Living On in the World Left Behind
Introduction
When you lose someone you love, how do you recover? And what does it even mean to “recover”?
This is a record of my own experience, written for someone who may be in a similar situation.
I have written it with care, so as not to harm her dignity. If you knew her and are reading this, I would be grateful if you could read it with that in mind.
In American research in psychology, philosophy and sociology, the death of a spouse or partner is considered one of the greatest stresses in a person’s life. Grief is not a single straight road. It is a swell of feeling that comes in and goes out like waves. You may be calm today, and sink back into deep sorrow tomorrow. Simply giving yourself to those waves, you slowly, little by little, regain your own outline.
But in that “little by little” there is a loneliness that is hard to see from the outside. Even when you try to talk about your sorrow, it doesn’t come out as words. You can’t sort out your feelings even for yourself, and time just passes while you are stunned. And when you finally try to talk to someone, what waits for you is an unexpected wall of “not understanding.”
Especially when you weren’t married. When the relationship isn’t legally recognized as “family.” But when I lost the person who mattered most in my life, my grief had no “official” place anywhere in society.
In psychology this is called “disenfranchised grief.” People around you may say “I’m so sorry” or “That must have been hard,” but it isn’t treated as equal to “a loss as a bereaved family member.” There is that kind of gap.
And I felt keenly that there is a limit to empathy, too. However kind someone is, however close they stay, people “can’t respond to what they haven’t experienced.” That is the reality.
Even so, there were just two things people said that saved me.
“I don’t understand how you feel. But — thank you for everything you did. You must be exhausted.” The one who said this to me was a senior colleague I had known for ten years. The honesty of “I don’t understand,” and the affirmation of “you must be exhausted.” In those words there was an imagination that didn’t force itself to understand, and a kindness that tried to stay close while keeping its distance.
And the other was from a friend who simply kept being there beside me. “I’ll always be here.” Those few words held me up through days I couldn’t put into words. They were words like an unconditional presence, needing no explanation, no reason, not even empathy.
The words of these two people truly saved me. With those words as a beginning, little by little, in “the world without her,” I found my way back to myself. I thought it would probably take about three years. But now, about two years on, I have finally come to the point where I can put it into words like this.
Even now, I remember how, when I was carelessly singing a medley of Mr.Children in the living room, she was laughing at me while messaging her friends on LINE. That ordinary moment, which should have meant nothing, has become now the most precious memory of all.
This is my own story. But at the same time, I write it hoping that when someone is in the same kind of sorrow, it might help them come across their own “you must be exhausted.”
Chapter 1 Conviction
It began with something very small, a change in her body. One day she said, “Something feels a little off.” At first it was the kind of unease that could easily have slipped away in everyday life. But that small unease became the reason she went to the hospital, and then the illness was found.
When we got the diagnosis, my head must have understood it was “serious.” But my heart was somewhere else. To be precise, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.
“I’m going to save her, no matter what.” “There’s no way she’s going to die.”
That conviction took root in me. “If I research this illness with everything I have and do the right things, she will be saved.” That is what I was trying to believe.
Even if some rational part of me knew the reality that “people die,” my feelings flatly denied it. And those feelings stayed lodged in me for a long time, even after she died.
Looking back, I think that was the process of “denial.” The first stage of grief proposed by the psychologist Kübler-Ross. In my case, though, it was extremely hard and firm, and it became a kind of outer shell that protected me.
But at the same time, that “not believing” would come to torment me terribly after she was gone.
Even now I can’t clearly remember what happened on the day she died, or how I felt. It was as if my body had slipped out of me.
I spent quiet time with her, her eyes closed. Afterward, in the act of sending her off, there was even something like guilt. Was this really all right? I kept asking myself.
For many days after that, the world was filled with sounds I couldn’t make sense of. Morning came, night came, there were people, there was light. But in all of it, she alone was missing.
And only in photographs did she go on smiling gently, unchanged.
What was happening in front of me was real, yet my heart was still saying, “She isn’t dead.” I have to keep a place for her to come back to. If I clear away her things, there will be no going back. Thinking that, I went day after day unable to touch her belongings.
One day my phone showed a notification: “A new photo Memory has been created.” I didn’t want to see it. I turned the notifications off at once.
Far from accepting reality, just trying to face it made my breathing shallow. My heart would race, and there were days I just walked around and around my room, not knowing whether I was crying or angry.
She was very strong, sensitive, and always thinking of others. She worried about me until the very end. More than her own body, she worried about what would become of me. The LINE messages and the notes on her desk she left behind quietly proved it.
— No reply will come anymore.
It felt as if she were apologizing: “I’m sorry for leaving you alone.” But I was the one who should have apologized. How much pain she was enduring, how much anxiety she was facing, I thought I was seeing it, but I wasn’t.
Even so, if she felt at ease, even for a moment, in that hospital room, then perhaps that alone meant something.
I was left behind, alone, in a world without her. And at that point I didn’t yet know that what lay ahead was the beginning of an endless time called “living with loss.”
Chapter 2 My Heart Fell Apart
After she was gone, the world changed. The streets I used to walk, the room I lived in, the familiar furniture — all of it became scenery that emphasized her “absence.”
“From now on I’m going to buy the newspaper at the convenience store and keep my antenna up for news.” — there was a time when that was the plan. Sometimes I remember the days I quietly watched her profile from a little distance, as she sat on the sofa and opened the paper.
I had to rebuild my life. I packed up her things and sent them to her family home. My own move came at the same time, and in a room full of cardboard boxes, not knowing whether I was crying, or sleeping, or thinking nothing at all, only time went by.
Everyday life fell apart all too easily. Even running the washing machine was too much, and I couldn’t feel any meaning in eating. I couldn’t answer emails, and I closed all my social media. I tried somehow to keep up with work and my daily schedule, but I don’t remember whether I was really managing it.
But harder than any of that was the feeling that no one truly understood.
She was not my “family.” Legally and institutionally, I was not “the bereaved.” Even so, she was at the center of my life. The days we spent together, the words we exchanged, the plans for the future — all of it bound us more deeply than family.
“She was your girlfriend, right?” “She was still so young.” Words like these, flat and mechanical, pierced my chest. Even knowing they meant no harm, that “lightness” made my grief stand out all the more.
There is a term I learned later: “disenfranchised grief.” In a death within a relationship that society doesn’t formally recognize — an unmarried partner, a former spouse, a same-sex partner, a close friend — the weight of the loss is underestimated by those around you, or you lose any place to speak of it. For the person grieving, someone irreplaceable is gone, yet an atmosphere of “it’s not really something to be that sad about” quietly pushes them away.
In fact, even at the funeral, I behaved like one of her “friends.” Even though I took pride in having been by her side to the very end, it was her family who were thanked, and somewhere along the way I had become someone who “just happened to be there.”
Of course, this isn’t about anyone being at fault. But my grief had no “place to belong.” Unshared, unacknowledged, it simply settled to the bottom.
My feelings wouldn’t turn into words. When I tried to talk, I only became more confused. “Whatever I say, it won’t get through anyway.” That resignation came first, and I stopped speaking.
The truth is, I wanted to talk. I just wanted someone to listen. “That must have been hard,” or “Are you okay?” I was longing for words that simple.
But many people quietly kept their distance. I knew they were worried. Yet the more they tiptoed around me, the more I felt like “something foreign.”
I hadn’t only lost her. I was beginning to realize there was another loss waiting after it: “isolation.”