The Grief Nobody Talks About

There is a kind of grief that nobody talks about.

I lost my father nearly 15 years ago, when I was 28. That grief — the traditional kind, the kind that comes with a funeral and flowers and people telling you they're sorry — was devastating. But it had a shape. It had language. It had a before and an after. People understood it. I was allowed, in the way our culture allows these things, to fall apart.

What I've come to understand since then — both through my own experience and through years of sitting with clients in the therapy room — is that grief and parents exist on a much wider spectrum than we are usually given language for.

There is another kind of grief that sits alongside bereavement. Quieter. Less acknowledged. And in many ways harder to carry — because it has no name, no ritual, and no social permission attached to it.

This article is about both kinds. Because for many of us, they exist at the same time.

The Grief We Know How to Name

When a parent dies, society, however imperfectly, makes space. There are rituals: funerals, condolence cards, bereavement leave. People know what to say, or at least they try. The loss is visible, acknowledged, and understood.

But grief, even the traditional kind, is rarely as linear as we are led to believe. The widely cited "five stages" model, developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, was originally intended to describe the experience of dying patients — not the bereaved. Grief researchers have since moved well beyond it. Contemporary models, such as Stroebe and Schut's Dual Process Model (1999), understand grief as an oscillating process in which the bereaved move between confronting loss and restoring daily life — not a neat progression through stages.

What this means in practice is that grief for a parent who has died doesn't arrive neatly and leave cleanly. It returns. It visits in the most ordinary moments — a date on the calendar, a song, a smell, a milestone they are not present for. This is not a sign of incomplete healing. Research published in International Journal of Psychiatric Research (Burke, 2025) affirms that grief is a deeply individual, non-linear process shaped by attachment, culture, and the nature of the relationship itself. Grief changes shape over time. It does not disappear.

The Grief That Has No Funeral

But there is a second grief I want to address — one that receives far less attention, and carries far more shame.

The grief of a parental relationship that is complicated. Where the parent is still alive, still present, still contactable — and yet something is being lost, or has always been missing. Where you have longed, perhaps for years, for a version of connection that hasn't quite been available to you. Where love and hurt exist in the same breath.

This kind of grief doesn't come with flowers. Nobody asks how you're doing with it. And because there is no obvious loss - no funeral, no before and after —-there is often no permission to feel it at all.

Psychologists have a term for this. Disenfranchised grief was coined by Dr Kenneth Doka in 1989 to describe forms of grief that are not acknowledged on a personal or societal level - grief where observers may view the loss as insignificant, leading to feelings of isolation and doubt over the impact of the experience.

When grief isn't recognised, people may feel isolated, ashamed, or silenced. Without support or validation, it can be harder to make sense of the loss. This is particularly true for those grieving within a living relationship — a parent who was emotionally unavailable, critical, or simply not quite safe; a parent whose presence has always held something painful alongside the love.

Doka identifies several reasons grief may become disenfranchised: when the relationship is unrecognised, when the loss itself is unacknowledged, or when the mode of grieving is socially invalidated. A complicated relationship with a living parent fits squarely within this framework. The grief is real. The loss is real. But without social recognition, it has nowhere to go.

Anticipatory Grief: When the Parent Is Changing

There is a third dimension worth naming — particularly relevant for adult children watching a parent age, decline, or become less themselves.

Anticipatory grief is characterised by the preemptive mourning and emotional turmoil experienced as loved ones age and their health declines. It involves the phases of grief, its impact on caregivers, and the importance of providing both physical and emotional support.

Anticipatory grief has been associated with separation anxiety, heightened concern for the ill person, existential aloneness, rehearsal of the loved one's end of life, ongoing attempts to adjust to changing circumstances, anger, irritability, sadness, and decreased ability to function as usual.

What makes anticipatory grief particularly complex is that it unfolds without the clarity of an ending. The person is there — and yet something is being lost. Slowly. Without a clear moment to point to. The reversal of roles, as an adult child becomes the carer for someone who once cared for them, compounds this: it is disorienting to become the one who holds things together for the person who once held them for you.

For expats watching this from thousands of miles away, the distance adds its own particular weight. The guilt of not being physically present — of watching a parent change through a phone screen across a time zone — is a grief that rarely gets acknowledged. You have chosen to build your life elsewhere. That choice does not make you a bad child. It makes you a human being navigating an impossible geography.

When the Relationship Was Complicated

I want to speak to something that is rarely said clearly enough.

You can grieve someone you have complicated feelings about. You can mourn the version of a parent who was never quite what you needed — who was emotionally unavailable, or critical, or unpredictable — and still feel their changing, or their loss, deeply.

Grief does not require a simple relationship. It only requires love — in whatever complicated, imperfect form that love has taken.

In fact, research suggests that complicated parental relationships can make grief more difficult to process, not less. When the relationship was ambivalent or painful, grief can carry additional layers of anger, guilt, longing, and unresolved hope. The mourning is not just for the person — it is for the relationship that never quite was, and now never quite will be.

This is perhaps the most isolating grief of all. It is the kind that sits in silence, that people carry without ever telling anyone, because it feels impossible to explain. Because society doesn't make space for grieving someone who hurt you. Because the love and the pain are so entangled that separating them feels impossible.

But it is grief. And it deserves to be treated as such

What Helps: Five Approaches

Understanding the nature of these griefs is the first step. But what does it actually look like to tend to them?

1. Name it.

The single most powerful thing you can do with unnamed grief is give it a name. Say it — to yourself, or to someone you trust: I am grieving this relationship. I am grieving the parent I needed and didn't have. I am grieving what is being lost as my parent changes.

Neuroscientific research on affect labelling — the process of putting emotions into words — consistently shows that naming what we feel reduces the intensity of the emotional response and restores a sense of agency. You cannot fully process what you cannot name.

2. Separate the layers.

Grief for a parent rarely arrives as one clean thing. It comes layered — practical fears, old wounds, anticipatory dread, current losses. When all of this collapses into one overwhelming mass, it becomes impossible to process. Try to separate the layers. What am I grieving about the relationship? What am I grieving about who they are becoming? What am I grieving about what might come? Each layer deserves its own attention.

3. Allow the complexity.

You can love someone and grieve them simultaneously. You can feel relief and guilt at the same time. Grief does not require a resolved story, or a simple one. You do not have to make the relationship uncomplicated before you are allowed to feel the loss.

4. Find somewhere for it to go.

Disenfranchised grief gives people language for an experience that is often invisible. But language alone is not always enough. Unprocessed grief needs somewhere to go — a therapist, a trusted friend, a grief group, a journal. If you have been carrying this quietly, I want to gently encourage you to find at least one space where you don't have to.

5. Be patient with the non-linearity.

Grief for a living relationship does not move in one direction. It will resurface when you are not expecting it — in a phone call, in a quiet moment, in a milestone that highlights what is absent. When it does, that is not a sign that you haven't healed. It is a sign that you are still in relationship with something real and human. Be patient with that. Be gentle with it.

A Final Note

I started thinking about this topic from both sides — as a therapist, and as a daughter carrying various kinds of grief. What I want you to take from this, if you are sitting with any version of what I've described, is this: what you are feeling is real. The relationship didn't have to be simple for the loss to be profound. You are allowed to mourn what was never quite there, just as much as you mourn what has been taken away.

Both kinds of grief deserve space. Both deserve care. And neither has to be carried alone.

If you would like to explore any of this further, I work with individuals navigating grief — both the named and the unnamed kinds. You are welcome to reach out.

References

• Burke, S.A. (2025). The science and experience of grief: Psychological, neuroscientific, and cultural perspectives. International Journal of Psychiatric Research, 8(4), 1–10.

• Doka, K.J. (2002). Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice. Research Press.

• Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan.

• Majid, U., & Akande, A. (2022). Managing anticipatory grief in family and partners: A systematic review and qualitative meta-synthesis. OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying, 85(4).

• Rodriguez, J.L., Wright, G.G., Leopold, P.J., & Petion, A.R. (2025). The bittersweet journey of anticipatory grief: Clinical implications for nurturing caregivers of aging parents. OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying.

• Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.

• Torre, J.B., & Lieberman, M.D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labelling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124.