Some of what we mourn never happened, and it deserves mourning anyway.
For a while now, I have been circling a particular gap in how we understand grief: what it means to lose a future that never happened, to mourn a life that was planned and invested in but never arrived. I’ve noticed it for years in the therapy room and have spent the past year working on it properly. I’m not ready to say more than that yet. But when you invest in a piece of work like this, it stops staying where you put it; it sits in your periphery, and it interrupts. Tonight, on a windy walk through an empty park with my dog, it interrupted again and showed me a facet I hadn’t seen before.
We spend so much of our lives entangled in the pursuit of the best version of ourselves, and we know something about what happens when that version becomes unreachable. That part is everyday; it needs no expanding here. What struck me was something adjacent: we don’t only carry these dreams and investments for ourselves. We carry them for other people. And we lose them for other people too.
We invest in other people’s futures
Think of how much of our love for other people is actually love for their future. A parent doesn’t only love the child in front of them; they love the adult that child is becoming, the life gathering shape just out of view. We do it with partners, with friends, with siblings, we hold, mostly without noticing, a quiet portfolio of other people’s tomorrows. Their dreams become things we are invested in. Not metaphorically. We plan around them. We reorganise our own futures to make room for theirs.
And if we are lucky, we even get to celebrate some of the steps climbed on the way to their desired destination. We frame the graduation photograph of someone else’s degree. We cry at weddings that are not ours. We keep a bottle of something good for the day a friend’s business survives its first year, motivate them to start driving lessons, ask after the flat deposit, the scan, the callback after the audition. Nobody teaches us to do this; it isn’t politeness. We have simply, somewhere along the way, taken out a share in the life they are building, and their milestones pay out to us as if the dream were partly our own.
Because it is. That is the uncomfortable arithmetic underneath all the champagne: to celebrate someone’s progress toward a future is to admit you were counting on that future too.
Which is why grief so rarely stays in the past tense.
The second loss at every funeral
Listen carefully at a funeral. The official business of mourning is the life that was lived, the stories, the photographs, the character. But underneath the eulogies runs a second current of loss, and it speaks in a different grammar. She never got to see her grandchildren grow up. He was two years from retiring; they had the maps out already. She’d just been accepted onto the course. The sharpest pain in the room is so often not for what happened, but for what now never will. We are mourning a person, yes, and we are also mourning their unlived life, the version of them that was still arriving.
And here is the part that took a windy park and an oblivious dog for me to see: that second loss is ours too. The unlived life we grieve was partly our own. The grandmother’s unmet grandchildren were also somebody’s dream of watching her hold them. The retirement trip was half-planned by the person left behind. When someone dies, they take with them not only their own tomorrows but a corner of everyone else’s. And for that loss, the loss of a future that existed only as a shared act of imagining, there is no ritual at all. The funeral buries the life that happened. Nothing buries the one that didn’t.
Secondary loss: grieving what could have been
Perhaps that is why some griefs refuse to close on schedule. The mourner is told, gently and repeatedly, that they are grieving a person, and they are. But they are also grieving something no one has named for them: a future they helped imagine, part-owned, and quietly built their own life around, or perhaps just assumed would happen, because it is the natural order of life. The condolence cards address the first loss. The second one gets no cards at all. It doesn’t even get a word.
The grief literature comes close. It speaks of secondary losses, the losses that follow the loss: the roles, the routines, the plans and milestones that vanish with the person. It is a useful term, and I use it with clients. But it files the unlived future under the aftermath of the death, one ripple among many, when for some mourners it is not a ripple at all. It is the wave.
It surfaces in strange, specific places instead. The wedding fund that no longer has a wedding. The spare room that was going to be the grandchild’s. The half of the map still marked in someone else’s handwriting. These are not memories, that’s the thing. Memories are of what happened. These are relics of what didn’t, and we have no shelf for those.
Why grief returns on birthdays and anniversaries
And it behaves differently in time, this second grief. The absence of a person, however brutal, is in the end a fixed fact, and we are built, as humans, to survive fixed facts. Some of us make that passage with more ease than others, but the capacity itself is not a virtue or an achievement; it is instinct. We are designed to survive loss. And around that instinct, every culture that has ever existed has built structure to help it along: the wake, the funeral, the shiva, the forty days, the year of mourning, the anniversary mass, the grave we can visit and tend. These rituals are among the oldest technologies we have, and they are not for the dead, they are for us. They give grief a container, a timetable, a community of witnesses; they walk the mourner, stage by stage, back toward life. None of this diminishes the loss. The pain of losing someone is real, and immense, and deserves every one of those rituals. But they work, slowly, imperfectly, they work. The empty chair becomes a treasure, and brings a smile to our faces, now and then. The silence in the house softens into something like their presence. This is not betrayal; it is the machinery working, held up by everyone who ever grieved before us.
But the unlived future never becomes anything, because it never was anything, and so the machinery has nothing to work on. It cannot be worn smooth. It waits instead, in the calendar. The birthday they would have turned sixty. The graduation they would have sat in the front row for. The June that would have been the wedding. Each of these arrives new, on schedule, for years, and each time, the pain is strangely undulled, as if the loss had only just happened. Because in a sense it has: this particular piece of the future has only just failed to occur. You do not get used to it, for the simplest of reasons, there is always more future, and it keeps not arriving.
Naming the loss no one names
I don’t have a tidy ending for this, and I suspect that is fitting, this is a loss that resists tidiness precisely because it was never acknowledged as a loss in the first place. But I have started listening differently at funerals, and to my clients, and to myself. Underneath “I miss them” there is so often a second sentence, waiting to be allowed: I miss who they were going to be. And I miss who I was going to be beside them.
One borrowed term aside, there is no theory to cite here, no evidence to marshal. I have written this without academic references, which is unusual for me, but what I am describing does not need endorsement. It needs acknowledgement. You have stood in that room. You have heard the second sentence underneath “I miss them.” You already know this is true, and you knew it before I named it. That is the only validation this kind of loss has ever been offered, and for now, it will have to be enough.
And if this is a loss you are carrying, it is also the work I do. You can read about working with me here.
Some of what we mourn never happened. It deserves mourning anyway.
Rebeca Paiva is a BACP-accredited therapist and doctoral researcher writing about identity, self-transformation, and the psychology of the futures we build. She practises online at Serenity Sessions. If you would like to be notified of her articles, please subscribe to https://substack.com/@rebecapaiva1