Grieving Someone You Did Not Get Along With

Your father died. Or your mother, or the sibling you stopped speaking to, or the person who hurt you and never acknowledged it. At the funeral people said kind things about them and you stood there feeling like a fraud, because what you felt was not simple sorrow. It was relief, and anger, and grief, and guilt about the relief, all at once.

Then afterward everyone moved on and you found yourself more affected than you expected, and unable to explain why to anyone.

This is complicated grief, and it is harder in specific ways than the ordinary kind.

You are grieving more than a person

When someone you loved simply and lost dies, you grieve them. When the relationship was difficult, you grieve several things at once.

The person, in whatever way you did love them, which is often more than you would admit out loud.

The relationship you never had. This is often the biggest part. As long as they were alive there was a theoretical possibility that things could change, that they would apologize, understand, or become the parent or sibling you needed. Their death closes that door permanently, and that loss can hurt more than losing them did.

The version of yourself that kept hoping. A lot of energy went into managing that relationship, and now there is nowhere for it to go.

Expect contradictory feelings, and let them coexist

Relief is extremely common and almost never spoken. If someone was frightening, exhausting, or cruel, part of you may be relieved that it is over. That does not make you monstrous. It makes you a person whose nervous system has been braced for a long time and has just been allowed to stand down.

Anger is common too, and it has nowhere to go now, which is part of what makes it so uncomfortable. You cannot have the conversation. You cannot get the acknowledgment. The anger arrives with no available target.

And underneath both there is often real sorrow, which can be the most surprising part. You can be devastated by the death of someone you could not stand being in a room with. Both are true.

Other people will get it wrong

Expect people to say things that do not fit. He was such a good man. You must be heartbroken. At least you had time together. They mean well and they are describing a different loss than the one you had.

You do not owe anyone an accurate account. You are allowed to say thank you and move on. And you are allowed to find one or two people who know the real history and can hear the whole thing, which is worth a great deal more than a hundred condolences.

You are also allowed not to attend, not to speak, not to write a tribute, and not to perform a grief you do not have.

Do not rush to resolve it

There is pressure, from inside and out, to reach a verdict: that you have forgiven them, or that you never will, that they did their best, or that they were simply cruel. You do not have to land anywhere. Most people's understanding of a difficult parent or sibling keeps moving for years after the death, and it is allowed to be unfinished.

Find somewhere to say the things you never said

The conversation you needed is not available anymore, which does not mean the words have nowhere to go. Write the letter you would have sent, with everything in it, and do not send it anywhere. Say it out loud at the grave, or in the car. Tell a therapist the whole story from the beginning.

People often find this releases more than they expected, because the words had been held for so long.

Watch for grief arriving late

Complicated grief often does not show up on schedule. You may be functional for months and then be knocked over by something small a year later. It can also arrive as something that does not look like grief at all: irritability, exhaustion, trouble sleeping, a stretch of drinking more, or a strange numbness.

If you were the caregiver

Many people in this situation spent the last years caring for someone who had hurt them. That is an enormous, unwitnessed thing to have done, and the grief afterward is usually tangled with exhaustion and resentment. Please be careful with yourself, and please tell someone what it actually cost you.

If you are estranged

If you were not in contact when they died, expect a particular kind of pain: the grief, plus judgment from relatives, plus the question of whether you did the right thing. You almost certainly made the best decision available to you with what you knew. Estrangement is usually the last resort of someone who tried many other things first.

When to get help

Please talk to a therapist if the grief is not moving after several months, if it has brought up memories of being harmed that are hard to manage, if you are drinking or using more, or if you feel stuck in an argument with someone who is no longer there. Complicated loss is one of the things therapy is genuinely good at, because it gives the unfinished conversation somewhere to happen. And if you find yourself hopeless or having thoughts of harming yourself, please reach out today. In the US you can call or text 988 at any time. Your grief is real even though it does not look like anyone else's. It may be the harder kind.