds of small decisions, made while you cannot think.

If you are reading this and you are in it: do less than you think you have to. Half of it can wait. Some of it can be paid for. None of it has to be finished by a particular date, except the bits the law puts a deadline on, and a solicitor will know which those are.

A letter can help, if there are things you wish you had said and didn’t. You don’t have to send it. Some letters are only ever for the writer.

When the death was complicated

Suicide. Sudden illness. An accident. The death of an estranged parent. The death of someone whose dying was hard to watch.

These deaths bring their own particular weight. You may not feel allowed to grieve cleanly. You may feel relief and guilt in the same breath. You may not know what to put on your face when people ask.

All of it is real grief. None of it is wrong.

For loss to suicide specifically: Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (UK SOBS) exists and is gentle. Cruse Bereavement Support, 0808 808 1677 covers every kind of bereavement.

The losses we are not allowed to grieve

There is a name for this: disenfranchised grief. The losses nobody validates. The losses you grieve in private because you are not sure you are even allowed.

In midlife, there are a lot of them.

• The friend who isn’t a friend anymore. No row. Just a slow fade.
• The marriage you’re still legally in, that you have already left in your head.
• The career you thought you’d be in by now.
• The version of yourself who could have been someone different by 50.
• The version of your mother who used to be your mother, while she is still here.
• The pregnancy that didn’t happen. The pregnancies that didn’t last. The pregnancy that did and shouldn’t have.
• The kind of mothering you had planned to be doing, before life happened.
• The body that used to do what you asked of it.
• The home you sold. The country you left. The neighbourhood that doesn’t feel like yours anymore.

Each of these is real grief. Each deserves real space. You are not making a fuss for grieving any of them.

Anticipatory grief, the cruel one

This is the kind you live in for years before the loss happens. When your mother is still alive but no longer herself. When the diagnosis means you have a finite number of conversations left, even if nobody has counted them yet. When you can already feel the shape of the absence in the room.

There is nothing to do about anticipatory grief except let it be there. It will not lighten by being ignored. It does not have stages. It does not finish on a timeline.

What it does have is two cruelties. First, that nobody quite sees it, because the person is still here. Second, that when the loss does happen, you find you have somehow not done the work in advance, because you cannot do that work in advance. You just keep starting it.

When grief and menopause share a body

Grief makes you tired, foggy, irritable, tearful, sleepless, anxious. So does perimenopause. They do not take turns. They sit on top of each other.

People will pick one and tell you it’s that. It is often both. Either way, you deserve real help with the layer that can be treated. Don’t accept “you’re just grieving” as a reason not to consider HRT. Don’t accept “you’re just hormonal” as a reason not to consider therapy.

Both can be true. Both deserve care. Don’t let anyone tell you to pick which one is allowed to be hard.

The version of you who isn’t here anymore

A lot of midlife grief is about a self. The one who could stay up till 3am and still go to work. The one who knew what she wanted. The one who could drink three glasses of wine without consequences. The one who was confident in her body.

Nobody throws a funeral for her. You can. Privately, in your own head, on a long walk, in a quiet bath. Acknowledging that she is gone is not weakness. It is the start of getting to know whoever is here now.

Anniversary waves

Grief does not pass evenly. The first anniversary. Her birthday. The week of the year when the light is the same as it was on the day she died. The Sunday in October when you used to have lunch with her. The smell of mince pies. The first wedding without her. The first grandchild she will not meet.

These are not relapses. They are not regression. They are how grief lives in a body. They get gentler. They rarely fully go.

What helps, on the harder days

• Lower the bar. A shower and a meal is a win. The rest will come.
• Don’t outrun it. Grief does not respond to being kept busy. It just waits.
• Tell one person, even badly. The friend who can sit, not the friend who wants to fix.
• Talk to SAM at 3am, if 3am is when it’s loud. You won’t wake anyone up.
• Walk. Not for exercise. Just to give the grief a moving room to live in.
• Write it down. A letter to the person, the version of yourself, the thing you lost. You don’t have to send it.
• Don’t apologise for the size of your sadness. Anybody who tells you to be over it by now is not a safe person.

When it doesn’t lift

Grief that gets stuck deserves real help. Try, in roughly this order, what feels possible: your GP, your local NHS talking therapies service (you can usually self-refer, no GP letter needed), or a private bereavement counsellor if you can stretch to it.

Cruse Bereavement Support, 0808 808 1677, free, open to anyone, including the losses you’re not sure “count.”

Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (UK SOBS), for the particular grief of losing someone to suicide.

The Good Grief Trust, an enormous directory of bereavement charities, sorted by type of loss.

You do not have to be grieving the right kind of loss to deserve help with it.