Grieving The Living
GRIEVING THE LIVING
BY LINDSAY GOULD
There’s a strange clarity that comes when someone passes away.
The grief is sharp and undeniable, but it has structure. There are services to attend, casseroles dropped off at the door, and quiet embraces that say everything words can’t. There’s a gathering of people who all agree on one thing: this person mattered. You lay them to rest while sorting through their belongings, as if touching what they once touched might somehow bridge the space between then and now. And gradually, you begin the long process of learning how to live in a world that no longer includes them.
There is a finality to it. A heartbreaking, irreversible understanding. You know why they’re gone and you know they can’t come back. As devastating as that truth is, it gives your grief edges. It gives it shape.
But grieving someone who is still alive—especially in college—is a different kind of ache. Because in college, you don’t always lose access to them. You lose closeness.
They’re still out there, maybe sitting three rows ahead of you in lecture, maybe laughing in the dining hall at a table you used to claim together after late practices or long study nights. They’re still posting pictures on the same campus you walk through every day. You could, in theory, pass them on the quad between classes. You could type out a message and watch the little “delivered” notification appear. You could scroll through old photos taken in dorm rooms with string lights taped unevenly to the wall and see proof that, at one point, you were inseparable.
There’s no ceremony for the end of a friendship. No acknowledgement from the outside world that something meaningful has shifted. The semester just keeps moving and assignments are still due at 11:59. Everyone else seems to carry on like nothing changed, even when your entire world was flipped upside down.
Sometimes it ends explosively, with words that can’t be unsaid and trust that fractures so quickly you don’t even realize what happened until it’s already broken. You replay the conversation in your head while walking to class, wondering which sentence did the damage, which toned sharpened the air. Other times it’s softer and slower. You simply drift. Different schedules, different priorities, different versions of yourselves forming without each other. One day you suddenly realize you don’t know what they did last weekend or how their family is doing.
I think friendship breakups in college cut differently because this is the stage of life where we’re told we’re “finding our people.” We’re told these are the friendships that will stand beside us at our weddings, the ones that will last decades. And maybe some will; but, not all of them are meant to.
College is a place where everyone is evolving at full speed. You’re choosing majors, questioning beliefs, figuring out who you are when your parents aren’t around to define you. You’re learning how to set boundaries, how to say no, and how to ask for what you need.
No one really prepares you for the moment you lose a friend who once felt permanent. The friend who knew your family dynamics without explanation. The one who could decode your silence during a two-hour study session. The one who saw you at your worst—puffy-eyed, overwhelmed, sitting cross-legged on a dorm floor at 1 a.m.---and stayed anyway. The who celebrated your wins like they were their own, who showed up to your games or shows without being asked.
You build a version of your college life around people like that. You assume you’ll graduate side by side. You picture future apartments in the same city and tell the story of how you met during freshman orientation and never looked back.
What makes grieving the living so uniquely painful is the ambiguity. When someone passes away, as devastating as it is, there’s nothing left to negotiate. You’re forced to accept the boundary between “here” and “gone.”
But when someone is still alive, sharing the same campus and existing in the same small bubble, the boundary feels invisible. You know they are only one text away or that you could easily break the silence. And maybe that’s the hardest part: choosing not to. Choosing peace over pride. Choosing growth over familiarity. Choosing yourself, even when every memory tries to pull you backward.
Whether in a mutual friend’s birthday photo or across the room at a party where you both pretend not to notice, it takes a different level of strength to let someone remain in your past when you know you’ll probably see them again.
There’s guilt woven into it, too. You wonder if you tried hard enough, or if you were too stubborn. You ask yourself whether you let something beautiful slip through your fingers because you were afraid to be vulnerable. Or maybe you stayed too long, accepting less than you deserved because you were afraid of sitting alone in the dining hall.
When someone you love is no longer physically here, the grief centers around absence. But when someone you love is still alive and simply no longer in your life, the grief is layered with choice, memory and proximity. Yet, sometimes losing a friend is the very thing that forces you to grow.
It takes maturity to accept that not every connection is meant to stretch across a lifetime, even if it once felt like it would stretch through all four years. It takes maturity to recognize when something that one felt safe is no longer healthy. It takes courage to walk away from a dynamic that shaped your college experience, even if walking away feels like tearing out a chapter before graduation.
We don’t talk enough about the bravery it takes to let a friendship end in a place where you can’t fully escape it: to resist checking their location on a map you both still share, to stop analyzing who they’re with now, to let gratitude coexist with disappointment.
Grieving someone who is still alive in a place you both still inhabit requires a different kind of closure, the kind you create for yourself. There is power in surviving the silence. Strength in walking into spaces you once shared and making them your own again. Strength in understanding that losing someone doesn’t mean you failed; it means you lived, you connected, you cared deeply enough that their absence now matters.
Maybe that’s the quiet truth about friendship loss in college: if it hurts this much, it must have meant something.
Mourning the living is complicated and messy. It’s private and often invisible in a place that feels so public and exposing. And sometimes, the strongest thing you can do is let someone go, not because you stopped caring, but because you care enough about yourself to accept that not every bond is meant to last.
Even if, somewhere deep down, you still miss them.
Holding gratitude, even in goodbye,
Lindsay