Belonging to No One

Living with a 30-Year Grief

Grief is not just the wound itself but the salt scattered across it in a thousand small, silent ways. I watch a mother laugh with her daughter in a coffee shop, the effortless joy between them, and it feels like seeing a world to which I’ll never belong. Thirty years I carried my mother’s loss with me, even when she was technically still here. But her passing made something final—something closed within me that I don’t think will ever truly open again.

My mother’s story began with tragedy. She was hurt by joyriders, an accident that left her in a permanent vegetative state. I was just a child, and from that moment on, I knew her as someone halfway between presence and absence. This strange, unfinished goodbye began so early in my life that I grew into it. I grew into the silence that surrounded her and all the years that followed, years in which she was technically still with us but so far from who she had been.

For most people, grief begins with an ending, but my grief began with a beginning that simply…never came to pass. People don’t know how to respond to this kind of loss, to years of “almost” and “might have been.” Friends would offer sympathy at first, saying they could only imagine what I was going through. But as the years passed, they stopped asking. Sympathy faded to silence. Their lives moved on, while I stayed behind, in that strange in-between where my mother both was and wasn’t. And now that she’s gone, finally gone, I find myself even further removed—grieving a life that never existed, an ending that felt overdue and sudden at the same time.

It’s a lonely, unacknowledged kind of loss. So many people experience grief, but not like this. Not this 30-year metamorphosis that has left me someone I don’t even fully recognize, let alone others. And even though I have friends, even though I am surrounded by family who love me, I feel alone in a way that’s hard to explain, as if I’m a guest in a world I don’t quite belong to.

When my mother died, I felt a shift. It wasn’t just loss—it was something darker and quieter. A transformation, maybe. Even though she didn’t raise me, she was there. Our bond was there, woven through every year of waiting and wishing for a connection that could never fully return. Her presence, as strange as it was, was an anchor I didn’t realise I depended on. And now, with her truly gone, it feels as though my inner compass has disappeared. I can’t seem to find my bearings in quite the same way. There’s no “moving on,” no stepping back into the life I used to have.

In moments, I still feel my mother’s presence—not as she was, but as I imagine she might have been. I can almost picture her, smiling as though everything were ordinary, her arms around me in a warm hug I’ve only dreamed of. I was so young that I don’t remember her hugs, only the echo of how they might have felt. For a fleeting second, it’s as if I’m part of that world, one where she and I belong together. But then the moment slips away, and I find myself back in the quiet loneliness that has become my own.

I don’t know if there’s an end to this feeling or if it’s simply something I’ll carry forever. And I don’t have any advice for you about grief—no mindset plan, no step-by-step guide. All I have is this: my own journey and this quiet attempt to crack open my thoughts about it. If you are going through loss, if grief is a part of your world right now, I hope these words bring a measure of comfort. Even in this strange loneliness, you are not alone.

With Love

Kathryn

(Joyful Sarcasm)