Grieving the Person You Could Have Been

Story

Grief is usually reserved for people and things we can name — the family member we bury, the home we leave, the relationship that ends in silence. But there’s another kind of grief, quieter and harder to explain: mourning the person we could have been.

It’s a grief that doesn’t come with flowers or casseroles. There’s no funeral for the career you didn’t pursue, no sympathy cards for the love you let slip away, no ceremony for the versions of yourself that only existed in daydreams. And yet, they leave an ache just the same.

I’ve felt this kind of grief more than once. It’s the sting I feel when I pass the local art gallery and think about how I used to paint, before “real life” crowded it out. It’s the heaviness in my chest when I read someone’s travel memoir and remember the version of me who was going to live abroad, learn another language, and build a life in the corners of the world.

Sometimes it hits without warning. I’ll hear a song I used to play on guitar, and suddenly I’m nineteen again, certain I’d be the kind of person who always made music. Or I’ll scroll past a friend’s wedding photos and wonder about the alternate timeline where I said yes to someone I loved but feared wasn’t “right.”

It’s not regret exactly. Regret is sharp and specific; it points to a choice and says, There. That’s where you went wrong. This is different. This is softer, more like standing in a hallway with many doors and realizing you’ve locked most of them yourself.

We rarely talk about this kind of grief because it feels self-indulgent. After all, the person we could have been never existed. They didn’t have a birthday, they didn’t breathe air, they didn’t walk through the world. But they did live inside us. They shaped our hopes, whispered in our dreams, and left footprints in the paths we didn’t take.

And when they’re gone, it can feel like losing an invisible friend.

I think we all carry a small cemetery inside us. In mine, there’s the fearless version of me who became a war correspondent, the quieter one who stayed in my hometown and married my high school sweetheart, the ambitious one who started a business and wore power suits, the romantic one who packed a bag and left with nothing but a notebook and a train ticket.

They’re all buried there, under unmarked stones.

Sometimes, late at night, I visit them. Not to punish myself, but to remember. I imagine their lives — what their kitchens look like, who their friends are, what kind of weather they prefer. I wonder if they’re happy. I wonder if they ever think of me.

Maybe you have your own versions. The parent you never became. The artist you abandoned when the rent was due. The lover you didn’t fight for. The student who never took that chance.

And maybe you grieve them, even if you don’t say it out loud.

Here’s the thing I’m learning: grief doesn’t have to be permanent. Sometimes, it’s an invitation. Not to resurrect the exact life you lost — time doesn’t allow that — but to take pieces of it with you into the life you do have.

I will never be the nineteen-year-old guitarist again, but I can still learn a new song, fingers stumbling over strings in the quiet of my living room. I will never live in Paris for a year, but I can take a weekend trip and eat breakfast alone in a café, pretending for a few hours. I will never marry the high school sweetheart, but I can still write him into my fiction, giving him the happy ending we couldn’t find in reality.

Maybe that’s the secret: the people we could have been don’t really die. They just hand us parts of themselves and ask us to carry them forward.

I like to think they’re still walking somewhere, in some parallel street, and sometimes — when I’m doing something that makes my heart catch in the same way theirs would have — we walk in step for a while.

And that’s when I stop grieving, and start feeling whole again.