Janet stopped going to gatherings. She stopped watching movies. Even her garden felt different, and the garden had always been hers.
Nothing had happened to her, not in the way we usually mean it. Nobody had died. No one had handed her a diagnosis. But she told the people close to her, "I feel like I am living in another reality. People talk about normal things while I am watching our country come apart."
Janet's story is in Chapter Two of Staying Strong in Unsteady Times. When I read it back, I kept thinking about a name psychologists give to what she was carrying.
They call it ambiguous loss. The researcher Pauline Boss developed the idea while working with families who had someone missing, and later with families living alongside dementia. In both cases the person, or the life, is neither fully gone nor fully here. There is no funeral. There is no casserole on the porch. Nobody says, "Take all the time you need."
Boss made a point that I find kind. She said the trouble is not a weakness in the person. The trouble is that the loss has no clear ending, and human beings are built to grieve things that end.
Think about how many of us are carrying one of these. A parent who is still here but not quite the same. A job that is still there but no longer makes sense. A town that is changing around you. A diagnosis that rewrote the plans. A country you thought you understood.
When I was fourteen, I watched the adults around me try to make sense of President Kennedy's death. It was terrible, but it had a shape. There was a day, a service, a place to put the grief. Much of what people feel now has no day and no place. So they feel foolish for feeling it at all.
That is where shame sneaks in. Shame says, "Other people are fine, so what is wrong with me?" Nothing is wrong with you. In the book's plain-word map, grief is the feeling that says something you love was wounded. It is information, not a flaw.
Here are three small things that help, and none of them require the loss to be resolved:
Say it in one sentence. "I am grieving the way things used to feel." Saying it out loud makes it a thing you can carry instead of a fog you live in.
Keep one ritual alive. Janet's garden is a good candidate. Something small, done on purpose, tells your body that some things are still yours.
Tell one safe person. Not to fix it. Just so you are not the only witness.
You do not need closure to begin. You need a next place to stand.
Janet's story is in Staying Strong in Unsteady Times.
Read the first chapter of Staying Strong in Unsteady Times free