You do not grieve her the way you would grieve someone who has died. There is no funeral, no anniversary, no one bringing food. The pre-illness self is gone, but you are still here, in a body that has changed. And she is still around, sometimes, on a good week, in the shape of who you used to be. That makes the standard grief scripts (the five stages, the year of mourning, the eventual closure) not quite fit. What helps is not following a script. It is recognising what this kind of grief actually looks like, and giving it the room it needs without rushing it.
What this grief looks like in daily life
The grief of chronic illness does not tend to arrive in a single wave. It moves through everyday moments. A friend mentions a trip you would have wanted to take. The body does something it used to do effortlessly and the contrast is sharp. A photograph surfaces. A song plays. Simon Olshansky, writing in 1962, named this pattern as chronic sorrow: grief that returns, at predictable moments and unpredictable ones, in response to a loss that keeps being relevant (Olshansky, 1962). He made a point I find clinically useful: chronic sorrow is not a relapse. It is an appropriate response to a loss that has not gone away.
What this means in practice: feeling sudden grief at unrelated moments is not a sign you are getting worse. It is a sign the loss is current again, briefly, and will likely settle.
What tends to make it heavier
A few patterns intensify the grief rather than letting it move. One is comparing the post-illness self unfavourably to the pre-illness self, especially on days when both are present in your awareness; the contrast is often sharper than what is manageable. Another is suppressing grief in order to "stay positive," which tends to bring it back larger when given less room. A third is isolating from people who knew the pre-illness self, because their not-knowing-about-the-illness can feel confronting. And running underneath these is a quieter pattern: treating grief that recurs as evidence you "have not moved on." That layers shame onto an already heavy load.
What tends to make it more bearable
The patterns I see helping are quieter than the ones above, and they are orientations rather than techniques. Naming the grief explicitly as grief, not as "being negative" or "failing to cope," removes a layer that does not need to be carried. Allowing the grief room when it arrives, briefly, then setting it down rather than residing in it, lets the wave pass through rather than build up. Talking to someone who can hold the both-and quality of this kind of grief (where the loss and the going-on can coexist) is usually more useful than talking to someone who tries to fix it. And, slowly, building a relationship with the current self who is not measured against the pre-illness one.
These take time. Most of the people I work with find they come and go before they stay.
When to bring it to a GP
Grief that recurs and settles is one thing. Grief that does not lift is another. A combined study of research findings by Scott and colleagues at Macquarie University found that around 1 in 8 to 1 in 10 people follow a persistently poor adjustment trajectory after a chronic illness diagnosis (Scott et al., 2023). A GP review is appropriate when low mood has lasted most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more; when interest in things you used to value has drained away; or when sleep, appetite, or hope has shifted noticeably. The point is not to pathologise grief. It is to check whether grief has crossed into depression, which is a different problem with a different response.
There is no failure in this. The grief is not a phase to get through. It is a piece of developmental work that the standard scripts did not prepare you for, and it does not have a neat ending. The carrying gets easier over time. Not because the grief becomes smaller, but because the self that carries it grows. The companion guide on grieving the pre-illness self develops the frameworks behind this in more depth: ambiguous loss, biographical disruption, and chronic sorrow.
For how we work with chronic health, what sessions cost, and how to begin, see Working with chronic health conditions.
