On a walk with my beagle recently, I came around the path and found an actual peacock perched on the bridge guardrail, tail spilling over the side like a waterfall of jewelry, posing like it was getting paid. I crouched, zoomed in, caught the light just right. It was genuinely a good photo.
And before I could think, my thumb was already moving to send it to my mom. She loves photography. She loves birds and nature and noticing things. It's something we share, maybe the truest thing we ever shared.
Then I remembered. We don't talk anymore.
A few days before that, my husband was heading out and asked if I wanted anything to drink. I said a Coke. He texted back: "No Coke, Pepsi." And I laughed out loud, alone in my kitchen, because that's the old SNL diner sketch, cheeburger cheeburger, one of my mother's favorites. She loved comedy. She could quote a sketch for a week straight. I got my sense of humor from somewhere.
I sent him the GIF. Then I sat down and cried about a Pepsi.
I went no contact with part of my family almost three years ago. It was the right decision. It is still the right decision. And grief, it turns out, does not care about either of those facts.
Grief With No Funeral
Here's what nobody warns you about estrangement: the grief doesn't show up on anniversaries, polite and scheduled. It ambushes you in the soda aisle. It hides inside Snoopy comics and sunsets she would have pulled the car over for. It perches on a bridge railing dressed as a peacock.
Because you are mourning someone who is still alive.
When someone dies, people bring casseroles. When you go no contact, nobody brings anything. There's no sympathy card, no service, no socially agreed-upon permission to be sad. Just you, a door you closed yourself, and a heart that didn't get the memo.
For months I dreamed about them almost every night. Some of the dreams were ugly. But sometimes we were just walking somewhere green, talking about nothing, and it was pleasant. Those were worse. You wake up from the nice ones and have to lose them all over again before breakfast.
Missing Them Is Not a Verdict
Because there's no script for this kind of grief, people fill in their own. The most common one goes: if you miss them, you should reconnect. As if missing someone were a verdict instead of a feeling.
It isn't. Missing someone doesn't automatically mean reconciliation is possible, or healthy, or safe. It just means you loved them. Children are wired to love their parents, even parents who couldn't love them back in the ways they needed. That wiring doesn't get removed when you change your phone contacts.
So let me say the thing I needed someone to say to me:
You can heal and still miss someone. You can understand exactly why you left and still grieve. You can know a relationship wasn't safe and still wish, with your whole chest, that it had been different.
All of those things can be true at the same time, in the same person, on the same Tuesday, over the same Pepsi.
What the Longing Is Really For
Something else I've learned to notice: what I'm longing for is usually not the whole person. It's the good parts, and what those parts were supposed to grow into.
My mother is warm and creative. She notices light. She notices birds. There were real, beautiful things in her, and those are the things that reach for me from bridge railings and soda orders. The missing is real because the good parts were real.
But when I slow down, "I miss her" often turns out to mean "I miss the mother I needed." Those are not the same ache, and only one of them can be answered by a phone call. The other one I'm learning to answer myself.
When Anger Turns Into Sadness
There's a strange mercy hiding in all this missing.
I used to talk about my family with anger. Now I mostly talk about them with sadness. That shift scared me at first, because sadness feels softer, more dangerous, more likely to open doors.
But anger turning into grief isn't relapse. It's what healing actually looks like. The wound stops burning and starts aching.
What I Do When the Wave Comes
Now, when the missing arrives, I let it.
I cry on the crying days. I laugh at the sketch anyway, because the joke is still funny and the laugh is still mine. I tell someone safe. And I've made myself one rule: I don't make permanent decisions on crying days.
Grief gets a seat in the car. It doesn't get the wheel.
I Still Take the Pictures
That peacock photo is still in my camera roll. So are others like it. A little folder of unsent things.
I used to think that was sad. Lately I think it's something else. The love doesn't need a recipient to be real. Noticing the peacock, catching the light, feeling her in it for a second — that part is mine. I inherited the noticing, and nobody can be estranged from their own noticing.
If you're estranged from someone and you still miss them, you are not broken, and you did not fail at healing. You're a person who loved someone it wasn't safe to stay close to.
So I light the candle for what should have been. I keep the door closed on what was.
And I still take the pictures.
If grief like this ever feels too heavy to carry alone, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is there to call or text, any hour, for any kind of emotional pain. You don't have to be in crisis to deserve support.
