The Silence I Didn’t Know Was Grief
By Brittany Tallman | May 23, 2025Understanding grief, especially in the context of loss over time, can be an essential step in the healing process.
For a long time, I thought I was just creating distance.
I told myself I was being mature. Protective. That I was setting boundaries.
I told myself it was okay to love someone from afar if closeness only reopened wounds.
But looking back now, I see it differently.
I wasn’t setting boundaries.
I was grieving.
And I didn’t even know it.
Grieving Someone Who’s Still Alive
My dad was my anchor in a house that didn’t always feel safe.
The calm inside chaos. The soft place I didn’t find anywhere else.
While my mom was overwhelmed by her own struggles, and my siblings kept their distance from the chaos they couldn’t understand, I often felt like an outsider in my own family.
But my dad accepted me for who I was. With him, I felt seen. I felt loved.
Sometimes, we’d rock together—him in his chair, me beside him—trying to calm a world that felt too loud. We never talked about it, but I think we both understood what it meant. It wasn’t just a habit. It was a way of saying, “I get it.” A quiet language between two people carrying more than they knew how to say
Even in the middle of his own chaos, he made space for me.
He brought home my favorite candy on my rough days.
He told me I was smart when learning felt like a battlefield.
And more than anything, he made me feel accepted—seen for who I was underneath the ADHD.
The kid who felt different.
The one who needed to feel safe.
The one who just wanted to be enough
I wonder if he saw a version of himself in me. Sensitive. Unsure. A little lost in a world that moves too fast and too loud. And maybe that’s why he tried so hard to meet me where I was.
But he was struggling, too.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was carrying so much pain. Quietly. In silence, in rocking chairs, in late-night calls to his mom. In the way his eyes always looked a little tired, even when he smiled.
And then, slowly… I watched that version of him slip away.
The man who made me feel safe started to feel unfamiliar.
Addiction. Depression. Emotional distance I didn’t know how to name.
It felt like betrayal. Like being left behind by the one person who never made me feel like a burden.
And the truth is—I didn’t know how to stay close to someone who had changed so much. I didn’t know how to hold the grief of losing him while he was still here.
So I told myself distance was healthy. That I was setting boundaries. That loving him from afar was the right thing to do.
But really?
I was protecting myself from the heartbreak of naming what was happening.
Because naming it would have meant accepting that I had lost the only version of him that ever made me feel like I was enough.
And I wasn’t ready for that.
The version of him I’d known—the one who made me feel safe—was fading.
But he was still here.
Still calling.
Still trying, in his own quiet way, to stay connected.
And I… didn’t always answer.
Naming the Grief I Didn’t Know I Was Carrying
I didn’t mean to push him away, I just didn’t know how to face what I was losing while he was still alive.
I thought I had more time, time to figure it out, time to come back around, time to try again, later.
But I ran out of time.
He passed away, and suddenly I was left with all the things I hadn’t said — and all the love I hadn’t stopped feeling, even from a distance.
It wasn’t until I started asking myself the hard questions—why didn’t I call more, why didn’t I try—that I realized something life-altering:
I had been grieving him while he was still alive.
Because if I didn’t pick up the phone, I didn’t have to accept who he had become.
And if I didn’t accept it, I didn’t have to let go.
But grief doesn’t disappear when you ignore it. It festers beneath the silence.
The part of grief no one talks about—the part where you think:
If I say nothing, maybe I won’t have to say goodbye.
But silence is a goodbye. And sometimes, we don’t realize we’ve already said it.
What I Would Have Done Differently
We talk about grief like it begins with death.
But sometimes, grief starts much earlier—with change. With emotional disappearance. With unmet expectations we never learned how to name.
If I had known I was grieving, I might’ve tried to sit with it.
I might’ve tried to accept him as he was. Not the dad I used to know, but the one still calling, still reaching.
I wouldn’t have tried to fix him or wondered why I wasn’t enough.
I would have just met him where he was.
Not to rewrite the past—
But to exist with him one more time.
As two people doing the best they could inside their pain.
I don’t share this to shame who I was.
I share it because I know someone else out there is carrying unspoken grief too.
If you’ve ever distanced yourself from someone you love—not because you stopped caring, but because the pain was too much—
You are not alone.
And it’s not too late to name what you’ve been carrying.
Even if you never get the closure you hoped for, you can still find understanding.
You can still choose healing.
Not by fixing what happened—
But by finally seeing what it held.