Grieving Someone I Couldn't Reach: A Stroke and Ambiguous Loss
My father had a stroke that left him there but not there. This is a different kind of grief — one that has no clear ending.
My father had the stroke three years ago. He survived it. He is alive, in a care facility four hundred miles from where I live, and when I visit he sometimes knows me and sometimes doesn't. The man who existed before the stroke is no longer accessible.
This kind of grief has a name: ambiguous loss. You can't fully mourn someone who is still alive. There is no funeral, no ritual, no moment at which the community gathers and says: this person is gone.
I was at a 2.5-gram session on a quiet Saturday evening when the grief finally moved through me. I had not been thinking about my father. But the session found what I had been carrying.
I cried for a long time. Not dramatically — just the steady, quiet crying of something that needed to come out and hadn't had permission. What came with the tears was a kind of acknowledgment: yes, this is real. Yes, it is a loss. Yes, it is allowed to be a loss even though he is alive.
When I came back to ordinary consciousness I felt something I can only call relief. I had stopped arguing with reality. I had set down, for a few hours at least, the impossibly heavy work of pretending that I was fine.
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