There’s a particular kind of grief that often goes unnamed.

It’s not the grief of losing someone we love or even the grief that accompanies a devastating diagnosis.

It’s the quieter, more persistent ache of losing the life we imagined we’d have. For those of us who live with chronic illness, trauma histories, or long-term mental health challenges, there is often a significant gap between what we hoped life would be and what it has become. That distance deserves to be grieved.

Too often, when people express sorrow about the lives they might have lived, they are met with dismissiveness. They are told to be more realistic or to stop living in a dream world. But this response misses something essential: grieving the life we couldn’t live isn’t about staying stuck in the past. It’s about honoring what was lost so that we can move forward more freely, with compassion and creativity.

As a pediatric chaplain, I have spent years bearing witness to the pain and resilience of others. But my own journey began with survival. As an adolescent, I lived through severe depression that stemmed from years of instability, both emotional and economic. My mother, who suffered a traumatic brain injury, struggled in ways that made consistent care impossible. We were often homeless or tenuously housed. When I spoke of this pain, therapists responded not with tools for healing but with correction. They told me I had unrealistic expectations of my mother.

They urged me to let go of my anger and to stop wanting something different. But I wasn’t angry. I was grieving. I was trying to make sense of what had been taken from me. It was not just about safety and stability, but also the chance to fully participate in life, in school, and in relationships. My longing wasn’t a symptom of entitlement. It was the early shape of sorrow.

That grief never found its way to language until much later. Instead, it lodged in my body and shadowed my days. Throughout much of my adult life, I’ve lived with the effects of trauma and the exhaustion of persistent depression. I’ve had to spend years of my life not pursuing dreams but simply surviving: waking up, staying alive, and doing it all again the next day. There are moments I wonder what more I could have done, how much farther I might have gone had I not been living inside a body always in recovery.

But this reflection is not a lamentation of regret. It is a ritual of recognition.

Psychologist Robert Neimeyer writes about the importance of meaning reconstruction…how, after trauma or loss, we must reorient our stories and identities. That process begins with grief. Not avoidance. Not reframing. But grieving what was and what will never be. Similarly, Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss helps us name those murky spaces where absence is not clear-cut, when someone is physically present but emotionally gone, or when an imagined future is no longer viable but continues to haunt us.

The loss of potential, of an unlived life, is just such an ambiguous loss. It doesn’t have a funeral. It has no rituals. But it shapes us deeply. We carry it in our posture, our hesitations, our shame.

Too many therapists, even today, still interpret this grief as self-pity or dysfunction. They pathologize it. But psychologist Kenneth Doka calls this mourning what it truly is: disenfranchised grief. It’s grief that isn’t socially sanctioned, so it festers in silence. But naming it aloud opens the door to healing.

Grief makes space. When we allow ourselves to mourn the life we didn’t get, we begin to let go of the shame of not having lived it. That shame is heavy. It tells us we should have done more, achieved more, been more. But we did the most important thing: we survived.

And now, survival can give way to something else, something creative, something grace-filled. When I grieve the life I couldn’t have, I make more room to live the life I can have. I become less entangled in what was impossible and more attuned to what is still emerging.

Grieving the unlived life does not mean I stop remembering. It means I remember with compassion. It means I stop punishing myself for the distance between my reality and my dreams. And when I offer that grace to myself, I find it easier to offer to others, their timelines, their struggles, and their quiet victories.

This is the invitation I want to offer to others living with chronic illness or trauma: don’t let anyone shame you for longing for what might have been. Don’t bypass your grief to appease others’ discomfort. Let yourself mourn. And as you do, notice what else begins to grow.

There is life on the other side of sorrow. And it is still yours to live.

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