Part Two: Grief Without Closure — Understanding Ambiguous Grief

Written by Sarah Benitez-Zandi LCSW

There’s a kind of grief most people don’t recognize as grief at all.

It doesn’t come with funerals or condolences. There are no rituals for it, no clear beginning or end. No one checks in months later to see how you’re doing. And if you try to talk about it openly, people often grow uncomfortable or gently redirect the conversation toward forgiveness, reconciliation, or “seeing both sides.”

This is the grief of realizing the family you needed may never exist.

It’s also the grief that comes when contact ends, whether that was your choice or not.

Some people choose no-contact because continuing the relationship requires them to keep absorbing harm. Others never fully make that decision themselves. Contact is cut because they stop participating in dysfunction. Because they name behavior others want buried. Because they set boundaries that disrupt long-standing roles. Because they refuse to continue carrying responsibility for everyone else’s comfort.

In both cases, the loss is real.

And in both cases, the people being grieved are often still alive.

You may still think about them every day. You may still see reminders of them in ordinary moments. You may still replay conversations that never happened or imagine apologies that never came. Sometimes the silence is mutual. Sometimes it arrives suddenly. Sometimes distance grows slowly until one day you realize the relationship you once had no longer exists.

Psychologist Pauline Boss described this experience as ambiguous loss, often understood as ambiguous grief.

It’s grief without closure.

Someone is physically present but emotionally unavailable. Or emotionally significant but physically absent. The relationship exists in memory and longing, but not in reality. There is no shared acknowledgment of loss and often no social permission to mourn it.

Ambiguous grief asks people to carry contradictions at the same time. You can miss someone and feel safer without them. You can love someone deeply and recognize they are not safe for you. You can wish things were different while also understanding they probably never will be.

But the grief doesn’t stop at the relationship itself.

Many people discover they are grieving parts of themselves too.

Family systems assign roles long before children understand they have choices. Some become the peacekeeper. Some become the caretaker. Some become invisible. Some achieve constantly because success feels like safety. Others learn to absorb emotions that were never theirs to carry.

When contact ends, whether chosen or imposed, those roles disappear almost overnight.

And even when those roles were exhausting or harmful, they were familiar.

There is grief in losing the version of yourself that knew how to survive inside that system. Grief in realizing that the identity you built around keeping others comfortable no longer has a place to exist. Grief in letting go of the hope that someday, if you just explained things the right way or waited long enough, someone would finally understand.

That fantasy of repair is often one of the deepest losses.

The human brain wants resolution. It wants narrative completion. It wants the apology, the moment of accountability, the conversation where everything finally makes sense.

Ambiguous grief rarely offers that.

Instead, it lingers. It resurfaces unexpectedly. It lives alongside daily life rather than passing cleanly through it.

This is often where guilt begins to take hold.

Guilt for choosing distance. Guilt for not trying harder. Guilt for prioritizing your mental health over family harmony. Guilt for wondering whether you misunderstood something. Guilt for feeling relief when contact stops.

And very quickly, guilt is joined by shame.

Guilt asks whether you did something wrong.

Shame asks whether something is wrong with you.

Shame grows easily in systems where honesty disrupted stability. When boundaries lead to withdrawal or rejection, the nervous system often interprets that loss as proof of personal failure rather than evidence of a system unwilling to change.

This becomes especially complicated when no-contact wasn’t fully your decision.

Being cut off because you refused dysfunction carries its own particular kind of grief. There is grief in being misunderstood. Grief in being framed as difficult or unforgiving. Grief in realizing that some families would rather lose connection than examine their own behavior.

And there is grief in losing belonging, even when belonging came with conditions.

Sometimes the most confusing part isn’t the sadness.

It’s the relief.

The quiet nervous system. The absence of waiting for the next emotional storm. The realization that you are no longer bracing for conversations that leave you depleted or questioning your reality.

Relief can feel like betrayal.

Many people experience deep shame when safety finally arrives because they were taught that love meant endurance. That loyalty required proximity. That distance meant failure.

But feeling safer does not mean you didn’t love them.

It means your body finally experienced space to breathe.

This grief shows up in unexpected ways. It appears when you witness healthy parent-child relationships and feel something tighten in your chest before you understand why. It deepens when you become a parent yourself and realize, sometimes painfully, how much choice adults actually have. It surfaces when you need support and instinctively know certain people are not safe to call.

People often try to reason themselves out of it. They remind themselves their parents weren’t all bad. They compare their experiences to others who had it worse. They minimize what happened because acknowledging the loss feels too large.

But grief isn’t a competition.

Ambiguous grief is not resolved through forced acceptance or premature forgiveness. It softens when reality is allowed to be what it is. When hope shifts away from changing other people and toward caring for yourself. When healing stops being measured by how much contact you can tolerate and starts being measured by how safe you feel in your own body.

Estrangement, whether chosen or imposed, is rarely impulsive. It is usually the result of years of trying. Years of explaining. Years of hoping that something might change.

Distance does not mean you didn’t love them.

Sometimes it means love alone was not enough to make the relationship safe.

This grief is quiet. It often happens behind closed doors. And because our culture is far more comfortable with reconciliation than boundaries, many people carry it alone.

But ambiguous grief deserves language.

It deserves compassion.

And it deserves permission to exist without apology.

In the next part of this series, we’ll talk about acceptance. Not the kind that asks you to excuse harm or abandon your needs, but the kind that allows you to stop fighting reality. We’ll explore what it means to accept the family you have without approving of what happened, and how acceptance can become the foundation for healing rather than surrender.

Grief without closure is not a failure to move on.

Sometimes it is the beginning of finally moving forward.