The Grief We Don’t Talk About — Week 2
My memories from that time in college are faded now, the way memories from your early twenties sometimes are, like photographs left in the sun too long. I remember being in my dorm room. I remember the phone call. I remember the shock of it, that particular stillness that descends when something impossible turns out to be true.
A close friend from college lost his girlfriend. She was 21. She died in her sleep, lying right next to him. I had known her, not well, but enough. We had a class together, spent time together through mutual friends. I remember her face clearly even now. Her smile. The way she lit up a room without seeming to try.
I grieved her. Of course I did. She was too young and too bright and her absence made no sense.
But the grief that actually consumed me was the grief I felt for him.
• • •
Watching someone you care about be completely devastated by a loss you have no access to is its own particular kind of helplessness. I felt so deeply for him and I had absolutely nowhere to put it. I couldn't take his pain. I couldn't absorb it. I couldn't fix any part of what had happened to him.
I think I was afraid that if I showed him how much I felt, he would have to take care of my emotions on top of everything else he was already carrying. So I held back. I remember the funeral, sitting with everyone, going to the restaurant afterward where her family shared their favorite memories of her. He was so entwined with them, so held by the people who needed him and who he needed. I could see clearly that there was nothing I could offer that those people weren't already giving him.
And that made me feel terrible. Not in a self-pitying way. In a suffocating, I don't know what to do with any of this, way.
I think all those big feelings I had nowhere to put created distance between us. We saw each other the remaining two years I was in school but less and less. I carried something from that time that I never fully named or processed. A grief that wasn't quite mine, that had no clear home, that just quietly took up space.
• • •
Last week I wrote about how James Van Der Beek's death was the thing that cracked this whole series open for me. How I cried for a week and couldn't fully explain why. I was embarrassed by how much it affected me.
Writing this blog, I remembered my college friend. And something clicked into place.
My grief for James wasn't really for James, the person I had never met. It was for his wife. For his kids, who needed their father to stay. It was for an entire generation of people who grew up alongside Dawson's Creek and felt something close when he died, even if they couldn't name it. It was for my younger self, the girl who watched that show and felt seen by it for the first time.
Me, right now in 2026, is okay. James Van Der Beek passed away and the world kept turning. But I couldn't deny the weight of grief I felt for everyone who needed him to still be here. That grief was real. It was just never mine to begin with.
Grief by proxy still counts as grief. It just doesn't know where to land.
• • •
Last decade, a new coworker quickly became one of my closest friends. After a few months of working together I noticed she never mentioned dating, never talked about anyone in her life in that way. One day she was showing me pictures on her phone and I asked about someone in a photo. The way she paused before answering told me everything before she said a word.
Her boyfriend had passed away in his sleep while she was in college. She was in Massachusetts. He was in Tennessee. Hundreds of miles apart and she still woke up one day to find that someone she loved was simply gone. The parallel to what I had witnessed years earlier was so striking it nearly took my breath away. Different details, same impossible shape.
This time, I knew how to show up. I didn't hold back. I didn't worry about burdening her with my feelings or taking up space she needed for her own. I just stayed. I listened. I let her know that what she had carried deserved to be witnessed.
I didn't realize until I sat down to write this blog that I think I needed that moment as much as she did. That somewhere in me, the 20-year-old who didn't know how to be there for her college friend finally got to try again. Almost fifteen years later, but still.
Grief has a long memory. And sometimes it waits patiently for us to catch up to it.
• • •
This is the type of grief I want to talk about this week: the grief we feel not for ourselves, but for someone else. For the person left behind. For an entire generation. For anyone who needed someone to stay and didn't get to keep them.
It doesn't feel smaller than the grief that belongs directly to us. If anything it can feel denser, and I think I finally understand why. The person you would naturally turn to with your grief, the one you would call, the one you would sit with, is the one at the center of the loss. They are already carrying the heaviest version of this. So you don't bring it to them. You hold it instead. You protect them from your feelings about their pain, which means your grief has nowhere to go at all.
That's the particular edge of vicarious grief. It isn't just that it has no home. It's that the door you would normally walk through is the one door you feel you can't knock on.
But it is real. And it is worth naming.
Later this week I'll be in the prompts with you, helping you map the grief you might be carrying on behalf of someone else. For now I just want you to sit with the question.
Is there a grief in your life that was never quite yours, but you've been carrying it anyway?
With you in all of it,
Kristin