Grieving a living parent and finding your own closure

When people talk about grief, the conversation almost always drifts toward funerals, flowers, and final goodbyes. It’s a vocabulary built around death. But there’s another kind of grief—one that isn’t talked about in polite company, one that doesn’t get casseroles or sympathy cards. It’s the grief for someone still alive. A mother who no longer calls. A father whose number you’ve blocked. A sibling you scroll past on Facebook without clicking.

I know this grief because I lived it long before my mother died. And if that sounds strange, I’m not the only one. Around 27% of Americans are estranged from a family member. That statistic is a quiet, stubborn reminder: not all absence comes from the grave.

Family estrangement is rarely neat. Sometimes it’s the result of an eruption—a fight that burns the bridge down to cinders. Other times it’s erosion, the kind you don’t notice until you’re already standing on separate islands. Some people step back for survival, others because the relationship simply can’t breathe anymore. The reasons are as varied as the people themselves: narcissism, addiction, old patterns of abuse, neglect, manipulation, ideological rifts. Sometimes distance is geography. Sometimes it’s a wall built out of silence.

There’s also the third-party influence, the subtle push from an outside partner or friend who twists the narrative until the bond is too warped to hold. Values can split families down the middle, too—politics, religion, or sexual orientation becoming the lines no one is willing to cross.

But what makes this grief so complicated is that it has no clear script. There’s no socially accepted arc of mourning for a parent who’s still breathing somewhere. The absence is alive, but so is the person who chose—or forced—you into it.

Licensed mental health counselor GinaMarie Guarino puts it plainly: the loss of a still-living parent can feel confusing, uncomfortable, and hard to reconcile. It’s a collision of abandonment, rejection, sadness, and shame. Guilt has a way of seeping in, too—an unwelcome echo of cultural narratives that insist a child should always honor their parents, no matter the history.

And culture has a way of making that guilt louder. Kara Nassour, a licensed professional counselor in Austin, notes how often strangers and acquaintances assign blame without context. “When was the last time you called your mother?” someone might ask, as if love and loyalty were just a matter of picking up the phone. The assumption is always that reconciliation is the natural, noble choice—that estrangement is a rash decision rather than the last resort it often is.

What’s harder is that this grief is invisible. It doesn’t get public acknowledgment. No one sends flowers for a severed relationship. If you cry about it, the world assumes you can fix it—after all, the person’s still alive. But closure is not guaranteed just because someone’s heart is still beating.

For some, the separation feels like oxygen. The relief is palpable, and peace settles in the space where conflict used to live. That, too, is valid. Estrangement can be an act of self-preservation, a reclaiming of emotional territory. The complexity comes from holding those truths side by side: you can mourn and feel lighter. You can love and let go.

Coping with this kind of loss isn’t linear. There’s no single recovery plan. The timeline is unpredictable, and the emotions can loop back without warning. Some days, you might feel steady in your decision; others, you might ache with the urge to reconnect. Even initiating the separation doesn’t protect you from the waves.

When the grief spikes, finding someone to listen without judgment can feel like a lifeline. Friends, relatives, or support groups who understand the nuances can offer a kind of validation the outside world doesn’t readily give. Books on addiction, abuse, or personality disorders can reframe your experiences, making it clear that the dynamics you endured weren’t isolated or imagined. Therapy, too, can be a space to untangle guilt from necessity.

Boundaries become both a shield and a compass. They keep you from sliding back into unhealthy patterns, and they help you define what you will and won’t allow in other relationships. Boundaries, when clear and firm, remind you that you are not responsible for your parents’ actions, behavior, or well-being. It’s a recalibration of roles: they are adults, accountable for their choices. You cannot fix them, and you are not obligated to absorb their consequences.

Naming your emotions—without judgment—can be its own form of release. Sadness, frustration, shame, relief: they all get to exist without canceling each other out. Grief is messy like that. It doesn’t follow a single track toward resolution, and it doesn’t reward those who try to rush it.

Therapist Leanna Stockard frames it simply: give yourself permission to feel exactly as you do. You’re allowed to experience that complexity without editing it for palatability. Healing doesn’t require you to paint the past in softer colors or force a narrative of forgiveness before you’re ready—or ever.

And yet, living with estrangement in a hyper-connected age adds another layer. Social media turns absence into something you can watch in real time. You might see a tagged photo of your parent at a barbecue. A birthday post from someone else in the family. Their face ages on your feed while your relationship stays frozen. In a way, it’s like grieving with a window open to the life you’re no longer part of.

For some, that visibility is a constant reopen of the wound. For others, it’s a strange reassurance—the proof that the person is okay, even if you’re not speaking. Either way, the scrolling becomes part of the ritual, another reminder that grief in the digital era doesn’t always come with clean breaks.

Holidays complicate things further. Family-centric celebrations can magnify absence until it feels like the only thing in the room. There’s the decision of whether to join extended gatherings where your parent might be, or to skip them entirely and face the loneliness head-on. New traditions can help, but they also highlight the shift: you’re building something separate, often from scratch, while the rest of the world assumes togetherness is the default.

And then there’s the well-meaning advice that lands like sandpaper. “Time heals.” “Blood is thicker than water.” “One day you’ll regret it.” These phrases are offered as comfort, but they carry a weight of expectation—that your grief should be temporary, that reconciliation is inevitable, that distance is only a phase.

But the truth is, some relationships are healthiest in their absence. Some stories don’t get a reunion scene. And the absence itself can become a kind of stability—less dramatic than conflict, less exhausting than repair attempts that keep failing.

In those moments when the grief feels sharp, it’s worth remembering that healing isn’t about eliminating all sadness. It’s about creating enough space for life to keep moving alongside it. You might still think of your parent on their birthday, still imagine what it would be like to share certain news. That’s part of the ongoing negotiation between love and loss.

Estrangement forces a redefinition of family. Sometimes it means investing more deeply in chosen family—friends, partners, or mentors who show up in ways biology never guaranteed. Sometimes it means learning to be your own safety net, building rituals of care that don’t rely on old family structures.

If there’s a quiet truth running through all of this, it’s that grief for the living is an act of self-definition. It says: I know what I can’t hold anymore, even if the world doesn’t understand why. It’s a grief without eulogies, without formal closure, but it’s still real. It reshapes not just your relationship to the person you’ve stepped away from, but your relationship to yourself.

There’s no single way to carry it. Some days, it might feel lighter. Other days, it might ache in unexpected ways—triggered by a smell, a song, a stranger’s offhand comment. The goal isn’t to make it vanish, but to learn its shape and how to live around it.

And maybe that’s the quiet solidarity in all of this: knowing there are others out there navigating the same invisible terrain. Some of them are sitting in therapy rooms, some are swapping stories in anonymous forums, some are just holding it quietly and going about their day.

You may never get the kind of closure that comes from a final goodbye. But you can still write your own ending—one that doesn’t require anyone else’s permission to be valid. Because in the end, grief for the living is still grief. And acknowledging it, even to yourself, is the first step toward carrying it on your own terms.