What is actually being grieved

People assume grief is made of memories, and that where there are few memories there is little to grieve. That is the wrong model and it is why nobody understands this.

What you are grieving is a relationship that existed almost entirely in anticipation. The room you had thought about. The name you had. Being this particular child's mother or father, which is an identity you had already started to live inside. The whole shape of the next twenty years, which quietly rearranged itself the day you found out and rearranged itself again the day you were told.

That is a real object of grief. It is not a smaller one because it was made of future rather than of past.