The Futures We Never Got to Mourn

CW: Childlessness, chronic illness, trauma

I’m standing in the cereal aisle at Target when it happens: a toddler in the cart ahead of me points at the Froot Loops and erupts into delighted giggles. Her mother smiles and tosses the box into their cart without negotiation or hesitation.

It doesn’t make me bitter. It just makes me still.

It’s not envy exactly, and it’s not regret. It’s something more complicated: the ache for a version of life I never inhabited, where I met my partner Wyatt earlier and my health had been different and we weren’t in late-stage capitalism and maybe having a child would have been a choice that would have made more sense.

Naming the Terrain: What Is Disenfranchised Grief?

Disenfranchised grief is mourning that isn’t publicly acknowledged or socially sanctioned - when someone experiences a loss that is not understood or supported by society.

Disenfranchised grief extends beyond lost relationships or roles. It encompasses the death of imagined outcomes - the futures I incubated in my mind like fragile unhatched eggs.

The academic career I might have pursued if I had more systemic support earlier. The parenthood that became untenable when chronic illness made the math feel impossible for me. The pain-free body I didn’t know to want until it became clear I’d never have it. These aren’t fantasies or delusions. They’re paths that existed in potential, alternate timelines that felt real enough to shape my choices and dreams until they didn’t.

Neurodivergence, Disability, and Premature Closure

Entire categories of possible futures sometimes close before we knew they existed. Diagnoses come after years of internalized harm. Childhood trauma makes “normal” developmental windows impossible to access. Capitalism demands linear progress and penalizes those who take unconventional routes.

Some futures were never technically mine, but I kept them in my coat pocket like loose change anyway. The version of myself who would have thrived in graduate school if my autism and chronic illness had been recognized earlier. The writer who could have started publishing sooner if I’d had the emotional bandwidth to handle rejection before therapy taught me that my worth wasn’t contingent on external validation. The me who didn’t normalize harm for a million reasons, big and small, and didn’t have a life shaped by those experiences.

Why This Grief Is Hard to Name (and Easy to Dismiss)

There are no rituals for mourning unlived lives. Society provides no guidelines for processing these losses.

This absence of structure makes the grief easy to dismiss. It gets mislabeled as immaturity, romanticizing, and self-indulgence. No use crying over spilled milk. Everyone has regrets.

The shame layers itself over the grief: I should be grateful for what I have. I never really earned that path anyway. Everyone feels this way sometimes. The implication is that acknowledging these losses means rejecting your current life.

How the Grief Shows Up Anyway

The body keeps track of unlived possibilities.

It manifests as flinching when others talk about their dreams with easy confidence, subtly shrinking around people who live the lives I never got to attempt.

I develop avoidances that others can’t decode: certain movies about academic life and songs that soundtracked imagined futures.

What It Means to Grieve Without Apology

I don’t need to justify this pain. Grieving lost futures doesn’t mean failing to appreciate what you have. It’s not regret - regret implies you made the wrong choice. This is recognizing that some paths were never really choices at all, that doors closed before you could get to the threshold.

I don’t want a different life. I just want to name the ones I didn’t get - to bear witness to what it means to be human in a body that operates differently, in systems that weren’t designed for my particular needs.

There’s a difference between attachment and acknowledgment. I’m not clinging to these lost futures. I’m simply refusing to pretend they never mattered.

The Tenderness of Unmarked Graves

I don’t need to transform this feeling into something more palatable. I can simply feel it without judgment, the way you might stand at an unmarked grave and acknowledge: Someone was here. This absence has weight.

I’m bearing witness to the full complexity of a life lived with constraints, honoring both what was possible and what wasn’t.

That recognition, that tenderness toward my own unlived possibilities - that is love that doesn’t need public acknowledgment to be real.