Why Can’t I Just Grieve Forever?

When I was 16 my sister who was a year older than me was killed in a car accident. I’m 36 now, and while the pain has dulled over the years, I am coming into a place in life where I realize that I will never get over it, and I don’t think I will ever be whole again. When I try to talk to people about this feeling they seem unsatisfied by my stasis. They’re certain the right therapy or treatment or approach to life will fix me and get me to a place where I stop being actively depressed about her death. She was my best friend. We were extremely close, as close as any two people could be. Nobody has ever or will ever understand me how she did.

Over the years I have done different therapies and anti-depressants. The one I’m on now seems to work well enough, with minimal side effects. So I am doing that.

I have a great marriage, two kids I love to pieces, and a decent career. I have hobbies and interests. I have friends. Most days I like how my hair looks. I love to read. Right now I’m sitting at my desk, and there’s a window to my left and there’s a really great tree out there. I’m drinking my icy coffee because my wife makes this cold brew concentrate on Sundays that I can use to make a fresh glass every day all week. We have tickets to see Brandi Carlile in a few weeks, and my wife’s parents will babysit the kids when we go, because they live just 20 minutes away, and have always been here to help out. I’m wearing a new pair of jeans that fit me perfectly.

But thinking about my sister still makes me cry. As I write this, even, I am crying. I am sometimes jealous of my own children for having each other. But nobody I talk to seems to think this is a state of being worth accepting. Can’t I just? I’m so tired of trying to get over it or move past it. Can’t I just sit here? Can’t I just live a broken life without having to fix it?

Valerie: I think the answer is yes. I think you can. I think you are allowed to still cry about the sister you lost. It doesn’t sound like this grief is keeping you from living your life. It sounds like it’s not even keeping you from having a wonderful life. So as long as it’s not consuming you, as long as you can still feel joy about your children and Brandi Carlile and the cold brew your wife made you, as long as you can still appreciate a great tree or a perfectly-fitting pair of jeans, I think it’s okay that you will always be grieving her, always be missing her. As long as your therapist isn’t concerned and you feel your antidepressants are working, it doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me that you still cry about your sister. No amount of therapy is going to bring her back, so that hole will always be there, it’s just a matter of not falling into it. Grief is not linear, so it makes sense to me that some days the pain feels dulled and others it brings you to tears. I hope you have people in your life who let you cry about her, let you talk about her, about what you loved about her, about what she loved, about what you miss and what you think she’d be like now. If you don’t, maybe you can ask someone for that. To not try to fix or change your grief, but to be with you in it for a while every now and then. Not trying to move past the grief, but just trying to move through the latest wave of it.

Katie: Reading this actually makes me more concerned about the people trying to convince you to suppress your feelings than it does about you. I don’t think grief ever truly goes away. It changes, and over time we learn how to live alongside it, but love and loss don’t have an expiration date.

I even still cry sometimes over dogs I lost years ago because they were such important parts of my life, and their deaths were painful and devastating. Over the years, many people have told me that my emotions were “too much.” For a while I tried to make myself feel less, but eventually I realized that strong emotions are not a flaw. They are part of what allows us to experience love, joy, connection, and meaning so deeply.

I imagine that alongside your grief, you still carry memories of laughter, comfort, and the bond you shared with your sister. That bittersweet mixture of sadness and love is beautiful. As long as you are still able to experience moments of joy and meaning in your life,and it sounds like you are,I don’t think there is anything wrong with you. You went through something profoundly traumatic at an age when most people have not yet had to face that kind of loss and it sounds like people don’t know how to relate to that and would rather just try to fix you. I live with multiple incurable illnesses since a young age and I experience something similar where people want to think that if they just give me the right piece of advice my illnesses will go away magically. People are not good at existing in discomfort.

I once read grief described as love with nowhere to go. I think there’s truth in that. You’re never going to stop loving your sister, so it makes sense that grief will always remain. Continuing to miss her is not a sign that you’re broken or stuck. It’s a reflection of the importance of that relationship.

It also makes me wonder whether some of the people trying to “fix” your grief simply aren’t the right support for this part of your life. Not everyone understands long-term grief, especially after the loss of a sibling or another deeply traumatic loss. I wonder if there are long-term grief communities or support groups where you could connect with people who understand that grief doesn’t have a timetable and that healing doesn’t mean no longer hurting.

From what you’ve written, I don’t see someone who is failing to move on. I see someone who loved deeply, lost someone irreplaceable, and continues to carry that love with them. And I think that’s something to be honored, not corrected.

Summer: There’s an acquaintance in my life I know through loved ones. His younger sister died when he was a pre-teen and he still grieves for her. He’s well into his sixties now.

Me? I barely felt anything when my grandfather died. I was ‘down’ in mood for about two days and nothing else happened.

The statement that “Everyone grieves at their own pace,” is wholly true, but we should remember to add “and some people never stop grieving.” to the end. If your experience is such that grief hasn’t abated after decades, it’s far preferable to continue actively grieving than push for completion. It’s clear that you’ve built a life beyond your pain, but that doesn’t exclude its existence. I don’t think completing your grieving is going to relieve this—especially since there are people in your life pushing you toward completing a process you’re not ready to do.

Grief can’t be ‘fixed’ any more than any other mental distress can just be fixed. Yes, some people develop or recover their way out of adverse mental health. I mean, my severe depressions are quite firmly a past-tense thing. But other distressing experiences I have will still be here and show no signs of leaving. There isn’t a goal end date on any of this. It’s all a process and I’ll echo the sentiment others have given that people telling you to just be done with your grief are callous and clueless.

It’s okay to be grieving at your stage in life. You are still grieving. You are capable of working through it via the supporting people in your life—wife, loved ones, therapists. I can’t be the person who suggests ways to grieve, but I’ll join my co-authors in telling you that it’s okay to keep doing it.

Nico: You lost your sister way too young — of course it’s okay to grieve forever. Many to most people don’t ever fully get over a loss like that, and everyone has their own ways of grieving and of showing their grief. Comparing yourself to anyone else is not necessary here. Like my colleagues, I am concerned about the thought processes of the people who expect you to get over it. What purpose does it serve them for you to be grief-free? Why is it their business whether or not you need to cry about your sister from time to time? The answer is that it isn’t. Your grief sounds similar to other people I know who’ve lost siblings or children or a partner. That grief doesn’t fade easily, and it comes and goes. I’ve heard it said that grief doesn’t fade, actually, and that what we do is we grow around our grief. You’re a person with deep emotions and a lot of love to give, it seems, and like Katie said, feeling things strongly is not a character flaw.

You sound like you’ve built a beautiful life for yourself, one your sister surely would be happy you have. It does not seem like this grief is too detrimental to you living your life and taking care of your responsibilities. So, the answer is yes, you can feel broken forever. You do not have to get over it. You can both live your life and hold your love for your sister and the grief tied to that love for the rest of your life, and no one has the right to tell you to stop feeling.

Riese: I feel like this too, from losing my Dad when I was 14. It has taken me a lot of time to really, truly accept it. I tried a lot of therapies and platitudes and coping mechanisms and I feel more peaceful now that I have just accepted that I will be broken forever. It feels weird like there’s this jagged edge inside of me — surely I cannot continue to live with this knife in my chest. But I do.

My ex and I broke up about two years ago; it was messy. I initiated breaking things off, and they took it badly. We dated for five to six years on and off from our late teens to our early twenties. I ended things because they emotionally withdrew from the relationship (and moved halfway across the world without consulting me- and for no real reason, for about eight months). We never lived together, and our last “big” fight before the breakup happened because I asked them to consider moving in with me during their time away from the city we both lived in. I asked them to think about it, but I didn’t have a specific date in mind, just broadly “the future” (we were also very young at the time, 22-23). They thought I was being manipulative, I thought they were being cowardly, still, I conceded, until I didn’t.

They met their new girlfriend about two months after we broke up. I would’ve had no problem with this if they hadn’t been actively begging me to get back together and telling me they still loved me at the time. In a classically lesbian fashion, we also communicated via Spotify playlist until the end of January last year. I did not know they were in a new relationship, and I never would have done anything like that if I had. They moved in with their girlfriend this month, and I’m feeling so conflicted about it. I am also in a new relationship, which is going very well. But still, their moving in with her makes me feel terrible about myself. I can’t talk to my girlfriend about it, obviously. I don’t know why I’m having these feelings; my ex and I haven’t spoken in almost a year, and I am completely in love with my partner. Still, when I found out they moved in together, I felt this deep kind of inadequacy, and a sort of pseudo-jealousy? (though I’m not jealous of their girlfriend, really. I still feel really bad about the Spotify thing, even if I didn’t know.) Am I not over my ex? I don’t know why I would feel this way if I were. I feel so guilty.

Valerie: While this is really only something you can know within yourself, I don’t think feeling some type of way about your ex who wouldn’t move in with you move in with someone else necessarily means you’re not over your ex. That “why not me?” feeling. Jealousy can be illogical sometimes; your past self can be rearing up to wonder why this new girl, why now, even though your current self doesn’t feel that way. But you have to ask yourself: if your ex showed up at your door right now, would you drop everything, dump your current girlfriend, and get back together with them? Because it sounds like no. (It also sounds like the answer SHOULD be no, because it doesn’t sound like you were ultimately a good fit for each other.) Especially now that you know they were still sending you Spotify playlists while they were in a relationship, I have a feeling you wouldn’t want to get back with them even if they asked. It sounds like you’re both better off in your current relationships. Six years is a long time to be in a relationship (even on and off) with someone, and late teens to early twenties is such a formative time. It’s normal that part of you is still a little tangled up in that. As long as you can think clearly about what you consciously want, and feel those feelings while also recognizing them as illogical and unhelpful, and work through moving past them, I think you’ll be okay.

Summer: I’m usually not judgy in these answers, but your ex sounds kinda… inconsistent in their behaviors. Not willing to discuss moving in years into a relationship? Maintaining a (possibly inappropriate) connection with a recent long-term ex with no obvious sign that the new partner knows? Fast cohabitation with a new partner even though the previous relationship ended over cohabitation? Their decision-making seems all over the place. Which is about on par for someone in their early-mid twenties.

This well of jealousy in you is pretty sane and understandable because you’re seeing your unresolved feelings (the breakup, cohabitation prospects) reflected in their current life. If the relationship ended with more closure, this wouldn’t be nearly as disturbing to you. Valerie has covered that point in greater detail so all I’ll say is that this is a normal and okay feeling. You might be ‘over’ the relationship with your ex, but you’re probably not ‘over’ some of the non-affectionate feelings left behind. That’s uh… what we call ‘baggage’, unfortunately.

In your position, I’d try to keep loving your new partner and unpick the past slowly. Ending a long-term relationship is very hard. It’s harder if there are unresolved feelings left over. Time and introspection will make it much easier, so keep taking forward steps.

Nico: Relationships we start when we’re young can run their course after a few years because we mature and change so rapidly during those years and can grow apart. It seems like you all probably have some really nice memories, even if you no longer seem to be a good fit for each other, and that is something you might be able to hold more easily as you heal and the post-relationship angst loses its bite. However, I do think it’s really understandable to feel both a bit taken advantage of or bamboozled because of the Spotify thing and also annoyed that your ex decided to move in with someone else so quickly after refusing to move in with you after years. Your sense of justice and fairness is probably bothering you, but the problem is, peoples’ emotions and choices often do not play out in logical ways. Do you have a friend you can vent to? A bit of venting and validation might go a long way. I don’t think you need to feel guilty for having some resentment from a past relationship that ended without good closure. That’s pretty normal. A good strategy for combatting these feelings might be to try and distract yourself. Coming up with some imaginative dates to go on with your current partner, getting into a new hobby or reviving one you’ve been meaning to get back to, doing literally anything to make your life richer and more fulfilling is going to help you with your jealousy because it’ll give you satisfying things in your life to concentrate on.