There are losses that unfold slowly, without a clear moment of goodbye. You wake up one day and realize that the person sitting across from you — the one you’ve known for years, maybe decades — has changed. Not gone, but different. Illness has a way of rearranging lives like that. It takes pieces of the person you love, sometimes gently, sometimes all at once, until the familiar rhythms of your connection no longer sound the same.

This letter to grief was the final assignment written by a bereaved daughter who cared for her mother.

The grief in these non-death losses are as valid as the grief caused by death. Get support and learn about grief in all its forms as a way to strengthen and provide additional support knowing that you are experiencing grief and that is okay. You too need to create your coping kit to first manage the stressful situation and then to eventually move from the old you to the new you.