The kind of grief that doesn’t get flowers

There’s a grief no one talks about.
No funeral.
No casseroles.
No sympathy cards.
No tearful eulogies.

Because the person you’re grieving… is still alive.

My mother is still alive.
We haven’t spoken in years.

And yet, she lives inside me;
in the way my shoulders tense at sudden footsteps,
in the pit of my stomach when I try to speak up,
in the way I shrink from joy, like I haven’t quite earned it.

People talk about estrangement like it’s a clean break.
A dramatic exit.
A line drawn in the sand.

But it wasn’t like that for me.

Mine felt more like a garden
rotting from the inside out.

It wasn’t one moment.
It was hundreds.
Small ones.
Repeated ones.