Your child is alive. And you are grieving.

Maybe they are living with addiction. Maybe they have a serious mental illness that makes connection unpredictable. Maybe they are estranged—across town, across the country, across a silence you did not choose. Maybe they are incarcerated. Maybe you are a grandmother raising a grandchild because their mother cannot. Maybe a brain injury, trauma, or a long season of instability has changed the person you knew into someone you barely recognize. Maybe it is several of these things braided together, and nobody in your life understands what you are actually living inside.

Psychologist Pauline Boss calls this ambiguous loss—a loss that has no resolution and no clean ending. The person is still alive, but the relationship, the safety, the future you imagined has been altered beyond recognition. 

Boss identified two forms:

• Physically absent but psychologically present. Your child is gone—estranged, disappeared, incarcerated—but they live inside your mind every day. You set a place at the table that stays empty. You check your phone for a call that does not come.
• Physically present but psychologically absent. Your child is here—in the house, in the next room, at the other end of the phone—but serious mental illness, addiction, or brain injury has overtaken their capacity for connection. The body is familiar, but the person inside it is not.

This is a different kind of grief—one our culture has no container for. We know grief as death certificates and eulogies, and casseroles. We do not know what to do with a mother who is mourning someone who is still breathing. So we do what we always do with pain we cannot categorize: we look away.

This kind of grief—known as ambiguous loss—affects many mothers facing estrangement, addiction, mental illness, or incarceration in their children.

After more than a decade of working with mothers and caregivers who are grieving the living, I have learned a few things that hold up:

1. The Only Way Through Is in: Processing Ambiguous Loss & Grief

You can try to outrun grief. You can stay busy—organize the house, take on another project, drink more wine, scroll until your eyes burn. You can spiritualize it into a lesson, a test, a karmic assignment. You can perform recovery so convincingly that even you believe it. But the body keeps the score. It will find you at 3 a.m. after a dream you cannot shake, or in the parking lot of the grocery store, sobbing into the steering wheel because a song threw you back into a life that no longer exists. The only way through is in.

This does not mean wallowing. It means stopping long enough to name what you actually lost—the Sunday phone calls, the graduation you had already pictured in detail, the version of your daughter who used to sing with you in the car, the safety of your own home before your son’s illness made every room unpredictable, the grandchild you are raising because your own daughter could not do it herself.

Give yourself the time this takes. There is no schedule for it. Your nervous system will metabolize what it can, when it can. Let it.

2. Stop Expecting People to Understand What They Have Not Lived: Why Others Don’t Understand Ambiguous Loss

People will disappoint you. Expect less from them. And from yourself.

Most people do not know how to handle things they have not handled. Your grief makes them feel helpless, and they do not like feeling helpless around you. So they offer advice. They minimize. They say things like “at least he’s still alive” or “have you tried setting boundaries?”—as if your situation were a problem with a tidy solution they just happened to have in their back pocket.

They are not cruel. They are human. You are not helpless. You just need time, self-trust, and people who know your kind of grief—a mother whose son has schizophrenia, a grandmother raising her daughter’s child, a woman whose family fractured over addiction and never fully came back together. They will not flinch when the story gets ugly. They will sit beside you and say, I know. That is worth more than a thousand well-meaning suggestions.

3. Grief & Joy Can Coexist—the Sacred Both

Our culture does not do sadness well. It makes money on making people think they can buy happiness—gratitude journals, manifesting courses, positive affirmations on coffee mugs. Buried inside all of it is an unspoken rule: if you are sad, you are failing.

I am an advocate for sadness. Here is what it has taught me: grief and joy can coexist, and joy is much deeper than happiness.

Happiness depends on circumstances. Joy does not. Joy is your grandson laughing so hard milk comes out of his nose. Joy is a song that catches you off guard in the kitchen. Joy is your body remembering pleasure—real, physical, unearned pleasure—in the middle of a season that has been nothing but hard. Joy does not require the absence of grief. It requires the presence of you.

I call this the “Sacred Both.” You can grieve your child and still savor an evening of pleasure. You can carry sorrow and still feel alive. You can hold the emptiness and the gratitude in the same breath without one canceling the other. This is not denial. This is the full range of a human heart that refuses to shrink.

You are not betraying anyone by feeling good. The moments when grief loosens its grip are not accidents—they are how your body begins to replenish itself. Let them.

4. Letting Go of Control in Parenting Through Grief

Grief and pain bring up control issues. By now, your illusion of control is shattered—and so is your parental innocence. When you lose someone, or lose the way things were, the scaffolding you built your entire parenting life on collapses.

I am going to take a liberty here and assume something about you: you were raised to believe that love could prevent catastrophe. That if you read the right books, made the right choices, stayed vigilant enough, and prayed hard enough, your children would be okay. And then they were not. The realization that your love was not enough to stop what happened is one of the most shattering things a mother can live through.

The more we acknowledge that control was always an illusion, the more room we make for the unpredictability of life as it actually is. The work is learning to stand inside uncertainty without bracing against it.

Releasing control is not the same as releasing love. You can show up for their crisis without making it your entire life. You can stop white-knuckling the outcome and still love them with your whole self. The difference is you are no longer treating yourself as collateral damage. You are standing on your own ground, and from that ground, you can actually be of use—to them and to yourself.

5. Savor the Moments When You Feel Alive

The moments when you feel free of pain, sadness, or depression may be few and far between, especially at first. But when they arrive, acknowledge them. Savor them. Tell yourself that you did it—you felt alive and allowed yourself to feel good. This becomes the path forward.

You are reclaiming your right to a life beyond someone else’s suffering—your appetite, your sleep, your curiosity, your laughter, your desire to be in the world. For a mother or caregiver who has been in crisis mode for years, allowing yourself one afternoon of genuine pleasure is a radical act.

Give yourself that permission. Recovery may come, and you can hold space for that hope. But you cannot suspend your own life while you wait for it, because the waiting itself will break you. Your body and spirit need replenishment, and they need it now—as sustenance for the road ahead, however long it turns out to be.

Grieving the living has waves. Some days the water recedes enough for you to catch your breath, and some days it rises so fast that you are underwater before you know it. I know this from the women I have sat beside over the years, and from my own life. Early in my journey with one of my children, a social worker said to me, “Oh honey, you have got to get respite when you can. You are in this for the long haul.” I did not want the long haul. I wanted reassurance. I wanted someone to tell me that we were going to get through it and everything would be fine. But what she gave me was more useful than comfort. She gave me the truth.

Find your respite when you can. You are going to need it.

What changes over time is you—because you stopped demanding that grief resolve itself on your timeline, because you found people who could hold your story without flinching, because you let grief and joy sit in the same room, and because you came back to your body, again and again, and let it teach you what your mind could not. The long haul does not require you to suffer the entire way. It requires you to stay—present, grounded, and still willing to feel the good when it comes.

And if no one has said this to you yet, let me be the first. You deserve a room full of people who already understand. That room exists, and it is waiting for you.

If you are navigating ambiguous loss as a mother or caregiver, support and language for your experience exist—and you do not have to carry it alone.