You’re driving home from work when you catch yourself mid-argument, out loud, with your father. What you’re saying is what you should have said to him in the hospital, and you’ve said it to an empty passenger seat a few hundred times by now. He died four years ago, the house sold last spring, and everybody agrees you handled the whole business remarkably well.
Or maybe your situation is different. Both parents are alive and healthy and texting you about the weather, and something in your chest still goes cold whenever anybody mentions them.
From the outside it all looks settled. But your life keeps drifting somewhere you never actually chose, and you get close to something good and then trip yourself up on the way to it. You skip meals, you stay awake until three in the morning for no particular reason, you let the small repairs pile up until they turn expensive.
You thought you’d let go of the past. Have you?
What do you picture when somebody says grief?
Most people picture a funeral, somebody who died, and the years since. They think of someone saying, “It’s been six years and I still can’t let my father go.”
But grieving someone, or mourning them, is more than being sad. It is your mind finally accepting that the person is really gone — not just as a fact you can mention at dinner, but so deeply that you no longer half-expect it to be them when the phone rings.
Crying hard doesn’t finish it, and neither does time. Mourning asks for more than either. In your ordinary day, the person you lost is still the one whose number you never had to look up, the one you keep arguing with in the car on the way home, the one you were always going to prove something to. Mourning means noticing each of these, one by one, and learning to get through your day without that person in it. When that work stalls halfway, the loss never moves into the past. It stays in the present tense: years later, it is still happening to you.
Why do you start turning into the person you lost?
When mourning stalls, you may keep the lost person present by copying them rather than accepting that the relationship has ended.
You start using their phrases. You hold your cup exactly the way they held theirs. You feel what they felt and want what they wanted. You never decide to do any of this; it simply happens. Some part of you is keeping them alive by becoming them. There’s a name for this: identification.
That sounds tender, and usually it is. The trouble starts when mourning stops there and goes no further.
Because now the two of you overlap, and whatever was happening to them keeps happening inside you. If they were going downhill, you go downhill with them. And because they died, some part of you wants to die as well. That’s why depression settles in and stays for people who never finished mourning, and why some of them, in the worst cases, attempt suicide.
From the outside, skipping meals, refusing help, or damaging a stable life can look unrelated to the loss. From the inside, getting better may feel like disloyalty: if the person you lost suffered, recovering can feel as though you are abandoning them. Continuing to suffer becomes a way of staying connected.
Not every depression, and not every wish to die, comes from unfinished mourning. If you feel deeply depressed, have thoughts of dying, or can no longer manage everyday life, get professional help now. Your safety comes before any explanation of why you feel this way, including the ones in this piece.
But what if your parents are still alive?
Here’s the harder case. The grief that costs people the most is usually not for somebody who died, but for parents who are alive, well, and picking up the phone on the second ring.
You’ll want to argue with that. How do you mourn somebody who is sitting right there in front of you?
You can, because the one you have to let go of is not the person sitting there. It’s the parent from your childhood — the one who stood in the kitchen when you were nine and said something you’ve never repeated to anybody. And harder still, it’s the parent you made up back then, the one you wished you had. The mother who would have noticed what was happening to you. The father who would have come when you needed him.
Neither the parent from your childhood nor the one you wished for is the tired, older parent across the table asking whether you’ve eaten. You already know this, and you ignore it anyway. You look at the tired parent in front of you and keep expecting the one you wished for, and afterward you wonder why every visit ends in the same disappointment.
Everybody carries a picture in their head of the parent they needed. It isn’t a memory of what happened. You drew it as a child, out of longing: a mother who would notice, a father who would protect you, a parent who would apologize and mean it.
Even when the real parent lets you down again and again, the hope you had as a child can hang on. So you visit again, hoping that this time they’ll understand. You explain yourself one more time, and you leave hurt by the same response. The disappointment keeps repeating because part of you is still waiting for the real parent to become the parent in the picture.
So what you may not be able to let go of isn’t only your actual parent. It’s the expectation that this person will someday give you what was missing.
What’s left when you let go of the parent you wished for?
Only when you let go of the parent you wished for do you get to meet the parent you actually have.
Not the one in the picture. The one in the chair, smaller than you remember and slower, limited now in ways that aren’t going to change, repeating the same three stories every single time you visit. Somebody who didn’t give you what you needed and is never going to, because they never had it to give.
Never getting what you needed from them is a loss. A real one, with a weight of its own. Mourn it the way you would mourn any other loss.
Is that the same as forgiving them?
No, and the difference matters more than almost anything else here. Nobody’s asking you to understand what they did, or forgive it, or reconcile, or send a warm message on their birthday. You can let go of the picture and still keep every inch of the distance you carefully built. You can even mourn somebody you’ve already decided never to see again.
Before mourning can begin, it asks one thing of you, and only one. Admit that the parent you wanted isn’t coming. Not next year. Not once you finally do well enough to earn it. Not at the very end, at their bedside, when they finally say the words you’ve been waiting for.
Admit that, and mourning can finally begin. Refuse, and it can’t even start. You stay stuck in the life this piece began with, the one that quietly works against you: skipped meals, nights awake until three, tripping yourself up just before something good.
Why does giving up hope hurt so much?
Because hope has been protecting you from the full loss. As long as you believe your parent may someday understand, apologize, or put you first, you don’t have to face the fact that what you needed as a child may never come from them.
When you give up that hope, you also give up the future you have been imagining, the one where they finally make up for what happened back then. That is why it hurts the way grief hurts, rather than feeling like a calm, tidy decision. But what you are letting go of is not your love for them. It is the hope that the past can still be put right.
Two lines on one sheet of paper
Take one sheet of paper and write two lines, one underneath the other.
The first line: the parent I wanted would have ______. The second line: my actual parent ______.
Fill in both lines and cross out neither. Don’t judge either line, and don’t soften the second one by adding that they were doing their best with whatever they were given. Understanding them is a different job for a different day, if it is your job at all.
Seeing the gap between those two lines with your own eyes is how you start to admit that the parent you wanted isn’t coming. That is where mourning begins. Today, all you have to do is look at that gap. A picture you’ve been holding since you were a child doesn’t drop out of your hand the first time you loosen your grip, and it was never going to.
I write these pieces as notes to think with, not as treatment. A page can’t see your face or ask you the next question. So, fair warning about the second line: it’s the one that tends to hit hardest. People sit down braced for sadness and get something else instead — a flare of rage at somebody they have spent years defending, or a numb flatness that frightens them more than the rage would have. If that feeling is still with you at bedtime, don’t carry it alone and call that strength. Take the two lines to a therapist and read them out loud, both of them, in the order you wrote them. Half of what makes those lines bearable is that somebody else has finally heard them.
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Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board