Grieving Someone Who Isn't Dead

This is a specific kind of grief that polite company doesn’t give you permission to feel.

When someone dies, there are rituals. Funerals, sympathy cards, three days off work. People bring casseroles. They say the right things. There is a shape the loss is supposed to fit into.

But when someone you love is still alive and simply gone from your life — the ex who cut you off, the friend who drifted, the parent you’re estranged from, the version of yourself you had to leave behind — there is no ritual. There is no time off. There’s just you, knowing they are out there, somewhere, having breakfast and going to work, and you aren’t allowed to miss them in any way that anyone else will honor.

These twelve songs are for that grief.

Phoebe Bridgers’s “I Know the End” is the scream of it — five and a half minutes that start as a lullaby and end with her actually screaming over a marching band. Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is the quiet opposite: the most matter-of-fact acceptance ever sung in American pop. Big Thief’s “Not” catalogs everything the feeling isn’t before collapsing into a three-minute guitar solo that admits there is no language for it.

Joni Mitchell’s nearly-nine-minute “Song for Sharon” is a letter to a friend back home from the person she could never go back to being. Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” is a literal 4am letter, signed at the end, to the man who slept with his wife. Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is young-man grief for a love he drove away himself. Nina Simone’s “Wild Is the Wind” is seven minutes of a 1957 film ballad remade as a devotional to a presence that was never quite there.

The back half moves through the heaviest territory. Tom Waits’s “Tom Traubert’s Blues” is a drunk’s orchestral ballad about the self he is becoming. Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day” narrates the slow death of a high school girlfriend in pastoral detail. Red House Painters’ eight-minute “Katy Song” is Mark Kozelek doing the 3am math of a missing person who is still technically a phone call away. Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” closes most of the record with ten verses of accounting in past tense. And Richard & Linda Thompson’s “Calvary Cross” — six and a half minutes of a marriage feeling its own future collapse — ends things with anticipatory grief, which is maybe the purest form.

No one here is going to tell you to move on. That isn’t what grief is for.