Grieving A Loss That Feels Like a Death

Mourning a living person is something I hope you never have to experience. To mourn a living person means that they have entirely left your life and you have no way of communicating with them. It feels like they have died but are still very much alive.

My family is shaken to the core. I am currently an only child. Yes, I still have two very much alive siblings, but they have both chosen a path away from our family. We do not communicate with either one of them, because they decided to not stay in contact with us.

It makes you question where you went wrong. It feels like losing a loved one, but worse because they decide to be this way. They choose to not associate with myself and the woman who gave birth to them.

Confused. Lost. Hurt.

Questions have gone unanswered, and hope is slowly diminishing. I’m at a loss, and so is the rest of our family.

I’ve been struggling for the longest time with where I could’ve gone wrong and how I could pick up the broken pieces. I want to put our family back together again, to make it like it was in 2018. Yea, that’s how long this entire thing has been happening. Our family hasn’t been the same for almost two years, and I don’t know if it ever will be.

You raise your children to the best of your ability, and one day they could jump off the deep end, and you have no idea why. You have no idea what happened or what you could’ve done to change the outcome.

They. Just. Jump.

Not in the right way, either. They jump into a dark pool filled with temptation and deceit. A pool and journey that is so far away from the lit path you had them on, that you can’t use the shepherd hook to pull them back to the edge.

All you can do is cry, pray, and repeat. There is nothing else you can do with no way to communicate. You pray for their heart to heal, for their mind to clear, and to hear God’s voice at the end of the day. You pray as your life depends on it because it is your loved ones who rely on it.

I write this as my therapy session to you. I put my thoughts on this screen so that I may feel better, so that family and friends might be able to understand better how serious it is, and so that the reader who is also experiencing a similar thing might find strength in knowing they are not alone.

Mourning a living person is real, and more people experience it than you realize.

I pray you never have to experience this; I pray that you will always be able to work out problems in your family without them completely cutting you off. I pray that you find peace in the hard times, and never lose hope.