The Question People Often Feel Ashamed to Ask
In my work I often hear clients say something like:
"I know they didn't choose to hurt me, but it feels like they abandoned me."
They pause before saying it, as though speaking those words out loud might somehow be disloyal.
When someone dies, particularly someone you loved deeply, there can be enormous pressure to focus only on sadness. Only on missing them, but grief is rarely that simple.
Alongside the love, the longing and the heartbreak, there can also be anger, confusion and sometimes a profound sense of being left behind.
If you've ever thought, "How could you leave me to deal with this?" you're not alone.
Many people feel it. Few people talk about it.
Why does grief sometimes feel like abandonment?
When someone dies, you don't only lose the person. You lose their presence in your life.
The person you called, who understood your history and who witnessed your life. The person who made you feel less alone in the world, and suddenly, they're gone.
Part of grief is learning how to live without someone you never wanted to live without. Of course that can feel like abandonment, not because they intended to leave you, but because the experience of their absence is so profound.
As a grief and loss counsellor in Huddersfield and online, I often hear people say:
"I feel like I've been left to figure this out on my own."
That feeling can be incredibly painful, because underneath it is often fear.
Fear of facing life without them. Fear of carrying responsibilities alone. Fear of becoming someone you never wanted to be.
“Why do I feel angry that they died?”
Loss changes your life. Sometimes dramatically. Sometimes permanently. You might now be carrying responsibilities you never expected.
Making decisions alone. Facing milestones without the person you thought would be beside you.
When grief is spoken about publicly, anger is often treated as something people should move past quickly, but anger can be a very natural response to losing someone important. It's often the part of grief that protects the part that feels devastated.
When the death was by suicide
“Why wasn't I enough for you to stay?”
This is one of the most painful questions I hear in suicide bereavement and often one of the hardest to say out loud.
Many people carry a deep sense of rejection after a suicide loss, not because they truly believe the person wanted to hurt them, but because the loss can feel intensely personal.
You are left with questions like:
Why didn't they tell me how bad things were?
Why couldn't my love save them?
Why wasn't I enough?
Why did they leave me with this?
These questions don't come from selfishness. They come from heartbreak. From trying to understand something that feels impossible to understand.
Understanding the feeling of abandonment after suicide loss
One of the cruellest aspects of suicide bereavement is that it can leave people carrying two realities at once. The reality that they loved the person deeply, and the reality that they feel deeply hurt by what happened.
Many people feel guilty for acknowledging that hurt. As though recognising their own pain somehow dishonours the person who died. It doesn't. Both things can be true. You can have enormous compassion for the suffering that led to their death, and still feel abandoned by their absence.
You can understand their pain and still grieve the impact their death has had on your life.
Therapy often helps people create space for both truths. Without having to choose one or the other.
“Will these feelings ever go away?”
Usually, what changes is not the fact that the feelings existed. It's the way you hold them. In the early stages of grief, abandonment can feel all-consuming. It can colour every memory. Every thought about the future. Every unanswered question.
Over time, many people begin to understand that the feeling of abandonment is often rooted in something deeper. Love. Attachment. Need. The significance of the relationship itself.
The stronger the bond, the greater the disruption when that bond is broken. That understanding doesn't remove the pain, but it can soften the self-blame that often accompanies it.
One of the hardest parts of grief is accepting that conflicting emotions can exist together. You can love someone and feel angry. You can understand their suffering and feel hurt by their death. You can miss them desperately and wish things had been different.
Grief is rarely either/or. More often, it is both/and.
Healing doesn't come from forcing one feeling out. It comes from making room for all of them.
My reflections
If you've felt abandoned since they died, it doesn't make you disloyal. If you've wondered why you weren't enough to keep them here, it doesn't make you selfish. It makes you human.
These are some of the deepest wounds grief can leave behind, and they deserve understanding, not judgement.
A Gentle Next Step
If you're experiencing feelings of abandonment, rejection or unanswered questions after a loss, particularly after a suicide bereavement, I offer grief and loss counselling, including specialist suicide bereavement support, in Huddersfield and online across the UK.
Together, we can make space for the complicated emotions that often sit beneath grief. The ones that feel difficult to say out loud. Sometimes healing begins when those feelings finally have somewhere safe to be heard.
Joanne Reed, Grief, Loss & Suicide Bereavement Counsellor (Huddersfield + Online)