The Canyon Isn’t Silent
Grief is a canyon. Wide, but not quiet.
Every sound, every memory, every doubt ricochets off the walls and returns in a different form. What starts as a whisper of sadness can come back as a roar of regret. What we thought we left behind suddenly sounds like it’s still ahead. It’s beautiful terrain. Sacred even. But also disorienting. You can know the general direction you’re headed, and still question every step because of what you hear.
Years ago, I found myself hiking through Red Rock Canyon in Waterton Lakes, Canada. The beauty was breathtaking. Towering striations of red and green rock, cold mountain water carving a path between steep walls. It should’ve felt peaceful. In some ways it did. But I also remember feeling strangely unsettled. The sound of my own footsteps, the rush of water, even the voices of other hikers. All of it echoed wildly. Sometimes I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. Something that seemed ahead of me turned out to be behind. Something that felt close was actually far away.
I’ve seen this same truth surface in other seasons of my life. Times when the climb inward felt just as steep as the climb up a mountain. Read how self-reflection in rugged emotional terrain can reveal as much as any physical summit in The Shadow and the Summit,
Grief can feel like that.
The Echoes We Don’t Expect
About six months ago, a friend of mine (a single mother) got a call no one ever expects. Her ex-husband had passed away suddenly. No warning. No goodbye. Just gone.
And while the world around her responded with sympathy and condolences, something more complicated stirred in her chest. Alongside the sadness came something colder, quieter, and far more disorienting: doubt.
She hadn’t spoken to him much in the years since the divorce. She’d done the hard work of healing, of holding boundaries, of choosing peace over chaos; even when others didn’t understand her reasons. But now, in death, he became something else entirely. A ghost not only of a person, but of every decision she’d ever made.
Was I too harsh?
Did I give up too soon?
Should I have stayed?
Did I love him enough to grieve him now?
I remember telling her something like:
“Grief doesn’t cancel out the truth you lived through. And death doesn’t rewrite the need the past.”
But I also remember feeling the ache; the dissonance of mourning someone you once had to let go of… someone who wasn’t cruel or abusive, but whose presence still became unsustainable. A relationship strained by health concerns and emotional patterns neither of them could fully navigate.
That choice (to protect your peace while staying open) is what I call living with a soft heart. Explore how staying tender and present can coexist with healthy boundaries in The Soft Heart: Living Whole in a Numb World.
The Collision of Grief and Guilt
Psychologists call it disenfranchised grief. A type of grief that doesn’t always get social permission. You’re mourning a relationship that wasn’t supposed to matter anymore. You’re heartbroken over someone you were no longer with. You feel lost, and at the same time, unsure whether you’re allowed to feel lost.
As psychologist Kenneth Doka (2002) explains, “Disenfranchised grief can be particularly complicated because it lacks acknowledgment from others, yet it doesn’t lack intensity.”
Layered onto this is something more intimate: retrospective guilt. When someone dies, our memories reorganize themselves. The brain, in a bid for meaning, smooths over the rough parts, idealizes the past, and casts doubt on decisions that once felt necessary. This is known as rosy retrospection, a cognitive bias that colors how we recall emotionally complex experiences (Mitchell & Thompson, 1994).
But here’s the thing: questioning ourselves in the face of loss is human. It’s not evidence that we were wrong; it’s evidence that we’re still capable of compassion, even for someone we couldn’t stay with.
Boundaries Are Not Cruelty
We often confuse boundaries with rejection. Or worse, punishment. But boundaries, when set with integrity, are never meant to harm, they’re meant to protect. To create the space where healing and growth are even possible.
In grief, especially after the death of someone we once loved but had to leave, those boundaries can feel especially fragile. They weren’t drawn out of anger or fear, but out of need. Out of exhaustion. Out of the quiet ache that sometimes love alone isn’t enough to hold a relationship together.
Sometimes, it’s not that the person was cruel. Sometimes, it’s just that the dynamics between you grew too heavy to carry. That illness (physical or emotional) created a fog neither of you could see through. That the hopes you began with couldn’t weather the storms that followed.
So when that person passes, grief floods in with questions:
Did I do everything I could?
Was I too quick to let go?
Could we have found a different path?
Psychologist Dr. Pauline Boss, who coined the term ambiguous loss, reminds us that not all losses are clean. Some are ongoing even while the person is still alive. And some continue to evolve even after death (Boss, 2006).
Your grief is real. So was your decision. You can honor the good without denying the hard. And you can mourn what was (and what might have been) without betraying the boundary you once had to draw.
What Death Reveals (and Distorts)
There’s something about death that reframes everything. Like a sudden snowfall on a familiar trail, it covers the terrain we once walked and makes us question whether we truly remember it at all.
In the wake of someone’s passing, especially an ex-partner, it’s common to experience survivor’s guilt: the internalized belief that maybe we didn’t try hard enough, forgive deeply enough, or love well enough. These thoughts are natural, but they’re often distorted by what psychologists call emotional memory bias. The tendency for our brains to highlight warmth and minimize conflict in retrospect, especially when resolution is no longer possible (Levine & Pizarro, 2004).
We may find ourselves mourning the version of them we hoped they’d become. Or the version of us we longed to be in that relationship. Not because they were terrible, but because we loved them, and love made us want to believe in a future that couldn’t materialize.
So what do we do with this?
We remember that clarity and compassion can coexist. That we can grieve with soft hearts without distorting the truth of what was. That mourning doesn’t require martyrdom.
Living With Integrity Before the Eulogy
There’s a haunting clarity that comes after death. The kind that leaves us wondering if we could have shown up more honestly when the chance was still there.
And maybe that’s one of the quiet invitations grief offers:
To live now with the same depth of awareness we long for after a loss.
What if we paid closer attention to the small fractures, the misalignments and micro-rejections before they grew into full-blown separations? What if we honored our needs and named our truths before resentment hardened them?
Clinical psychologist Dr. Alexandra Solomon talks about relational self-awareness; the ability to reflect not only on how others show up in our lives, but how we show up for ourselves and them (Solomon, 2020). It’s a practice that asks us to stay awake in our relationships, to pay attention not just to the connection, but to the conditions that nurture or erode it.
Relational integrity is not about perfection. It’s about presence. About speaking the truth before it’s memorialized in absence. About making peace while people are still here to receive it.
Letting the Story Be Complicated
Grief doesn’t need to be clean to be real. Love doesn’t need to be mutual to be mourned. And boundaries don’t need to disappear when someone dies.
We are complex creatures. Our relationships are messy, layered, and sometimes unfinished. That doesn’t make our grief any less valid. It just makes it more human.
If you’re walking through grief that doesn’t fit into neat categories…
If you’re mourning someone you had to leave in order to stay whole…
If you’re second-guessing the past because death has made it sacred…
Let this be your reminder:
You can honor their humanity without dismissing your own.
You can feel sadness without surrendering your sanity.
You can grieve and still be grateful for the distance you chose.
And maybe, just maybe, this is an invitation for all of us. Not just to grieve better, but to live more intentionally. To speak what needs to be spoken. To love with clear eyes. To let go, not only when death comes, but when staying costs us our wholeness.
Because the stories we tell ourselves matter, especially when the final chapter arrives unexpectedly.
Reflection Questions:
- Have you ever grieved someone with whom you had an unresolved or painful history? What made that grief feel unique?
- Where in your current relationships might you be avoiding difficult truths or necessary boundaries?
- What would it look like to practice relational integrity? To show up now with the honesty you’d want remembered later?
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