The Shape of Grief

My stepfather’s brother passed away this week. He was 94.

It wasn’t unexpected. It wasn’t too sudden. And they weren’t particularly close. Not in the way we often measure closeness. They didn’t see each other often. They didn’t talk every week.

And yet, I could hear it in his voice.

Something was… unsettled.

There was a quiet confusion underneath the sadness, like he was asking himself a question he couldn’t quite answer:

Why does this feel harder than I thought it would?

I have some thoughts on that.

I’ve known death in many forms.

Some arrived like lightning strikes, sudden, violent, impossible to prepare for. Others came slowly, giving time to brace, to anticipate, to begin grieving before the moment even arrived.

I’ve lost people who’ve shaped me.

I’ve lost people who brushed past my life.

I’ve lost people whose absence didn’t fully land until years later.

And through all of it, I’ve come to understand something I didn’t expect… It’s not always the people we’re closest to who are hardest to grieve. Sometimes, it’s the ones we weren’t.

When we lose someone we are deeply connected to, someone woven into our daily lives, the grief is immediate and undeniable.

It’s loud.

It’s the empty chair. The phone call you can’t make. The instinct to share something, followed by the realization that you can’t. It’s the reshaping of your world around a space that used to be filled. 

But there is something else there too.

There is a quiet knowing that you loved, and were loved. That you showed up. That you tried. That you built something real together.

And in time, that knowing becomes a kind of peace. Not the kind that erases the pain, but the kind that sits beside it and softens the edges.

But when we lose someone we weren’t as close to, the grief can take on a different shape.

It’s quieter. More complicated.

Because now, grief isn’t just about loss. It’s about possibility.

It’s about all the conversations that didn’t happen.

The moments that never came.

The relationship that existed, but never quite became what you thought, or hoped, it could have been.

And suddenly, death doesn’t just close a chapter. 

It closes the door. Permanently.

I’ve felt that tension in a relationship where love was always there, but closeness was harder to reach. Where there were good moments, and care, but also distance - unspoken things, missed timing, different ways of seeing the world.

Those are the relationships that leave you wondering. Not because they were broken, but because they were unfinished in ways you didn’t fully understand until it was too late to change them.

That loss is a different kind of pain.

Not louder. Not bigger. But harder to place.

Because there’s no clear narrative to hold onto. No tidy collection of shared memories to lean against. Instead, there are questions. Reflections. “What ifs.” The quiet weight of things left unfinished, not out of neglect or failure, but simply because life is complicated, and so are people.

And here’s the hardest part:  Often, no one is to blame.

Not them. Not you.

And yet, it can still hurt. A lot.

I think this is why death can shake us in unexpected ways. It doesn’t just take people from us. It forces us to confront the truth of what was, and what wasn’t.

If I think about the people in my life I’m closest to, I know that when their time comes, it will break something open in me. To be honest, I can’t actually talk about it without losing my breath and tearing up. Writing about it is much easier.

But, there will be a deep ache in learning how to exist without them.

But there will also be something to hold onto.

A lifetime of shared moments. Laughter. Growth. Repair. Love.

And that will matter.

More than anything, that will matter.

Which brings me back to the question I heard in my stepfather’s voice.

Why does this hurt, even when we weren’t that close?

Because death doesn’t measure in relationships the way we do.

It doesn’t care about how often you called, or how many holidays you spent together. It simply marks the end of possibility.

And sometimes, that’s where we’re really grieving… the what might have been, or could have been. Sometimes, even the what should have been.

Maybe that’s also why we gather when someone dies. Why we hold funerals, wakes, celebrations of life. Not just to honour the person who has passed, but to support the people who remain.

To give shape to something that feels shapeless.

To speak what wasn’t said.

To remember what was shared.

To sit together in the strange, complicated space that grief creates.

Over time, after enough loss, you start to see the pattern. Not in a cynical way, but in a human one. You begin to understand that grief doesn’t follow rules. That it doesn’t rank people by importance. That it shows up differently each time, asking something new of you.

Death is inevitable.

But regret doesn’t have to be.

Connection doesn’t have to be.

And maybe that’s the quiet invitation hidden inside all of this:

To show up a little more fully while we still can.

To say the thing.

To have the conversation.

To soften where we’ve been rigid.

To reach, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Not because we can fix everything. But because we can leave less unfinished.

In the end, grief is not a measure of how much we loved.

It’s a reflection of the relationship as it truly was, beautiful, messy, complete, or incomplete.

And all of it is valid.

All of it is human.

So if something feels harder that it “should,” maybe there’s nothing wrong with you. Maybe you’re just feeling the full weight of what it means to be alive, in a relationship with other imperfect, complicated, human beings.

And that… is something worth paying attention to. While we still have the chance.

Ⓒ April 2026. Beki Lantos. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the author.