What do we do with unfinished grief?

Not all grief is straightforward.
Sometimes, we lose someone we didn’t feel close to—or maybe didn’t feel safe with.
And yet we grieve.
Or we don’t… and then feel guilty for that, too.

This is what’s often called complicated grief.
It shows up when our relationship with the person who died was… well, complicated.

Maybe it was a parent who was absent or abusive.
Maybe it was a sibling you never fully reconciled with.
Maybe it was a friend you drifted from, but never stopped loving.

The world doesn’t always make space for grief like this.
You might hear, “Well, at least you weren’t close”
Or, “Why does this hit you so hard now?”

But grief isn’t always about who they were to us at the end.
It’s about what never was.
What could have been.
What we wished for.
What we never got to say.

And that can be some of the heaviest grief there is.

If this resonates with you, I want to offer a few gentle prompts to sit with—maybe in a journal, maybe in your heart:

• What am I grieving: the person, the relationship, or the possibility that was never fulfilled?

• What parts of my story with them still feel unresolved or tangled?

• If I could say anything to them now, what would I want them to know?

• How can I offer myself the compassion or closure I never received from them?

Complicated grief doesn’t mean your grief is invalid.
It means you’re human.
It means you’re carrying the weight of both love and pain—and that takes courage.

If you’re in this space right now, I just want to say: I see you.
You're not alone in the messiness of it.
And you're allowed to feel however you feel.

Take what you need. Leave what you don’t.
And as always—go gently.

With you in the journey,
Cody