Nobody sends a card when your marriage ends, when a diagnosis takes away the life you had planned, or when you stop speaking to your mother. You are expected to keep working and to be fine fairly soon.
If what you feel seems a lot like grief, that is because it is. Health sources and researchers describe it in those terms.
Can you grieve something other than a death?
Yes. MedlinePlus, from the National Institutes of Health, defines grief as "a reaction to a major loss of someone or something." It says that people can grieve an incurable illness or a chronic condition that affects their quality of life, and that "the end of a significant relationship may also cause grieving."
The American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology defines grief as the anguish that follows a significant loss, "usually the death of a beloved person." The word "usually" leaves room for other losses.
There is some research as well. A 2014 online survey compared people who had been bereaved (151) with people who had lost a job (157) or been through a divorce (116). The authors concluded that grief "may be a common phenomenology across types of loss." They also noted the limits of the study: it was a convenience sample surveyed at a single point in time, so it is a suggestive result and not a settled one.
What kinds of losses do people grieve?
The ones named in the sources used for this guide, along with some that people commonly describe:
- The end of a marriage or long relationship. You lose a person, and also a home, a routine and a future you had pictured.
- A job or a career. Work can carry your income, your daily structure and a large part of who you are.
- Health. A chronic or incurable illness can mean grieving abilities and plans you had counted on.
- Pregnancy loss. Some parents experience this as a death. It appears here because the people around them often do not treat it that way.
- Infertility and family estrangement. People often describe both as grief.
- A person who is still alive but changed by dementia, brain injury or addiction.
- A place or an identity, for example after immigration, retirement, or a change in how you understand yourself.
The feelings can resemble the ones that follow a death: yearning, anger, guilt, trouble sleeping and concentrating. What Does Grief Feel Like? describes them.
Why can this kind of grief feel so lonely?
In 1989 Kenneth J. Doka published a book called Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines the term as "grief that society (or some element of it) limits, does not expect, or may not allow a person to express." One of its examples is parents grieving a stillborn baby.
The dictionary adds that disenfranchised grief "may isolate the bereaved individual from others." That is the particular difficulty of these losses. The pain is one part. The other part is that there is often no ritual, and friends may expect you to move on within weeks, or may even congratulate you.
Pregnancy loss shows the gap clearly. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists tells patients: "For many women, emotional healing takes longer than physical healing."
What if the loss has no clear ending?
Dr. Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss in the 1970s for losses that lack certainty. Her website describes two types. In the first, a person is physically absent but psychologically present, and her examples include divorce and immigration. In the second, a person is physically present but psychologically absent, as with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, traumatic brain injury and addiction.
What sets these apart, she writes, is that there is "no certainty that the person will come back or return to the way they used to be." People who are estranged from a parent, a child or a sibling often describe something similar: the person is alive, the door is neither open nor shut, and it is hard to know whether to mourn or to hope.
The guide to types of grief explains these terms alongside the others.
Can this kind of grief be diagnosed?
Not as a grief disorder. The one grief-specific diagnosis, prolonged grief disorder, is defined in both DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 only for the death of a person. That is a limit of the manuals. It is not a ruling on whether your grief is real.
A loss of any kind can also come with depression or anxiety, and a clinician can assess those. If you are unsure which you are dealing with, Grief vs. Depression explains how clinicians tell them apart. If things feel hopeless or you have thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988, or call 911 in an emergency.
What kind of support is there?
Most people who are grieving do not need therapy. It can help to have the loss recognized, by you and by at least one other person. Calling it grief, out loud, to someone who will not argue with the word, can be a start.
The National Institute on Aging's advice for grief applies here: if sadness is making it difficult to carry on day to day, reach out to a support group, a mental health professional or the people close to you.
Some people want more room than friends can give, especially when a loss is tangled up with older ones. Dr. Rabin's grief and loss therapy includes losses other than a death: the end of a marriage, estrangement, a career, health, identity. The work is about what this loss means to you and how it connects to your history. She also sees people for life transitions and relationship concerns, which often overlap with this kind of grief.
Keep reading
Sources
- MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia (National Institutes of Health), Grief (2026)
- American Psychological Association, APA Dictionary of Psychology: grief
- American Psychological Association, APA Dictionary of Psychology: disenfranchised grief
- Papa, Lancaster and Kahler, Commonalities in grief responding across bereavement and non-bereavement losses, Journal of Affective Disorders (2014)
- Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss: FAQ
- American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Early Pregnancy Loss (2024)
- Prigerson, Boelen, Xu, Smith and Maciejewski, Validation of the new DSM-5-TR criteria for prolonged grief disorder and the PG-13-Revised (PG-13-R) scale, World Psychiatry (2021)
- Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss: About
- National Institute on Aging, Coping With Grief and Loss (2024)
Last reviewed October 2026. This guide is general information, not medical advice or a diagnosis. If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911 in an emergency.
