Back to School Blues…

The kids have gone back to school, and many of the parents I know are having a rough time. It shows up as a heaviness on the first day, a tightness in the chest when they see the empty seat at the breakfast table, an ache that says something has ended. Their kid is still alive, healthy, and theirs, which makes the whole thing confusing. What is there to grieve?

Is it the version of that kid who existed all summer, or the version of themselves that got to be the fun parent all summer long? Something nostalgic ends when the first-day-of-school photos get posted on social media, even though outwardly this new beginning is being celebrated.

This is rarely, if ever, called grief, and it is happening to people all around you right now.

Most of what we grieve in a lifetime has nothing to do with a death or break-up. People walk around carrying endings that no one else will acknowledge. Marriages die before the divorce is filed, friendships dissolve through slow drifts, and the version of you who existed before the diagnosis, the move, or the child comes to an end. These are endings that shape your life, and somehow they are expected to happen without pause or recognition.

There is a term for this. Grief researchers call it disenfranchised grief, grief that does not get social recognition because the loss does not fit what we’ve been conditioned to picture when we hear the word "grief." No one brings you a casserole when your youngest starts kindergarten. You don’t get flowers your friend of fifteen years just stops texting back. You are expected to celebrate and be happy when you retire from the career that shaped a large part of your identity, or when your last kid drives off to college and the house goes silent in a way it has never been silent before. The loss and grief are real but for some reason, world has yet to create a container for it.

Here is a short list of some of the unseen griefs I hear about most:

• Empty nesting, when the last kid leaves and you have to reinvent yourself.
• Friendships that fade through years of growing apart.
• Getting married and feeling as though you’ve lost your identity.
• Surviving a diagnosis or accident and the person you were before didn’t.
• Elders who are alive but no longer recognize you.
• Changing careers or even getting promotions.
• Retiring can expose where one may have made their work, their whole life.
• Losing a pet can be treated as smaller than it was, when pets are family.
• Moving to a new state, or country can sound exciting but also comes with grief.

None of these losses get social acknowledgement and often, you can be made to feel as though you’re being unreasonable. Yet every single one of them changes a person the way loss changes a person, reshaping how you move through your days, what you have capacity for, and who you understand yourself to be.

This is grief the world has no language for. It lives underneath your skin while everyone around you asks why you are so tired, showing up in the doom-scroll through your phone at midnight, the tears after a completely normal day. 

Death-work has shown me that the grief we ignore accumulates. It stacks up in the body and nervous system the same way any unprocessed grief does. I think of grief like a stone. In the beginning, when you carry it in your pocket, it’s heavy and oddly shaped. You feel every edge of it as it changes your gait and rhythm as you move through the day. Over time, you build the tolerance and strength to carry it. It’s always with you and you can reach into your pocket, pull it out, and admire what it taught you, then put it back. What you can’t do is pretend it’s not there. Grief you ignore doesn’t disappear, it just gets heavier and less visible, right up until the moment a nameable grief arrives. Then every unnamed grief bubbles up to the surface. Suddenly the weight of everything you have been carrying bears down on you all at once.

Part of what makes disenfranchised grief so heavy is that it asks you to do the work of grieving while also convincing yourself that you are allowed to grieve. You compare your loss to bigger losses and tell yourself other people have it worse. You minimize what happened because it does not look like socially a acceptable grievance. That comparison is not protecting you, it’s keeping the grief exactly where it has been, unnamed and unattended.

The way through this work begins with naming the grief. Saying out loud, alone or with someone you trust, that something has ended and you are grieving it. That single sentence, "something ended, and I am grieving it," does more than most people expect. It gives the pain a shape you can finally look at, work with, and set down when you are ready.

Try that this week if you are a parent whose child just walked into a new grade or whose baby is now driving. Try it if you are caring for a parent who is disappearing in front of you one memory at a time. The same invitation is open if you are the person carrying an ending nobody else knew about.

Call it what it is: grief.

The fourth cohort of The Unseen Mourning begins this soon, a six-week group for people integrating grief in community. It was built for exactly this, the losses that do not get a funeral, a card, or a day off work, the ones you have been carrying alone because no one told you that you were allowed to call it grief. If you have been carrying something the world has no language for, this is what it was built for.

What ending are you carrying right now that nobody else knows about?

Until the end,

Kema