Loss and Abandonment

They're gone, and the ground went with them.

Maybe it was a death, maybe a door closing, maybe a message that simply stopped coming. Either way the world looks the same and feels emptied out. You reach for them out of habit and they aren't there, and some part of you keeps insisting this can't be true. If the pain feels less like sadness and more like a piece of you has been torn loose — you are not being dramatic. Something is actually being pulled out.

It hurts this much because we'd quietly placed the source of our okayness inside them. Losing them feels like losing part of ourselves — and that part can be felt, and grieved, and recovered.

Long before the loss, something quiet happened: we set the source of our happiness outside ourselves, in them. They became the one who made the day feel safe, the future feel possible, our own worth feel settled. They stopped being simply a person and became mine — woven into the sense of who we are.

So when they go, it isn't only them we lose. The okayness we'd stored in them seems to leave with them. That's the tearing sensation — not weakness, not overreaction. You're feeling the place where your own wellbeing was being kept somewhere it could be taken away.

We never really grieve the person alone. We grieve the part of ourselves we had left in their keeping.

Here is the part almost no one is told in the worst of it: grief is not a bottomless well. It is a finite amount of energy that has been waiting to move. The pain you feel is not the loss itself — it's the resistance to the loss, the bracing against a wave that only wants to break.

And it never comes all at once. Grief arrives in waves — a swell that crests, floods, and falls, then a stretch of strange calm before the next one. When you stop fighting the biggest waves and let them move all the way through, each one leaves a little less behind. The reservoir really does empty.

There are two different pains here, and they get fused into one. The first is clean grief: I miss them, my heart aches, this is hard. The second is a story the mind lays on top: I'm unlovable. I'll always be left. There must be something wrong with me. That second one is the abandonment wound, and it is not the same as the loss.

Watch what the mind does — it generalizes from the particular. Losing this one person gets quietly equated with losing love itself, as if love had walked out the door and is never coming back. It isn't true. One bond ending is not a verdict on whether you're worthy of being loved. But the old fear is convincing, because it's ancient and it's been rehearsed a long time.

The loss says they're gone. Only the wound adds: and that means no one will stay.

If the pain seems out of proportion to the event, you're not broken — you've touched a reservoir. Every grief we didn't let move stays stored, compressed, waiting. Today's loss is the event that opens the gate, and out comes not just this sorrow but all the sorrow that never got to finish.

This is why a breakup can crack open childhood, why one goodbye can feel like every goodbye. Each loss represents all loss. That's not a curse — it's an opening. The same wave that's so painful is also draining a tank that has been full for years. You're not only mourning them. You're finally mourning.

The fear underneath all the holding on is that if the pain ever stops, they're truly gone — that grieving fully is a kind of betrayal. So we clutch the suffering, believing it's the last thread connecting us. But the suffering was never the connection. The suffering was the resistance.

What you surrender is the attachment — the demand that they stay in the exact form you had them. Let that go and what's left isn't emptiness. It's the love itself, no longer tangled in pain: gratitude, the way they shaped you, a warmth you can carry. Letting go of the form is not letting go of the love.

You are not letting go of them. You are letting go of the resistance to the pain — and underneath it, intact, is the love that was never the thing that hurt.