The pain of estrangement

There is a type of loss that doesn't have a funeral, which in turn means others don’t quite see our pain….and this particular loss I’m talking about is estrangement.

No one is sending you flowers or texting to see how you are, and there’s no ‘sorry for your loss’ conversation because no one really gets the loss because your person is still here, so how can you be grieving them? They are still getting up and going to work, posting their dinners on social media and living a life, but you aren’t in it, and wow is it painful to see all this. It’s devastating to be cut out of someone’s life.

You keep replaying the last conversation over and over... should I have said more, or less? What did I do wrong? How can I take it back? What was it that I even did, because I’m left feeling confused and frustrated that you won't take my calls. I think that’s one of the hardest parts of it all, that sometimes you don’t even know what you did, and so you are just left with so many unanswered questions and a gaping big whole in your life. How can I apologise when I don’t even know what I’ve done, and actually, why should I? They should be an adult and talk to me about it, and so the gap widens…it’s conflicting and confusing and so very painful. You miss someone who, for whatever their reason, has decided they are better without you in their life, and goodness, that hurts. They made that decision, and it’s unbearable.

Then there's a real strange loneliness of not being able to talk about it properly with anyone, because when you tell people, they just want to fix it. Saying really quite unhelpful things like "have you tried reaching out"? or "maybe just give it time" and "I'm sure they'll come around” and you just smile because you’ve already sent a billion messages, left voicemails and given it time, and the silence is still so very loud. No replies, just nothing but radio silence. People don't know or say so, they minimise it without meaning to, and you end up having to grieve twice, once for the person, and once for the fact that no one quite understands how much it really flipping hurts.

The question that hangs around in that silence is, what does it say about me that someone decided they don’t want me in their life? and that’s hard to think about, isn’t it. That’s really going to knock your confidence, and you start to wonder if you're the problem and think that maybe they are right. If you don't know what you did, you’re going to second-guess everything you do moving forward, am I really a bad person? What do I need to change about myself? You basically end up grieving the person you were when you were their friend/ sibling /parent or child, and now you don’t even know who you are anymore.

Relationships are complex and can be really toxic, harmful and confusing, and someone can have genuinely loved you and yet still not be able to be in your life, and you can grieve someone who is still alive and miss someone who hurt you, and yet be really quite angry at them too. Many estrangements are where two people were both trying to do the best they could with the knowledge they had, and have ended up in a silence that neither of them really wanted, but this is where we are.

We just don't talk about estrangement enough because it can feel like you’ve failed at the relationship, but maybe it’s not really actually about you, and you did all you could with the knowledge that you had at the time.

Your grief over the loss is very real and very valid, though, and that’s ok.