The Grief Nobody Gives You Permission For

There’s an album by Noah Kahan called The Great Divide and it’s touching on themes so many of us can relate to. The song 23 by Noah Kahan is about watching someone you love disappear into addiction while they’re still standing in front of you — the person you grew up with, the one who taught you things, the one whose initials you tattooed on your arm so you’d see their name every time you lifted a drink. Present, technically. Gone, in every way that matters.

The world has no container for that kind of grief, which means most people just swallow it.

Disenfranchised grief is the clinical term — loss that society doesn’t formally recognize, which means no one thinks to ask how you’re doing. There’s no occasion for it. The absence is yours alone to carry, and yours alone to interpret, and that’s where things get complicated.

There’s a line in the song: “If I never see you again, you could be anything I want.” It sounds like longing, and it is — but it’s also something more precise. When someone is gone without being gone, you fill the space they vacated. You hold onto the version of them that existed before — the one leaning over a car hood showing you how the engine worked, the one who made everything feel normal — or you build a story that makes the distance easier to justify. Either way, you’re grieving the relationship that never quite was, the one you kept waiting to return to.

Psychologists call this ambiguous loss. I’d call it one of the loneliest experiences there is, because you can’t point to it. There’s nothing to show anyone.

But underneath the ambiguity, something else is usually alive: hope. Quiet, maybe unacknowledged, but there. The belief that the relationship might still find its way back to something. That a conversation might happen. That recovery is possible, that people do change, that the version of them you loved is still in there somewhere, waiting. You don’t have to be actively holding onto it. It can just exist in the background, the way an unanswered question does.

And then, sometimes, they die.

Now you’re grieving two people. The one you lost gradually, quietly, without witnesses. And the one who just died. Except the world only acknowledges the second loss — the funeral, the condolence cards, the well-meaning he’s at peace now — all of it oriented around a relationship that may not have resembled yours in years, maybe decades.

The grief that surfaces isn’t always clean. Sometimes what comes up first is old anger, or relief, or a mourning so layered you can’t find the bottom of it. Because you’re grieving the person who died last Tuesday, yes — but also the brother who used to know how your engine worked. The mother who was there in body and nowhere else. The father who stopped showing up when you were twelve. The person who became a stranger so gradually you couldn’t name the moment it happened.

And you’re grieving something else entirely — something the death has just made permanent: the possibility of resolution.

That’s the part that undoes people, and the part that almost never gets named. While they were alive, the story was still unfinished. Painful, complicated, maybe untouched for years — but unfinished. Recovery was still possible. A conversation could still happen. Some part of you, however small, was still holding the pen.

Death takes the pen away.

Every imagined conversation that never happened. Every apology that was never given or received. Every version of the relationship you tried to have, or quietly grieved when it didn’t materialize — gone. The door closes, and with it, every future in which things might have finally been different. The closure that always felt one honest conversation away moves from unlikely to impossible, and that is its own kind of death entirely.

And then, sometimes, the phone rings, and someone tells you that you’re the next of kin.

For so many people, this is where the weight becomes almost unbearable — because now you are responsible for them in death in a way you never got to be in life. You have to make decisions. You have to call the funeral home. You have to answer questions about what they would have wanted, as though the relationship was intact enough to know. You have to stand in a room and receive condolences for a loss that the people offering them don’t fully understand, and you have to do all of it while carrying years of history that has nowhere to go and no appropriate moment to surface.

There is something uniquely disorienting about arranging a funeral for someone you were estranged from, or someone whose illness put an ocean between you. The logistics don’t pause for the grief, and the grief doesn’t pause for the logistics. You are simultaneously the bereaved and the one managing the arrangements — signing the forms, choosing the urn, deciding whether there will be a service and who, if anyone, would come. Underneath all of it is a question you may never be able to answer cleanly: what do I actually owe this person?

That answer is yours alone. There is no right way to do this.

What I can tell you, from sitting across from people in exactly this position, is that doing right by someone in death doesn’t require pretending the relationship was something it wasn’t. You can arrange a funeral for a parent you were estranged from and still be angry. You can choose something simple and dignified without performing a grief you don’t feel. You can show up, do what needs to be done, and still hold every complicated truth about who they were to you.

This is some of the most complex grief that exists, and it is almost entirely invisible. From the outside, it looks like ordinary bereavement. The person living it knows the difference. They’re mourning the relationship they never had, and now definitively never will — and then being handed the responsibility of closing it out.

If the grief you’re carrying feels too tangled to explain, too old to justify, too complicated to fit inside the sympathy card someone handed you — that is a sign that your loss was never simple to begin with.

What you lost was real, long before last Tuesday. You are allowed to grieve all of it. And if you find yourself making arrangements for someone with whom your history is complicated, you don’t have to do that alone either.

We’ve sat with this before. We know how to hold it.