The Grief We Don’t Talk About — Introduction
In 2018, I sat beside my grandmother as she died. I was right there. I watched it happen, held the space for it, and then did what you do afterward. I grieved. I knew how to do that, or at least I thought I did. There was a before and an after. There was language for it.
That same year, I lost my best friend. My cousin, someone who had been my person for my entire life. But she didn’t die. She’s still alive. What happened was complicated and painful and ultimately I had to step away from the relationship to protect my own health. It was the right thing to do. It was also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Here’s what I didn’t know then: I would grieve her. Not in the past tense. Ongoing. To this day. And because she’s alive, because there was no funeral, no ceremony, no socially acceptable mourning period, I didn’t even call it grief for years. I didn’t have the word for it. I just carried it.
• • •
In 2025, I lost both of my dogs. Bennett in May, Kinsey in October. I wasn’t ready for either of them. You never really are, but these felt particularly cruel in their timing, both gone at least a year before I thought they would be. Bennett from bone cancer. Kinsey from heart failure.
The scream-crying with Bennett, the kind I would normally have been embarrassed by, I didn’t care at all. Not one bit. I just let it happen. And then Kinsey cracked me open further. I didn’t know I could hurt that much. And then I had to watch my cat grieve, which was somehow the hardest part of all of it. That one undid me in ways I still can’t fully explain.
Those losses felt obvious. Visible. The kind of grief people understand, acknowledge, send flowers for. What I wasn’t expecting was what came next.
• • •
In the fall, around the same time I lost Kinsey, a handful of public figures I’d grown up watching died. Diane Keaton. Catherine O’Hara. Richard Simmons. Phil Donahue. Each one landed with a small, quiet thud. I felt something. I wasn’t sure what to call it.
And then in February, James Van Der Beek died. And I fell apart.
I cried all day. For the rest of that week. I did a deep dive through his social media trying to find exactly when I had re-engaged with him on Instagram, because I had loved what he’d been sharing lately: the messages about self-understanding, about God and the Universe. I could tell he was doing real work on himself. I’d tried to get tickets to the Broadway reading of Dawson’s Creek the previous September and been too slow. They sold out in minutes.
I wanted to post something about him and then talked myself out of it. It felt like I was hijacking his death, inserting myself into something that wasn’t mine. And the whole time I kept thinking: why am I this devastated over someone I never met?
A psychologist I follow posted about something called parasocial grief, the grief we feel for people we knew only through a screen, a page, a stage. And something clicked into place for me. Not just about James, but about all of it. About the shape of what I’d been carrying for years without naming it.
• • •
I started making a list. Not the obvious losses. The other ones.
The cousin I’d had to let go of to protect my own health, who I still miss and probably always will. Friends that no longer fit. Jobs that disappeared in the last two years. The body I used to live in. The version of myself I thought I’d become by now. Time periods that feel gone in a way that nostalgia doesn’t quite cover.
They’ve all felt different but also somehow the same. The loss of my dogs was sharp, deep, cutting, the kind that doubles you over. Grieving a person who is still alive but gone from your life feels almost invisible sometimes, and sometimes it feels like anger, and sometimes it feels like guilt, and occasionally all three in the same afternoon. The times that are past feel like longing more than memory. Not quite nostalgia. Something heavier.
I’ve been grieving all along. I just didn’t have the right words for most of it.
• • •
This series exists because I’m still mapping the landscape. There are things I haven’t fully uncovered yet, and writing has always been how I do that kind of work. But I also thought: if I’m feeling all of these things, you probably are too. And maybe naming them, or sharing what I’ve been through, makes it a little easier to carry.
Over the next several weeks I’ll be writing about different forms of grief: the kind we feel ashamed of, the kind for people who are still alive, the kind that compounds quietly over years, the grief for entire eras and for versions of ourselves that no longer exist. Each week I’ll share my own experience and offer some tools or practices for working with these feelings on your own.
Grief isn’t just death. I’m only beginning to understand how many forms it takes.
I’m glad you’re here for this one.
With you in all of it,
Kristin