If you are grieving a former abuser — one who was different in the last years of their life, but it is hard for a kid to forget what the earlier years were — I see you.
This is the grief nobody talks about. The complicated loss. The person who hurt you as a child and showed up differently as an adult. How do you mourn that? How do you miss someone who also traumatized you? How do you hold “I loved him and I’m angry at him and I’m relieved he’s dead and I wish I had more time” all at once, when the cultural template for grief has no room for that combination?
Social media has no space for this grief. Algorithms want clean emotions — the beautiful tribute, the touching memory, the lesson learned from loss. They cannot process contradiction. The complicated grief post doesn’t get engagement the way the clean one does.
Pema Chödrön teaches that the willingness to be present with suffering — not to resolve it, not to make it comfortable, but to actually be there with it — is the heart of genuine compassion. Complicated grief requires that presence turned inward: the willingness to be with your own contradictory feelings without requiring them to simplify.
Jack Kornfield writes about the importance of allowing grief to move through rather than requiring it to be held in the shape we can manage publicly. Private grief — the kind that doesn’t fit public narrative — still needs a witness. It needs to be spoken somewhere, even if only to yourself, even if only in the practice of sitting with it honestly.
Equimundo’s State of American Men found that more than half of people feel no one really knows them. In complicated grief, that invisibility is specific: you are isolated in contradictions that don’t fit what people expect, and so you carry them alone.
You don’t have to carry them alone. Your grief is valid — all of it. The love, the anger, the relief, the regret. The full contradictory truth of grieving someone who was both harmful and human. I see you in this. And it is honest.
