The Hardest Kind of Grief is When Loss Has No Funeral
- Aug 12
- 11 min read
Ava Marie Somers, MACP, CCC, is a Canadian Clinical Counsellor and founder of Inner Harmony CMH. She writes about the experiences people struggle to name — where trauma, identity, relationships, and the nervous system quietly shape how we live, love, and lead.
Some losses have no funeral. No one gathers. No flowers arrive. No ceremony marks the moment something ended. Yet, something has been lost. A dream you carried for years becomes impossible. Your body changes in ways that alter how you recognize yourself. A child leaves a school, a home, or a place where they belonged.
You look back at a younger version of yourself and realize there are things about that person, and that season of your life, you cannot get back.
Someone you love is still alive, perhaps even still present in your life, but no longer emotionally accessible in the way they once were.
This is grief too. But it isn't only the outside world that can fail to recognize it. Often, we don't recognize it either.
Grief like this doesn't always announce itself. Many people may not recognize what they're carrying as grief at all. They keep going. They keep doing life. Somewhere underneath the exhaustion, or the flatness, or the sadness that doesn't quite make sense, a loss is sitting there, unclaimed, because neither the world around them nor the person carrying it has yet named what was lost.
What a funeral gives us
A funeral does more than mark a death. It makes loss visible. It interrupts ordinary life and says, plainly, something happened here. It gathers witnesses. It gives us a way to name what has happened. It creates permission for emotion to be expressed rather than hidden, and it gives grief somewhere to go, through tears, stories, prayer, music, silence, touch, ritual, remembrance.
Of course, not every culture marks loss the same way, and not every goodbye looks like what we might formally call a funeral. Some communities gather for funerals. Others mark loss through wakes, vigils, periods of mourning, prayer, song, storytelling, shared meals, or other rituals. The form changes. What interests me is the human function underneath it, a pause in ordinary life, a shared recognition that something has changed, a place for grief to be witnessed rather than carried entirely alone.
Perhaps we have created these rituals not only because we know someone has died, but because human beings need help knowing what to do when something has been lost.
The grieving person isn't only being witnessed. They're standing in an environment that repeatedly communicates back to them that something has been lost. This mattered. You are grieving.
But what happens when the loss comes without any of these markers? There was no ritual to mark this. No communal pause. No recognized transition. No one necessarily knew to gather. Perhaps I didn't even know that I needed to grieve.
When grief doesn't look like grief
Grief does not always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like anger, or exhaustion, or a heaviness the body carries before the mind has words for it. But sometimes, of course, it does.
Sometimes sadness settles in quietly and stays. You feel heavier. Less interested in things. You withdraw. Getting started becomes harder. What used to take little effort now feels strangely demanding. For some people, that sadness can become so consuming that it begins to resemble depression, affecting motivation, connection, and the ability to move through ordinary life.
Sometimes it looks like anger. You are shorter with people. More easily irritated. Things that ordinarily wouldn't bother you suddenly do.
Sometimes it feels like exhaustion. You are doing what you've always done, but everything seems to require more effort. Your concentration is thinner. Decisions feel heavier. You are functioning, but functioning costs you more.
Sometimes grief is felt in the body before we have words for it. A heaviness in the chest. A throat that tightens unexpectedly. Restlessness. Trouble sleeping. A body that seems to be carrying something the mind has not yet named.
For some people, coping becomes a way of getting distance from what hurts. We stay excessively busy. We withdraw. We scroll. We work. We drink. We eat. We reach for whatever gives us temporary relief. None of these behaviors, on their own, tells us that someone is grieving. But sometimes loss is part of the story underneath them.
A loss without a name does not necessarily stay silent. Grief that goes unrecognized does not disappear. It may still show up in how we feel, how we function, how we relate, and how we cope.
Which is why, sometimes, before asking ourselves how to get over what we're feeling, there is another question worth asking.
"What have I lost?"
When grief doesn't fit the diagnosis
When the loss is a death, psychiatry now has a name for a particular form of grief that remains intense, persistent, and significantly disrupts a person's life: prolonged grief disorder, formally added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) in 2022. But the losses I'm describing here often don't come with a death, or even a clear date when the loss began. There is no comparable diagnosis designed to capture this broad territory of non-death loss. Important psychological frameworks help us understand parts of it, but no single diagnostic frame neatly holds it all. Perhaps that raises a larger question for another conversation, "What do we do with grief when even our formal language has difficulty naming what has been lost?"
Psychology does have language for some of these experiences
One of the most useful comes from psychologist Pauline Boss, who developed the concept of ambiguous loss to describe losses in which someone can be physically absent but psychologically present, or physically present but psychologically absent.
What makes this kind of loss so difficult is the contradiction. Something can be present and absent at the same time.
A marriage may still exist on paper while companionship, intimacy, or emotional partnership has disappeared. Two people may still share a home, raise children, pay bills, attend family gatherings, and be known to everyone around them as a couple, while one of them privately experiences profound loneliness inside the relationship.
This is the bind. What exactly are you supposed to grieve when the thing you've lost is also, in some sense, still there? Do you keep hoping or begin grieving? Do you work to restore what was there, or begin accepting what is no longer there? How do you give yourself permission to mourn something the outside world still believes you have?
There may be no clean ending around which to organize the loss. Sometimes hope and grief are happening at the same time. Boss's framework gives us important language for this particular kind of loss. But it also brought something else into focus for me, a different kind of not knowing entirely.
In ambiguous loss, the uncertainty is about the loss itself. Is this person gone or not? Should I hold on or let go? But some losses carry no such confusion. You know what changed, even if you couldn't tell someone exactly when it happened. Your body no longer feels the way it once did. A dream you carried is no longer possible. You look at an earlier version of yourself and recognize something you cannot get back. Nothing about the loss itself is unclear. What's uncertain is whether grief is allowed in the conversation at all.
When silence is protective
Silence around grief isn't always imposed from the outside. Sometimes we participate in it ourselves, and denial can be one way we do that.
I don't mean denial as a character flaw or a refusal to tell ourselves the truth. Sometimes not fully taking in a loss is how we continue getting up, going to work, caring for children, meeting responsibilities, and making it through a period when the full weight of what has changed feels like too much to carry all at once.
There can be protection in that. But what protects us for a season may not protect us forever. Sometimes life eventually removes the structures that helped us keep grief at a distance. Work ends. Retirement arrives. Illness slows us down. A relationship changes again. The children leave home. The busyness stops. Feelings that once stayed somewhere at the edges of our awareness may suddenly have much more room to be felt.
What looks like someone suddenly falling apart may not always be about what happened that week. Sometimes an older loss has finally found enough space to be felt.
Permission, not proof
A death comes with permission built in. When a mother loses her son, or a widow her husband, she does not have to establish that a loss has occurred or that grief belongs in its aftermath. The funeral itself stands as a kind of proof–something happened here. Someone mattered. Grief belongs in this space.
That does not mean death-related grief is always understood or well supported. People may still be told they are grieving for too long, too openly, or not openly enough. But the existence of the loss itself is rarely in question. The grieving person does not usually have to establish their right to grieve in the first place.
The losses this article has been describing rarely arrive with that proof attached. No one necessarily hands you permission. Sometimes you have to begin by granting it to yourself.
Scholarly language exists for part of this. In 1989, psychologist Kenneth Doka introduced the concept of disenfranchised grief, grief that “is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.” His framework has since been applied beyond conventional bereavement to losses that may receive far less public recognition or support.
What strikes me about Doka's framework is the question of legitimacy. When grief cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported, the person carrying it may be left with another burden alongside the loss itself–the question of whether they are permitted to call what they're experiencing grief at all.
Perhaps this is what happens when permission never arrives–we start looking for proof. I remember when I first moved to Canada and heard that some workplaces allowed people time away after the death of a pet. I genuinely couldn't understand it. Taking grief time because your dog had died? At the time, it seemed excessive to me.
Years later, I see something in that practice that I couldn't see then. When an organization makes room for a loss like that, it does more than approve time away. It is recognizing the loss. It is saying, in effect, something important happened to you, and you are allowed to stop.
That kind of recognition matters. It also raises an interesting question about all the losses for which no such category exists. A marriage ends. A career disappears. A diagnosis changes what someone imagined their life or body would be. A future they had counted on becomes impossible. The person may need space to absorb what has happened, but there may be no bereavement policy, no recognized leave, sometimes not even language for explaining why they are struggling.
Permission, then, isn't only something we give ourselves. Sometimes the world around us helps give it too, through what it acknowledges, what it makes room for, and what it allows us to stop for. But when that recognition doesn't come, we may still have to begin with ourselves. What does it actually mean to give yourself permission to grieve?
It doesn't mean assembling a case. You don't have to prove the loss was significant enough, permanent enough, visible enough, or recognized by enough people before you're allowed to feel it. Permission isn't a verdict reached after the evidence is weighed. It's simpler, and harder, than that.
There's something worth noticing in how freely children grieve before they learn what kinds of losses the world considers worthy of grief. A five-year-old can lose a beloved blanket and cry with his whole body. To the adults around him, it may be only a blanket. To him, something that mattered is gone.
Children don't necessarily stop to ask whether the loss is important enough to justify the feeling. That calculation often comes later. Somewhere along the way, many of us learn to measure our emotional responses against what other people consider reasonable. It's only hair. It was only a job. You're still married. You should be grateful. At least nobody died.
I remember something like this from my own life after, of all things, a tooth extraction. It wasn't a front tooth. Nobody looking at me would have known anything was missing. But I remember walking out of the dental office feeling strangely affected by the fact that something that had been part of my body was simply gone. I didn't have language for that feeling at the time. Looking back now, I wonder if what I was experiencing was grief. Apparently, sometimes, yes.
Perhaps permission begins with refusing that comparison. Not every loss carries the same weight. But the meaning of a loss belongs, first, to the person who experienced it.
This isn't only an emotional matter. Loss is experienced by the body too. Research on bereavement has found associations with disrupted sleep, altered immune function, and changes in stress hormones and cardiovascular activity. Grief can affect sleep, concentration, appetite, energy, tension, and our capacity to regulate emotion.
When we are also working hard to suppress, avoid, or conceal what we're feeling, that effort can carry a physiological cost of its own. Research on emotional suppression has found that consciously concealing the outward expression of what we feel, even when we appear calm to someone watching, can be accompanied by increased sympathetic nervous system activation.
Acknowledging grief doesn't guarantee that the body will immediately settle, and expression doesn't make loss disappear. But it can remove one additional demand, having to experience the impact of a loss while simultaneously working not to experience it.
Permission, then, isn't about making yourself grieve. It's about no longer requiring yourself not to. I see the importance of this recognition repeatedly in my own clinical work.
People don't always come to me saying they are grieving. More often, they come because they feel stuck. Something isn't moving. They are exhausted, angry, disconnected, unable to make sense of why a particular part of their life continues to carry so much weight.
Remarkably often, somewhere in the work, grief enters the conversation.
"Sometimes I name it tentatively. I wonder if some of what you're describing is grief."
What has stayed with me is how often people return to that naming later. A session or several sessions afterward, they will say, “Remember when you said this might be grief?” The loss hasn't disappeared. But something about recognizing what they are carrying seems to change their relationship to it. That has made me wonder how often what we experience as being stuck has grief somewhere inside it.
Perhaps this is where attunement matters. Sometimes we need another person to listen closely enough, not to diagnose our grief for us, but to notice the loss inside the story. To witness what mattered. To help us put language around something we may have been carrying without language.
Perhaps this is part of what can make grief without a funeral so hard. Not that these losses are necessarily greater than the losses we gather to mourn, or that one kind of grief can be ranked against another. But when grief has no funeral, it may also have no witnesses. No ritual. No recognized pause. No shared language for what has happened. Sometimes no permission to grieve at all.
The person is left carrying not only the loss, but the work of recognizing that a loss has occurred. Perhaps the hardest grief is not always the grief attached to the greatest loss. Sometimes it is the grief we have been given the least help to recognize.
Sometimes getting unstuck begins there, not with forcing ourselves forward, but with finally recognizing what we have been carrying with us.
Maybe there will never be a funeral for some of the things we lose. No gathering. No flowers. No moment when the world stops and acknowledges that something important has changed. But perhaps we can still offer ourselves some of what a funeral would have given us, acknowledgment. Witness. A moment to stop. A way to say, this mattered.
Something was lost here. Perhaps, sometimes, that is where the grief we have already been carrying is finally given permission to be grief.
Read more from Ava Marie Somers
Ava Marie Somers, Clinical Counsellor & Mental Health Thought Leader
Ava Marie Somers, MACP, CCC, is a Canadian Clinical Counsellor, writer, and founder of Inner Harmony CMH. With more than a decade of experience supporting individuals, couples, and families, her work explores the intersection of trauma, identity, relationships, workplace wellbeing, and the nervous system. Grounded in a humanistic approach, she helps people find language for experiences that have long remained unnamed, believing that clarity is often the beginning of healing. Through both therapy and writing, she invites people to reconnect with self-trust, meaning, and living in greater harmony. Ava is also the creator of The Clarity Thread, a monthly publication exploring psychology, identity, and the human experience.
