When someone you love dies of cancer, the loss of the person is the center of everything. But surrounding that central loss are countless other losses — less visible, often unacknowledged — that can surprise you with their weight long after the initial period of grief.
These are called secondary losses, and naming them is important.
You might lose a role. The loss of a parent means also losing the experience of being parented — of having someone in the world who has known you since before you could remember, who loved you unconditionally, who occupied a unique position in your life. Even adult children grieve this. The loss of a spouse means also losing your daily companion, your domestic partner, your future as you had imagined it.
You might lose a community. A loved one's social world often becomes partly yours — their friends, their colleagues, the community that organized around their life. When they die, that community may scatter or become inaccessible. The people who were part of your life because of them may gradually drift away.
You might lose financial stability, or a home, or a way of life that depended on their presence or their income. These are practical losses, but they carry emotional weight too — the compounding grief of losing both the person and the life you built together.
You might lose a version of the future. The specific future you had imagined — the plans you made, the things you were going to do together, the milestones you were going to share — is also gone. And grieving a future that never happened is its own particular kind of sadness.
You might lose parts of yourself. Pieces of your identity, as we explored elsewhere, your sense of who you are in relation to this person, can dissolve with them.
Naming the secondary losses — saying "I have also lost this, and this, and this" — is not making the grief bigger than it needs to be. It is being honest about its full scope, and honesty about the scope of loss is the beginning of being able to carry it.