Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive

There is a grief nobody brings you a casserole for, and it is this one. The person you love is still alive. They are in the house. You can hear them in the next room. And they are not who they were.

After my husband's stroke, I was living with somebody I had to learn all over again. And I was grieving a man who had not died. You can be in the room with them and miss them. That sentence took me years to be able to say out loud.

This grief is enormously common and almost nobody names it, and people carrying it usually think there is something wrong with them.

Maybe they are different because of illness. A stroke, dementia, a brain injury, addiction, mental illness. Maybe they are different because something in them closed after a loss. And here is what makes this grief uniquely hard: there is no funeral. There is no date where everybody agrees that a loss occurred, so there is no permission to mourn. Instead you grieve in installments. A little at a time, every day, over years.

And you feel guilty about all of it, because how can you mourn somebody who is sitting right there? It feels like a betrayal. It is not a betrayal. It is love recognizing a loss. Only somebody who loved the first version could grieve its absence.

Romans 12:15 says weep with them that weep. There is no qualifier. God did not restrict mourning to funerals. Ecclesiastes 3 says there is a time to weep, and a time to mourn — a legitimate season, no death certificate required.

David spent years grieving a son who was very much alive. Absalom was breathing the entire time, and David wept over what had broken between them. You can weep over somebody whose heart is still beating.

And in Luke 19, Jesus wept over Jerusalem, a city standing right in front of Him, full of living people. He was not grieving a death. He was grieving what it could have been and would not be. That is exactly your grief.

Grieve the old and love the new. Give yourself permission to feel the loss. Grieving who somebody was, while still loving who they have become, is not betrayal. It is mature, complicated, real love.

Learn them again. This is grief and it is also discovery. There are things you can still share. They are not a diminished copy of who they were. They are a person, today, with a today.

Do not abandon yourself in it. Jesus said love thy neighbour as thyself. As yourself. Not instead of yourself. Keep your friendships. Keep the thing that makes you you. I am happier, healthier, and more myself today than I was in the years I was disappearing. And that is not abandonment. I did not abandon him. I finally, simply, refused to abandon myself.

Let somebody help you carry it. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens. Tell one safe person the true version. Not the update on the patient. The truth about you.