By Amanda Graham
On the hidden grief of childhoods we never had, relationships that end, children who leave, identities we outgrow, and why unrecognised grief can hurt so deeply.
Perhaps grief is not the price we pay for death. Perhaps it is the price we pay for having loved, belonged, hoped, and imagined that something might last.
The death of actress Hayden Panettiere at just 36 has inevitably prompted sadness, questions and, unfortunately, speculation. Her death is still being investigated, and none of us can or should attempt to construct an explanation for it from the fragments of her life that were visible publicly.
But something about Hayden’s story has made me think about grief. Not simply the grief surrounding her death, or even the grief she herself spoke about following the sudden death of her younger brother Jansen in 2023. I mean the grief that can quietly accumulate across a lifetime.
The grief we don’t necessarily recognise as grief at all.
Hayden began working before she was old enough to understand what work was. She was acting from infancy and recently spoke strikingly about her childhood career, saying that she felt she had been groomed into the industry and that, growing up, saying no had not really been an option. She described the people-pleasing and lack of agency that accompanied those early years.
And it makes me wonder, not diagnose, not conclude, but wonder, whether there can be grief for a childhood we never had. I have often wondered if I had been told I was adopted from early childhood, rather than finding out at eighteen, would my childhood have been so different? That is another story.
Question is, can somebody grieve the ordinary? The days nobody photographed. The mistakes nobody reported. The afternoons spent doing absolutely nothing. The freedom to decide that you no longer want to perform. The experience of being valued and worshipped simply because you are a child, rather than because you can produce something adults find entertaining or profitable.
Perhaps there are losses we cannot grieve at the time because we do not yet know they are losses.
Only later, when life brings another separation, another ending, another disappointment, do those earlier losses begin to stir and, perhaps that is why grief can be so difficult to understand.
Grief does not always arrive after a funeral
We tend to associate grief with death. Somebody dies. We grieve. There are rituals around it. Flowers arrive. People call. We are allowed to cry. Society acknowledges that something important has happened. But there are many other losses for which there is no funeral.
I see this often in my work. The person who has spent thirty years building a career and suddenly retires. Everyone congratulates them. “How wonderful. Now you can relax.”
Yet they wake on Monday morning and nobody needs them to be anywhere. Their diary is empty. Their professional identity has disappeared almost overnight. They may have lost status, routine, colleagues, purpose, intellectual stimulation and a version of themselves that existed for decades.
And nobody calls it grief.
The marriage that ends may have been unhappy for years, and yet divorce can still produce profound mourning. We do not only grieve the person. We grieve the imagined future.
The Christmases we thought we would have. The house we imagined growing old in. The grandchildren we imagined welcoming together. The version of us that existed inside that relationship.
Again: grief.
There is a term in psychology, ambiguous loss, developed through the work of Pauline Boss, which helps us understand losses that are real but lack the clarity and social recognition surrounding death. Divorce, migration and profound changes within relationships can all produce forms of loss that are difficult to resolve precisely because there is no clean ending.
Sometimes the person is still alive. Sometimes the life is still there. But something we loved has gone.
The empty bedroom
Perhaps one of the least acknowledged forms of grief I encounter is among parents.
For twenty or thirty years, parenting can become the organising principle of a person’s life. Meals. School runs. Laundry. Appointments. Homework. Sports fixtures. University applications. Worry. Negotiation. Arguments. Birthdays. Christmas. Sitting awake at two in the morning wondering where they are.
And then one day the bedroom is empty. We call it the empty nest, almost affectionately. But for some parents it is far more profound than that. Particularly for the parent who has unconsciously sacrificed much of themselves to raising their children, the question becomes:
Who am I? now that you don’t need me in the same way?
Of course, we want our children to leave. That is our job, isn’t it? Successful parenting ultimately involves making ourselves less necessary. But knowing that intellectually does not prevent the emotional loss. Is it harder for the parents who find it more difficult to allow their adolescents the independence they so need to make their mistakes and find ways to strengthen their resilience? Yes, I think it probably is.
Love can contain two truths simultaneously: I am enormously proud that you have gone. And I cannot quite work out who I am without you here.
That is grief.
Sometimes we grieve ourselves
There is another kind of grief that perhaps receives even less attention.
The grief for the person we might have been. The childhood we did not have. The parent we needed but never received. The body we once inhabited. The fertility that disappeared. The career abandoned to raise children. The country we left. The relationship that never became what we hoped. The life we imagined at twenty compared with the life we find ourselves living at fifty. Some of these losses are chosen.
That does not make them painless. You can choose motherhood and still grieve a former freedom. You can choose divorce and still grieve your marriage. You can choose retirement and still grieve your profession. You can leave a country willingly and still ache when you smell something that instantly transports you home.
Human beings are wonderfully contradictory. We can be grateful and grieving at the same time.
When one loss wakes another
This is the part of grief I find particularly interesting.
Losses do not always live neatly in separate compartments. Something happening today can reach backwards. A bereavement can reopen abandonment. A divorce can reactivate the childhood experience of somebody leaving. A child moving away can awaken earlier experiences of separation. Retirement can expose questions about identity that have been avoided for decades.
This does not mean every painful experience is secretly caused by childhood trauma. We should be careful about reducing complex human lives to a single psychological explanation.
But our nervous systems do remember patterns.
And when a present experience resembles an earlier emotional experience, helplessness, separation, rejection, uncertainty, loss of control, the emotional response can sometimes feel much larger than the present event appears to warrant.
We say: “Why am I reacting like this?” Perhaps the more useful question is:
What else might this be touching?
Hayden spoke publicly about postpartum depression, addiction and losing daily life with her daughter while trying to recover. She also spoke about the devastating death of her brother. Those are significant human losses. We cannot know how they connected within her private emotional world. But her story raises a broader question worth asking of all of us:
How many people are carrying several layers of grief without recognising them as grief?
The body grieves too
And grief is not something that happens only inside the mind.
People often describe heaviness in the chest, exhaustion, disrupted sleep, changes in appetite, anxiety, digestive disturbance, difficulty concentrating or a strange sense of physical depletion. The somatic experiences of grief.
These experiences are not imagined.
The American Psychological Association describes grief as involving physiological distress alongside yearning, confusion and anxiety. Research into bereavement has also found associations with changes in stress physiology, inflammatory and immune processes, sleep and cardiovascular health.
The body participates in loss. Which perhaps explains why unacknowledged grief can be so difficult. If I know I am grieving, I may soften around myself. I may sleep more. Walk. Talk. Cry. Accept that my concentration is poor. Ask somebody to sit with me. But if I don’t recognise the experience as grief, I may simply conclude: Something is wrong with me.
So, I push harder. Work harder. Drink more. Scroll more. Exercise more. Eat more. Control more and simply numb the pain. Not because I am weak, but because human beings are remarkably inventive when trying not to feel something they do not understand.
And then Buddhism gives us a difficult question
Buddhist philosophy offers a fascinating perspective here.
We often hear the phrase: “Attachment is the root of suffering.” It is a useful shorthand, but it is not quite the full Buddhist teaching.
Within the Four Noble Truths, the origin of dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness, is more precisely associated with craving, tanhā, and the clinging that follows it: our insistence that people, experiences and circumstances remain as we want them to be despite the reality that everything changes.
That distinction matters enormously. Because Buddhism is not telling us: Do not love. It is asking: Can you love without possessing? Can I love you deeply without demanding that you remain exactly as you are so that I can feel safe? Can I love my child while knowing that the very purpose of childhood is that they eventually leave me? Can I love my partner without believing they belong to me? Can I love my body while accepting that it will age? Can I love a life that I know I cannot keep?
That is a much more difficult spiritual practice.
Love and attachment are not quite the same thing
Another Buddhist concept helps here: mettā, usually translated as loving-kindness.
Mettā is not indifference. Nor is it emotional withdrawal.
It is the wish that another human being be well and happy without requiring their happiness to satisfy our own needs. Traditional Buddhist descriptions distinguish mettā from a love that is possessive or “sticky” with attachment.
That difference is fascinating when we think about human relationships. Love might say: I want you to flourish. Attachment may quietly add: …but preferably in a way that keeps me comfortable.
A parent says: “I want my child to be independent.” Until independence involves moving four hundred miles away.
A partner says: “I want you to be happy.” Until happiness requires something different from what they want.
We are human. Of course we attach.
Attachment is fundamental to human development; psychologically, secure attachment is not something we should be trying to eliminate. So perhaps Eastern philosophy and Western attachment psychology are not actually contradicting one another.
One describes the importance of connection. The other warns us about clinging. There is a difference.
Is grief worth it?
And eventually we reach the impossible question.
If loving somebody means that one day we may lose them, is it worth it? If having children means eventually watching them walk away, is it worth it? If creating a career means one day having to leave it, is it worth it? If loving a dog means knowing you will probably outlive it, why do we do it? Because the alternative would be to protect ourselves from grief by protecting ourselves from love.
And I am not sure that is living.
Perhaps grief is not evidence that something has gone wrong. Perhaps sometimes it is evidence that something mattered. The problem is not necessarily grief itself. The problem may be grief that has nowhere to go.
Grief that is hurried.
Grief that is medicated before it is understood.
Grief that is dismissed because nobody died.
Grief that is called weakness.
Grief that is disguised as anger.
Grief that becomes busy-ness.
Grief that becomes alcohol.
Grief that becomes control.
Grief that sits quietly underneath anxiety while we spend years treating only the anxiety.
What happens when nobody says: Of course you are grieving. Look at what you lost.
Sometimes recognition itself is therapeutic.
Perhaps grief needs hospitality
I increasingly think grief needs something very simple. Not fixing. Not explaining. Not a timetable.
Just hospitality.
A chair at the table. Space. Kindness. Someone willing to say: “You don’t have to make this disappear today.” We do not “get over” the significant things in our lives. We integrate them. They become part of the landscape of who we are. The relationship changes from something we physically possessed to something we carry. The child leaves home, but motherhood remains. The career ends, but the knowledge remains. The marriage ends, but the years existed. The person dies, but the relationship has shaped us permanently. Perhaps healthy grief is not about detaching ourselves from what we loved. It is learning to hold that love differently. Less tightly. More gently.
And perhaps we should ask a different question
Instead of asking someone: “What’s wrong?” perhaps occasionally we should ask: “What have you lost?”
Because the answer may surprise us. A person can be grieving while functioning beautifully. They can go to work. Laugh. Cook dinner. Post photographs. Parent children. Go on holiday. Be successful and still carry an ache they have never named.
Sometimes even they do not know it is there. So perhaps that is the invitation. Look at the person who has recently retired. The friend whose child has left for university. The woman whose marriage ended two years ago whom everybody assumes is “fine now.” The person who moved countries. The new mother whose experience of motherhood looks nothing like the one she imagined. The person whose body has changed. The person whose life took an unexpected direction. And perhaps ask that question “what have you lost?”
Not because grief needs to be solved. But because grief needs to be seen. And when it is seen, acknowledged and held with kindness, something often changes. The loss remains. But the suffering around it can soften. Perhaps that is the fine line between love and suffering. We cannot love without becoming vulnerable to loss.
But maybe the answer is not to love less.
Maybe it is to love fully, hold more lightly, and when loss inevitably comes, allow ourselves, and each other, the extraordinary human grace of grieving.
