The Grief No One Prepares Women For

There is a photograph on the wall in my hallway of a woman I no longer recognize. She is thirty-two years old. She is standing at a kitchen counter, laughing at something my husband said just before the shutter clicked, and her whole face is open in a way that my face has not opened in years. I do not know when the openness went away. I only know that I stopped being that woman at some point, without noticing that I was stopping, and now she is behind glass in my hallway, and I walk past her every day, and every time I do I feel something that has taken me most of a decade to identify. What I feel is grief. Not sadness, exactly. Not longing, exactly. Grief. The particular grief of missing someone I still am, technically, but who is no longer available to me. 

This is one of the griefs women are not prepared for. There are others. 

When we talk about grief in this country, we mostly mean the grief that arrives with a funeral. Someone dies, and the culture has scripts for what to do. You bring casseroles. You wear black. You attend the service. You send flowers. You give the family a wide berth for a period of time and then a narrower one, and eventually you resume treating them as if the loss has been absorbed. The scripts are imperfect but they exist. Everyone knows their part. 

There are no scripts for the losses I want to write about. There are no casseroles for the woman you used to be. There is no service for the friendship that thinned. There is no funeral for the ambition you laid down or the life you did not choose. The losses arrive without ceremony, and they are held without company, and most women carry them alone for years because the culture does not yet have language for what they are carrying. 

I want to name a few of these losses because the naming, I have come to believe, is the beginning of the holding. If you can call a grief by its name, you have a chance of eventually setting some of it down. If you cannot, the grief lives in your body, unaddressed and undischarged, and it accumulates the way debt accumulates when it is not paid. 

The Woman You Used to Be 

This is the first grief and, in my experience, the most persistent. It arrives sometime in the middle of life, often without warning. You look at a photograph, or you catch a glimpse of yourself in a store window, or a friend describes something you did years ago and you cannot quite recall having done it, and something in you registers that the woman you used to be is not the woman you are anymore. This is normal, of course. Everyone changes. Change is what life produces. But the change that women in particular experience often includes a significant contraction. The woman you were before you took the job, before you married, before you had children, before you started managing everyone else's needs, was often larger, freer, and more herself than the woman who emerged from all the accommodation. 

You did not intend to lose her. You made choices along the way that seemed reasonable at the time. Each individual choice was defensible. The cumulative effect of the choices was that you stopped being someone you had been, and the culture around you often celebrated the transformation without noticing what was being subtracted. You became a mother, which was celebrated. You became successful in your work, which was celebrated. You became reliable, capable, admirable, which were all celebrated. What was not noticed was the woman who had once been unreliable in the delightful ways of youth, who had made bad decisions with confidence, who had believed things she now finds embarrassing, who had been unformed and inefficient and alive in ways that maturity does not typically allow. 

The grief for this woman is often invisible even to the woman experiencing it. It shows up in vague dissatisfaction, in dreams that do not match the current life, in occasional inexplicable tears while doing something ordinary. It shows up when your daughter, or your niece, or a woman you meet at a party turns out to have some quality that the younger version of you also had, and you feel a strange combination of tenderness and envy that you do not know what to do with. The tenderness is for her, and the envy is for the version of you that recognized itself in her before that version of you disappeared. 

The grief is real. It deserves to be held. Not indulged, exactly. Not wallowed in. But acknowledged as one of the losses that midlife brings, so that the loss does not distort other parts of your life through the pressure of remaining unnamed. 

The Friendship That Ended Without Ending 

The second grief is the friendship that thinned rather than broke. I have written about this before in this publication and I will continue to write about it, because it is one of the most common losses women experience in their thirties and forties and one of the least publicly acknowledged. A friendship that has been central to your life for years becomes gradually less central. You do not stop speaking. You do not fight. You just see each other less. Then you see each other rarely. Then you see each other only at events where both of you happen to be present. Then you do not see each other at all, and one of you eventually realizes that the friendship is over, though it has never been declared over, though you have not had a conversation about it, though both of you continue to like each other in the general way that we like people whose lives once crossed ours. 

The end of a friendship of this kind is a specific loss with almost no cultural infrastructure to hold it. You cannot mourn her because she is not dead. You cannot process the ending because there was no ending, formally speaking. You cannot even fully acknowledge to yourself what has been lost, because the loss did not happen at any particular moment. It happened across years, in ways too small to notice while they were happening. 

And yet. She held things for you that no one else can now hold. She knew stories about you that no one else knows. She was the witness to the version of you that existed before your marriage, or before your children, or before whatever chapter has since defined you, and with her disappearance the witness has disappeared, and you find yourself carrying alone what she used to hold with you. 

This grief also has to be named. It has to be allowed. You do not have to explain to anyone why you sometimes think of her and feel something that resembles missing. You do not have to justify the fact that you have not fully reconciled the ending, because the ending itself was so ambiguous that reconciliation was never quite available to you. The grief for the ambiguous ending is legitimate. It deserves to be treated as such. 

The Version of Life You Did Not Choose 

Every woman I know at midlife carries some version of this. The city you did not move to. The relationship you did not stay in. The career you did not pursue. The child you did not have or the child you did not adopt. The graduate program you were accepted to but declined. The book you did not write. The version of your life that you can still feel, faintly, as a shadow of what is, and that occasionally rises up to remind you that it existed as a possibility even though you did not choose it. 

The grief for the unchosen life is not, in most cases, a wish to have chosen differently. Most women I know who navigate this well have made peace with their actual choices. They know why they made the choices they made. They can articulate what they gained. What they cannot fully articulate is what they lost, because the loss is the loss of a life that was never lived, and there is no way to inventory something that never was. 

The unchosen life haunts in small ways. You are on a trip and pass a woman about your age who might have been you if you had made a different choice at twenty-eight, and something in you contracts. You read a novel about a woman who did what you did not do, and you have to put the book down for a while. You dream, occasionally, that you are living the other life, and you wake with a specific and disorienting sadness that takes hours to lift. 

The grief for the unchosen life needs to be allowed to exist without threatening the actual life you are living. Both can be true. You can be grateful for what you chose and grieved for what you did not choose. The grief does not disqualify the gratitude. The gratitude does not erase the grief. Adult life often requires holding both, and the holding is a skill worth developing rather than resisting. 

The Parent Who Is Still Alive 

This one is difficult to name because so many women are living inside it and the naming can feel like a betrayal. You have a parent who is still alive but who has become someone else. The mother whose short-term memory has begun to disappear. The father whose personality has softened or hardened in ways that make him no longer recognizable. The parent whose illness has produced a version of them that does not match the version who raised you. You are still visiting. You are still calling. You are still, in some technical sense, in a relationship with this person. And yet you are also, in a deeper sense, grieving them, because the person they have become is not the person you have been in relationship with for most of your life, and the person you have been in relationship with has, in some meaningful way, already left. 

This is called ambiguous loss, in the clinical literature. The term is useful. It captures the specific difficulty of grieving someone who is still present. You cannot fully mourn because they are here. You cannot fully be with them because they are not really here anymore. You are caught in a state that grief scripts do not accommodate, and the state can go on for years. 

Women often bear the primary weight of this loss. They are more likely to be the daughters visiting the parent. They are more likely to be the ones managing the practical logistics of the parent's decline. They are more likely to be doing this in addition to their own careers and their own families. The grief they carry is enormous, and it is often invisible to the people around them, because the parent is still alive and the death has not yet occurred and the cultural markers of grief have not been triggered. 

I have watched women in my life go through this. What I have seen is that the grief needs to be named to be borne. The daughter who allows herself to say, out loud, that she is grieving her mother even though her mother is still alive is doing something important. She is refusing to let the ambiguity of the loss silence her about the reality of it. She is claiming her own experience as legitimate. The claiming does not fix the situation. It does help her carry it. 

The Ambition You Set Down 

The last grief I want to name is the one that arrives when you realize you are no longer going to become who you thought you were going to become. The career that was going to be different from the career you now have. The book that is not going to be written. The company you are not going to found. The change you are not going to make in the world. There comes a point in most women's lives when the arithmetic of remaining time becomes clear enough that certain futures become foreclosed, and the foreclosure is its own form of grief. 

The grief for foreclosed possibility is often held privately, sometimes with shame. Women who set down major ambitions are often told, by well-meaning others, that they had made the right choice for their families or their circumstances. The framing is not always wrong. It is often incomplete. The setting down was a real loss regardless of whether the alternative was possible. The person you might have become is a person you are no longer going to know, and the not-knowing is a loss that deserves to be acknowledged rather than papered over with reassurance about the life you did build. 

You are allowed to grieve who you did not become while continuing to love who you did become. Both are yours. 

How to Hold What Has No Ritual 

If the culture does not yet have rituals for these griefs, women can build small rituals for themselves. Write letters to the women you used to be, even if you never send them. Name your losses out loud to one other woman who will not try to argue you out of them. Mark the anniversaries of endings that had no formal end date. Create small ceremonies for the ambitions you have set down, so that the setting down is not performed silently and alone. 

The rituals will feel strange because they have no cultural precedent. Do them anyway. The body needs the naming. The grief needs the acknowledgment. What you do not name accumulates in ways that eventually demand attention, and it is better to attend to the accumulated losses on your own terms than to have them surface later in ways you cannot control. 

And find, if you can, one or two other women who understand what you are carrying without requiring you to justify it. The company of women who have known these griefs themselves is one of the most restorative resources available in adult life. They will not fix the losses. They will help you carry them. That is what the culture has been failing to provide, and it is what women, when they find each other, are able to offer. 

You are not making these losses up. They are real. They deserve to be held with the same care you would give a more publicly recognized loss. And the woman you are, even carrying all of this, is still here, still becoming, still worth being. 

That is what I would have wanted someone to tell me before the photograph in my hallway started to feel like a photograph of a stranger. I am telling it to you now.