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When those around us don’t acknowledge our grief, or make us feel that we have permission to grieve this sort of loss, that can make you feel lonely and isolated. Another complication of ambiguous grief is that many people don’t recognize it as grief. Or worse, they can start to consume our brains as those old memories begin to fade. These emotions can become even more complicated than the grief that comes after a death when the behaviors and words of the ‘new’ person causes us to question our old memories. Our ‘ ambiguous grief’ feelings may be sadness and yearning, anger and guilt, or a range of other emotions. Though we still have a relationship with the person it has radically changed and we grieve the relationship we used to have. The child-parent relationship becomes confused when a child has to care for a parent. The parent-child relationship no longer feels the same when a parent has to stop protecting, trusting, or helping a child in the same way due to addiction. We may not feel like we have the same relationship with that person – our marriage no longer feels like a marriage when one spouse can no longer remember the other. But this continued love doesn’t change how deeply we miss the person they used to be, the person we lost. These things do not change our love for the person – we still love our mom with dementia, our husband with an opiate addiction, our son with schizophrenia. You son, who was brilliant and driven, is now struggling with delusions and hallucinations.
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You husband, who was always kind and considerate, is now lying and stealing to support an addiction. Your mom, who always loved and supported you, doesn’t recognize you, understand you or says hurtful things. This may sound very abstract, but when it occurs in your life it is very concrete and real. This is sometimes referred to as “ ambiguous grief” or “ambiguous loss”. But regardless of how they look, they do things they would never have done, they say things they would never have said, treat you in ways they never would have treated you, and they are not there for you in ways they previously were. The person you love is still there, sometimes they ‘look’ sick, sometimes they don’t. If you have never lived through loving someone in such a situation, this can be hard to understand. Some of the most common are things like addiction, dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and mental illness. There are a range of reasons this can happen. The person is still physically with us, but psychologically they are gone. In contrast to anticipatory grief, there are times in life when someone we love becomes someone we barely recognize. Check out our article on Anticipatory Grief, which is about the grief that comes when we anticipate that we are going to lose someone. Either way, hopefully you’ll read on.īefore we dive in, if you clicked on this post because you feel like you are grieving someone with a terminal illness who has not yet died, there is another WYG article you should read before you read this article. This is one of those topics where if you have been there, you get it and if you haven’t, you don’t. My guess is that when people read the title of this article they will react with either a, “what are they talking about? How can someone be grieving someone who is still alive and what the heck is ambiguous grief?” or a “holy crap, yes! I have felt exactly that way! Thank goodness WYG is finally covering this topic”.