Letters for grief
Grief comes in many shapes, and the letters in this theme reflect that. The death of a parent or a partner. The end of a long relationship. A miscarriage. A friend, a sibling, a pet who was your closest company. A body that no longer works the way it used to. A future you had quietly assumed you would have. The slow grief of watching someone disappear into illness or addiction. All of it counts, and all of it is welcome here. Letters in this theme are written by people who have moved through their own version of it and remember exactly what it asked of them — the supermarket cry, the anniversary ambush, the unbearable lightness of a Sunday afternoon. They do not try to soothe the loss. They sit beside it.
A friendship ending is its own kind of bereavement.
It does not come with a funeral. There is no card, no flowers, no one bringing soup. You don't get to say I lost a friend this year without it sounding small, when it does not feel small. It feels like a death, and you are grieving a person who is, somewhere, still alive — which is its own confusion.
You can mourn this. You don't need anyone's permission. The relationship was real, the loss is real, and the absence of a ritual to mark it does not make it less real. Some nights you will cry about it and feel ridiculous for crying about it. Cry anyway. The friendship was a person you loved. It deserves a few tears.