And what is missing

Now the other half, and this is the part that changes the shape.

Ordinary grief runs on machinery that is largely social. People come. Somebody washes the body. There is a prayer, a burial, food in the house, a run of visitors, and a period where everybody knows and behaves accordingly. That machinery does a great deal of the work, and you never notice it doing the work until it does not switch on.

Here there are often no shared memories, because nobody else met this child. No witnesses. Often no body that anyone saw. Frequently no ritual, or a ritual you were not told you could have. No leave, no condolence, and sometimes active minimising.

So the grief is real and it has no container. Clinicians have a name for that, disenfranchised grief, which only means grief that was not socially ratified. It is not a diagnosis and it is not a criticism of you. It describes what the people around you did not do.