Grieving a person you never met is a quiet type of mourning. It resides in unspoken sorrows, where you feel you don’t deserve to feel pain because of the lack of connection.
You mourn the relationships that never had the chance to bloom- the grandparent who passed before you were born, the sibling who didn’t make it into this world, the parent you only knew through faded photographs and retold family stories.
You imagine the cliché moments you never had the opportunity to experience: sitting on your grandad’s lap as he flicks through the photo album of him in his heyday, playing darts down the pub with his mates. Envisioning the warm embrace of your mother after a bad day, a moment of comfort you long for in times of need. Picturing an extra sibling on the sofa at Christmas- a ghost of what could have been. Their absence lingers in subtlety like a missing stocking hanging by the fireplace, a name unwritten on the family tree, a birthday left uncelebrated or a lullaby unsung.
You’re not “too sensitive”. You are human.
This type of grief lives in the quiet corners of our lives; it feels like something was stolen: a relationship, a role model, a source of love you never got to feel. It creeps into our minds with erratic thoughts. You question:
- Would they be proud of who I’ve become?
- Would I be a different person with their presence in my life?
- How different would my relatives be if this person were still alive?
These are all normal, and you shouldn’t feel ashamed for feeling this way for someone you’ve never met.
Grief can manifest in the everyday, carried down by those before you.
Sometimes, grief surfaces in the stories others tell. All you can cling to are the whispers of time passed, like your widowed grandmother reminiscing about the love of her life with a weary eye as she glances down at the photo frame encasing her wedding day, frozen in time.
Grief like this can become generational. Children can inherit the unhealed weight of heartache they never experienced firsthand; it can:
- Shape how your parents raise you: through overprotection, emotional avoidance, or an unuttered expectation to fill a void.
- Pave the emotional climate of a home: impacting whether feelings are expressed openly or pushed down in silence.
- Teach you how to grieve (or avoid it) by example.
Why this kind of grief deserves to be spoken about.
It might be perplexing and isolating to grieve for someone you’ve never met. Without recollections to hold on to, people may minimise your suffering, or you may minimise it yourself. Although the fact is that it’s acceptable to mourn a connection that was never allowed to develop. Your pain is not “less than” because there are no pictures or memories to share. Even so, it’s grief, and it counts. We tell ourselves that these hidden losses don’t matter when we don’t discuss them. However, they do. Voicing these feelings facilitates healing and makes others feel heard and understood. You don’t need to justify your desire to be permitted to feel your pain or provide an explanation for it.