Family Events • May 19, 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: Disenfranchised grief is mourning a loss that others don’t acknowledge as valid, including grief for a complicated parent whose death leaves you relieved, devastated, or both at once.

The Eulogy You’re Writing Tonight

It’s ten forty at night, three weeks ago, and Sheila is sitting at her kitchen table with her late mother’s reading glasses folded next to her laptop, the ones with the tortoiseshell frames she still can’t bring herself to donate. The funeral home printed program sits face down beside her because she can’t look at the photo they chose, the one where her mother looks soft and warm in a way that doesn’t match forty years of memory. Sheila’s fingers hover over the keyboard. She is drafting the eulogy she will never read aloud, the one that begins, “My mother was the most complicated person I have ever loved.”

“I keep writing the nice version and deleting it because it isn’t true, and then I write the true version and I know I can’t say it in that church with her sister in the front row, so I’m just sitting here with two eulogies and neither one is the one I’m supposed to give,” Sheila told me, weeks later, describing that night.

I remember thinking, listening to her, that she wasn’t stuck. She was doing something exact and necessary: refusing to let one document hold two irreconcilable truths. Her nervous system already knew what her mind hadn’t caught up to yet, that a single eulogy cannot carry both the public farewell and the private reckoning.

Sheila’s experience echoes what I hear again and again from driven women preparing to speak, or not speak, about a parent who was hard to love cleanly. The public ceremony demands a certain kind of tribute, one that smooths over pain, conflict, and ambivalence for the sake of the room. Writing a private eulogy becomes a necessary act of bearing witness to the full and unglamorous truth of the relationship, the parts that don’t fit on a program.

In spaces where the family narrative dominates, the survivor’s grief can feel invisible, or even out of bounds. This form of disenfranchised grief describes loss that isn’t openly acknowledged or socially supported. When the parent was abusive, estranged, or simply difficult, the survivor’s sorrow often has no safe container inside the public rituals built for a different kind of loss.

Yet the private eulogy offers a real container for that grief. It creates a space where you can name what was lost, what you needed but never received, and what you’re still carrying three weeks or three years later. This ritual isn’t about rewriting history. It’s about honoring your truth on your own terms, in your own room, on your own timeline.

Public Eulogy	Private Eulogy
Manages family narrative	Allows honest, complex truth
Focuses on socially acceptable memories	Names pain, ambivalence, and unmet needs
Often avoids conflict or controversy	Provides a safe container for disenfranchised grief

If you’re struggling with what to say when your parent was difficult, know that your grief is valid, even if it can’t be spoken aloud at the funeral. Exploring private grief rituals, like the private eulogy, may be the compassionate next step in this particular kind of healing. For further guidance on grief complicated by difficult family dynamics, consider resources like grief when person who hurt you dies or memorial service for yourself after estrangement ends in death.

The Gap Between the Public Story and the Private Truth

Take Sheila, for example. The night before her mother’s funeral, she sits at her desk writing a eulogy she will never deliver. The one that begins, “My mother was the most complicated person I have ever loved,” naming both beauty and covert cruelty. Her true eulogy holds the weight of forty years spent trying to reach someone who never let herself be reached. Yet, at the funeral, the words must be softened, the pain hidden, the family narrative preserved.

Estrangement intensifies this divide. When you’re estranged from a parent, the public eulogy often becomes an erasure of your experience. Natalie’s father died in late winter, eleven days after she’d last hung up on him mid-argument, and she did not speak at his funeral at all. She sat in the second pew in a black wool coat that still smelled like his apartment, and let her uncle read three paragraphs about a man she barely recognized. Three months later, in my office, she finally said the eulogy out loud, the one that names what he was and what she never got. Her tears came not from shame but relief, proof that private grief rituals can hold what public ceremonies are not built to hold.

“Everyone at the funeral kept saying he was so proud of me and I just sat there thinking he told me I’d never amount to anything three weeks before he died, and I don’t know which father I’m supposed to be grieving, the one they described or the one I actually had,” Natalie said, twisting a tissue in her hands.

What struck me, sitting across from her, was that Natalie wasn’t confused. She knew exactly which father she’d had. What she lacked was permission, a place where both fathers, the one eulogized and the one she’d lived with, could exist in the same room without one canceling out the other.

Here’s what this gap costs survivors:

• Emotional dissonance: You feel split between the face you show the world and the raw grief inside.
• Invisibility of pain: Your complicated feelings may be dismissed or judged as ungrateful or disrespectful.
• Interrupted mourning: Without space to voice your truth, grief can remain unresolved or ambiguous.
• Physical cost: The effort of performing a socially acceptable grief while suppressing the real one often shows up as fatigue, tension headaches, or a strange numbness that arrives days after everyone else has moved on.

I want to name that last one specifically, because it’s the one driven women tend to minimize. You’re used to managing your face and your output under pressure. That skill, the one that’s made you good at your job, is the same skill that lets you deliver four composed sentences at a podium while your actual grief sits untouched underneath. The cost doesn’t disappear because you’re capable of the performance. It just gets deferred.

Understanding this gap helps you recognize that your grief is valid even if it’s not publicly acknowledged. Writing a private eulogy becomes a way to bridge this divide, holding your truth in a container that the public funeral can’t provide.

Aspect	Public Eulogy	Private Eulogy
Purpose	Protect family narrative and social cohesion	Honor personal truth and complex feelings
Content	Polished, often idealized memories	Layered, including conflict and pain
Audience	Family, friends, community	Yourself or trusted confidants
Grief experience	Often simplified or silenced	Fully expressed and witnessed
Emotional impact	May feel incomplete or frustrating	Can provide relief and integration

For more on how grief unfolds when the person who hurt you dies, see this article. And if you’re considering creating your own memorial service after estrangement ends in death, explore this resource for guidance.

Recognizing the gap between the eulogy you give and the one you hold inside is the first step toward honoring your complicated loss on your own terms. It’s a clinical truth and a ritual necessity that your grief deserves a voice, even if it’s only one you hear.

Disenfranchised Grief and the Eulogy That Cannot Be Spoken

Grief that can’t be openly expressed is what clinicians call disenfranchised grief, a term Kenneth Doka, PhD, gerontology professor and senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America, coined to name loss that isn’t socially recognized or supported. This form of grief often arises after the death of a parent who was difficult, abusive, or estranged, someone whose relationship with you was complicated and fraught in ways your friends may never fully see.

Pauline Boss, PhD, professor emerita at the University of Minnesota and originator of ambiguous loss theory, adds another layer to this understanding. Ambiguous loss refers to losses that lack closure or clear resolution. When a parent was emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, or physically absent, you might have been grieving them long before their death. That earlier grief doesn’t end when they die. It shifts, intensifies, and tangles itself into your mourning.

In session, this grief usually arrives in layers. On the surface there’s the practical grief: the funeral logistics, the obituary language, the seating chart nobody wants to negotiate. Underneath is the body’s grief, the tight chest, the shallow breath, the exhaustion that shows up two days after the service when the casseroles stop arriving. And underneath that is the grief for what the relationship never became, the parent who was never quite available enough, or steady enough, to grieve simply.

Take Natalie’s story. Three months after her father’s death, she finally spoke the words in therapy that she never got to say publicly. Naming what he was, what she needed, and what she never received became a ritual of relief rather than shame. This private eulogy, spoken in a room with no audience but me, provided the container that the public funeral could not.

There’s a reason this grief feels so raw in the body, not just the mind. Stephen Porges, PhD, psychiatrist and originator of the Polyvagal Theory, has shown how the nervous system detects relational threat before conscious thought catches up. When you’ve been harmed or neglected by a parent, your body can drop into hypervigilance or shutdown during public rituals that leave no room for your particular pain. That mismatch between body and social expectation is part of what makes this grief so lonely.

Early relational patterns also shape how the body stores grief long after the mind has moved on to logistics. When those patterns were formed around a parent who was frightening, unpredictable, or withholding, funerals can trigger old, wordless feelings that no one else in the room recognizes. The public eulogy rarely makes space for that. You end up carrying it by yourself, dressed in black, shaking hands at the reception.

This is worth naming plainly, because I hear driven women apologize for it constantly: grief for a complicated parent is almost never one clean feeling. It’s ambivalent by design. You can feel real relief that the chaos is over and real devastation that the chance for repair is gone, in the same hour. Clinically we call this ambivalent or complicated grief, and it is not a sign that you loved wrong. It’s an accurate response to an inaccurate, incomplete relationship. The two feelings aren’t in competition. They’re both telling you the truth about what that parent actually was to you.

I also watch for a client’s window of tolerance, the nervous system’s workable zone between shutdown and overwhelm. Grief that has nowhere public to go often pushes a woman outside that window without her noticing. She’ll feel fine at the funeral and then inexplicably rageful in the parking lot, or composed for months and then undone by a smell in a grocery aisle. That’s not instability. That’s a nervous system finally safe enough to process what it couldn’t process at the podium.

Aspect	Disenfranchised Grief	Ambiguous Loss
Definition	Grief not openly acknowledged or socially supported	Loss without closure or clear resolution
Common Situations	Death of abusive, estranged, or difficult parent	Emotional absence, physical absence, or unpredictability
Emotional Experience	Invisible, invalidated, shameful grief	Confusion, anxiety, chronic sorrow
Impact on Mourning	Limits public expression; isolates survivor	Prolongs grief; complicates closure

Understanding these frameworks matters when you’re thinking about the eulogy you can’t give. The private eulogy becomes a vital ritual, a way to hold your grief in a container that honors your truth. It acknowledges the full complexity of your relationship with your parent, including what was missing or harmful.

Sheila’s vignette illustrates this vividly. The night before her mother’s funeral, she writes the eulogy she won’t deliver, the one that names her mother as “the most complicated person I have ever loved.” That act of writing becomes a ritual of bearing witness to the grief that public ceremonies silence. It’s a private space where ambivalence, sorrow, and unresolved longing can coexist without judgment.

If you’re struggling with what to say when your parent was difficult or estranged, remember: your grief is valid even if it’s not publicly recognized. Writing a private eulogy can be a powerful step toward honoring your experience. For more guidance on grieving when the person who hurt you dies, see this resource. And if you want to create a personal memorial ceremony after estrangement ends in death, explore this article.

These clinical perspectives and practical tools can help you hold your grief with care. The private eulogy is not about rewriting history or denying complexity; it’s about naming your truth in a way that feels safe and healing.

How to Write the Private Eulogy: A Framework

Take Natalie. Three months after her father’s death, she finally spoke the eulogy she never gave at his funeral. In my office, on a Tuesday in early spring, she said aloud what she’d needed to say for eleven days and hadn’t been able to: “He was a man who couldn’t show love the way I needed. I grieved the father I wanted, not the one I had.” Her tears came not from shame but relief. This private ritual became a turning point, a container for feelings that had no safe place before that Tuesday.

Here is more of what Natalie actually said, close to word for word, because I think it’s useful to see what a private eulogy sounds like when it’s finally spoken instead of imagined. “You were funny and you could be so warm for about twenty minutes at a time, and then something would flip and you’d say something that took me a week to recover from, and I spent my whole childhood trying to guess which version of you was coming home. I’m not going to stand up at your funeral and pretend I don’t know both versions. I loved the funny one. I’m still afraid of the other one, even now that you’re gone. I don’t forgive you and I haven’t decided if I ever will, and I’m allowed to grieve you anyway.” That is not a eulogy anyone reads at a podium. It’s the one that gets read in a therapist’s office, or a parked car, or out loud to an empty kitchen. It is no less real for being private.

Next, clarify what you needed from that relationship and what you actually received. This contrast helps you identify the exact gaps that shaped your grief. You might write:

What I Needed	What I Got
Consistent emotional support	Unpredictable attention, often withdrawn
Safety to express myself	Criticism when I showed vulnerability
Recognition and encouragement	Silence or dismissal of my achievements

Here’s a simple framework to guide your writing:

• Who they were to you: Describe the parent honestly, with specific examples.
• What you needed: Identify your unmet needs in the relationship.
• What you got: Contrast your needs with the reality you experienced.
• What you grieve: Name the losses beyond death. Hopes, connection, healing.
• What you release: Acknowledge what you’re ready to let go of to begin your own healing.

This private eulogy is a powerful grief ritual, especially when public words fall short. It validates grief that society often overlooks or denies outright. Writing your eulogy privately creates a container for your truth and honors your complicated loss in a way that feels authentic to what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen.

A note on timing, because women ask me this often: there’s no required window. Some women write the private eulogy the same week as the funeral. Others, like Natalie, need three months, or a year, or longer, before the words are ready to leave their body. Grief on this particular terrain doesn’t move on a fixed schedule, and rushing it rarely helps. If you’re working through grief when the person who hurt you dies, or trying to hold space for estrangement and unresolved feelings, resources like this guide can be helpful. For those who want to create a personal memorial beyond the funeral, this article offers ideas for ceremonies that honor your experience.

Other Private Grief Rituals That Actually Help

Consider the letter as a foundational ritual. Writing a letter to your parent, whether they’re alive, deceased, or estranged, lets you name what you never got to say. This is more than journaling. It’s a focused, intentional act that can bring clarity and release. You might write:

• “I’m writing this because I need to say the things I couldn’t say when you were here.”
• “I want to acknowledge the pain you caused, the love I hoped for, and the distance that remained.”
• “I’m holding space for the parts of you I carry and the parts I’m letting go.”

Here’s a simple script you can adapt for your ceremony:

“Today, I honor the complicated person you were to me. I hold both the love and the pain. I release what I cannot change, and I hold what I need to carry forward. This moment is mine, and my grief is valid.”

Sheila ended up combining two of these. Six weeks after the funeral, on a Sunday afternoon, she drove to the coast alone with her mother’s reading glasses in her coat pocket and read her private eulogy out loud to the ocean, the version that started with “My mother was the most complicated person I have ever loved” and did not stop there. She told me afterward that she’d expected to feel worse, more disloyal, and instead felt like she’d finally put something down that she’d been carrying since she was nine years old. She buried the glasses in the sand and dug them back up before she left. She wasn’t ready to let go of the object. She was only ready to say the words.

That’s worth naming clearly: ritual doesn’t require finality. Sheila didn’t leave the glasses behind. She read the truth out loud and kept the object anyway. Both of those choices were hers to make, and neither one undid the other.

Therapy sessions can function as a living eulogy space, too. In Natalie’s case, speaking her real eulogy months after her father’s death, therapy provided a container where she could name her truth without judgment or pressure. A skilled therapist can guide you through naming what you needed, what you got, and what you’re still grieving. This process can be a powerful way of bearing witness to your own story and treating your grief as real, even when the world outside the room has not.

Some women build a small, recurring practice instead of a single ceremony. One lights a candle every year on her mother’s birthday, sits with it until it burns down an inch, and says nothing at all. Another keeps a single sentence taped inside a kitchen cabinet, a private eulogy of exactly twelve words she wrote the week her father died and has never shown anyone. There’s no required form. The only requirement is honesty.

If you’re wondering how to begin, here’s a decision framework to help you choose which private ritual might fit your needs right now:

Ritual Type	When It Helps	What You Need	Example
Letter Writing	When you need to express unsaid feelings or unresolved communication	Quiet space, pen and paper or computer	Writing a letter to your parent, whether delivered or kept private
Ceremony for One	When you want a dedicated moment to honor your grief without others	Meaningful objects, candle, music, safe private space	Lighting a candle and reading your private eulogy aloud
Ritual Object	When you want a tangible focus to return to for comfort or reflection	Personal item connected to your parent	Creating a small altar with a photo and keepsakes
Therapy Session as Eulogy	When you need guided support to name complex feelings and grief	Access to a trauma-informed therapist	Speaking your private eulogy aloud with a clinician

Choosing one or combining several of these rituals can help you hold your complicated loss in a way that feels authentic. Writing the eulogy you’ll never speak aloud is itself a complete ritual on its own, the night before a funeral or years after one. This act alone can honor the truth of your grief without forcing it into the public story.

For many women moving through complicated parental losses, these private rituals provide a vital counterbalance to the public funeral. They’re a way of saying, “I see you. I grieve you. Even if no one else can say it, I will.”

If you’re struggling with grief that feels unacknowledged or silenced, you’re not alone. Resources like grief when the person who hurt you dies and memorial service for yourself after estrangement ends in death offer additional guidance on reclaiming your grief and honoring your loss on your own terms.

Both/And: The Public Eulogy Serves the Family AND Yours Gets to Be True

Natalie’s story shows this clearly. Three months after her father’s death, she finally spoke the words she never could at the funeral: the grief, anger, and longing tangled with relief. In that session, the private eulogy became a sacred ritual, a container for the complicated feelings that the public moment couldn’t hold. This is not about rewriting history or vilifying the deceased. It’s about naming your truth without apology.

Sheila’s both/and looked different, and that difference matters. At the funeral, she stood at the podium and delivered four careful sentences about her mother’s love of gardening and her famous lemon cake, sentences that were true and also nowhere near the whole truth. She did not feel like a liar walking back to her seat. She felt like a woman honoring one part of a complicated inheritance in public, and saving the rest for a quieter room. Weeks later, at the coast, she gave the other eulogy. Both were real. Neither one canceled the other out.

Neither eulogy negates the other. You can hold the public eulogy as a gesture of respect or family duty while also claiming your private space to grieve honestly. This both/and approach validates the full spectrum of your loss without forcing you to choose between silence and confrontation.

Here’s a practical way to think about it:

Public Eulogy	Private Eulogy
Supports family unity and social expectations	Supports personal truth and emotional complexity
Often generalized, polished, and neutral	Specific, raw, and unfiltered
May omit difficult or painful details	Names what was needed and what was missing
Provides a public farewell	Provides a private ritual and emotional release

This framework gives you permission to hold both eulogies without guilt. You don’t have to sacrifice your truth to maintain family peace, nor do you have to publicly air wounds that aren’t ready to be shared. If you’re wondering how to grieve when the person who hurt you dies, this dual approach can guide your steps forward.

Writing a private eulogy, or holding a personal memorial ceremony like the one described in the memorial service for yourself after estrangement ends in death, can be a powerful way to honor your experience without the pressure of public performance. These acts hold space for grief that society often ignores or invalidates, the kind that doesn’t come with a casserole or a card.

If you’re ready to explore this further, consider these steps for your private eulogy ritual:

• Set a quiet time and space free from interruptions.
• Write the eulogy you wish you could have said. Naming the complexity, the needs unmet, and the grief held.
• Read it aloud, or speak it into a recording if writing feels too vulnerable.
• Create a small ritual to honor your words. Lighting a candle, holding a meaningful object, or simply sitting with your feelings.
• Allow yourself to revisit this ritual as often as needed, knowing it’s a container for your ongoing process.

For more support with these complex feelings, explore therapy options designed to hold complicated grief and trauma. You can also find practical tools in the Betrayal Trauma Complete Guide, which offers insight into managing layered wounds that surface when someone who hurt you dies.

The Systemic Lens: Why Funerals Are Designed for the Living

Funerals and memorial services serve a purpose far beyond honoring the deceased. They’re woven into cultural, legal, and family systems that prioritize the needs of the living over the needs of the grieving. These rituals are designed to maintain social order, uphold family narratives, and manage communal emotions. For women whose relationships with their parents were fraught or estranged, this systemic design often feels like a cage rather than a container.

Family systems theory helps explain why the funeral focuses on the living. The ritual functions to stabilize the family unit, manage anxiety about death, and reaffirm roles and alliances. This systemic goal often sidelines complicated grief, especially when it threatens the family’s image or cohesion. For example, Sheila’s private eulogy, the one she wrote the night before her mother’s funeral, lived in the shadows because speaking it aloud would have disrupted the family’s carefully maintained story.

Consider what this looks like on the ground. The officiant reads a script built for consensus, not accuracy. The cousins and aunts silently agree not to mention the years of estrangement, because naming it would fracture the room. And you, sitting in the pew, are doing enormous invisible labor: nodding at the eulogy, accepting condolences for a loss that isn’t quite the one you’re carrying, performing a grief that isn’t fully yours while your real grief waits for a safer room.

Systemic Pressure	Impact on Grieving Survivor	Potential Response
Cultural Expectations	Pressure to display conventional grief; silencing of anger or ambivalence	Write a private eulogy to hold your true feelings safely
Gendered Emotional Labor	Burden to maintain family harmony; suppression of authentic grief	Set boundaries around participation; seek therapy for validation
Legal/Financial Control	Exclusion from decision-making; invisibility in public memorials	Create personal rituals or memorials independent of family events
Family Systems Stability	Erasure of complicated narratives; enforced silence on difficult truths	Use private grief rituals to process ambiguous loss

Natalie’s experience in therapy, where she finally voices the eulogy she never delivered, illustrates the power of creating a private space for grief. The therapy session becomes a ritual container where her complex feelings can live without judgment or family pressure. This aligns with the concept of disenfranchised grief, as defined by Kenneth Doka, PhD, which recognizes that grief not publicly acknowledged is no less real or valid.

Recognizing that funerals are designed to meet the needs of the living rather than the grieving can be freeing. It allows you to claim alternative forms of mourning that honor your truth without conflicting with family expectations. Whether that’s writing a private eulogy, holding a memorial for yourself as described in this article, or engaging in therapy the way Natalie did (therapy with Annie), you’re creating a grief ritual that fits your reality.

For more on what it looks like to grieve when the person who hurt you dies, see this resource. It offers guidance on holding your grief authentically within the constraints of family and cultural systems. Remember, honoring a complicated loss privately isn’t a failure, it’s a courageous reclaiming of your story within a system that often demands silence.

What Comes After the Private Eulogy

After the private eulogy, consider what support you’ll need to hold this complex grief. Therapy offers a safe space to process feelings that may feel too raw or contradictory for public sharing. You might explore trauma-informed approaches like somatic experiencing or Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) to address how grief lives in your body as well as your mind. If you’re not already working with a therapist, resources like therapy with Annie Wright can guide you toward skilled clinicians who understand complicated family dynamics.

Grief after a difficult parent’s death often includes layers of disenfranchisement and ambiguous loss. You may revisit the private eulogy’s words repeatedly, or write new versions as your understanding deepens. Because this grief can feel isolating, some women find grounding in support groups that acknowledge the complexity of losing someone who was also a source of pain. The article Grief When the Person Who Hurt You Dies offers insight into this particular terrain.

Sheila came back to see me about four months after the funeral, mostly to say that she was doing better than she expected, and partly because a strange thing had happened. Her aunt, the one who’d sat in the front row, called to ask if Sheila wanted her mother’s reading glasses back properly, framed, instead of stuffed in a coat pocket. Sheila said yes. She told me she almost laughed, because the object that had traveled with her to the coast for a private funeral no one else knew about was now going to sit on a shelf in full view of the family, and only she would know what it had already witnessed. That’s often how this resolves, not with a single clean ending but with the private and the public quietly trading places over time, neither one erasing what the other one held.

Natalie’s process kept unfolding differently. She wrote three more versions of her private eulogy over the following year, each one a little less angry and a little more clear-eyed. She told me the version she wrote at the one-year mark barely resembled the one she’d spoken in my office the first time, not because the facts about her father had changed, but because she had more room in her now to hold both what he was and what she’d lost. Grief like this rarely resolves into a tidy final draft. It keeps being rewritten, and that’s not a sign that you’re doing it wrong.

Consider also creating ongoing private rituals that honor your complicated parent in a way that feels authentic to you. This might include maintaining a journal, lighting a candle on difficult anniversaries, or holding a personal memorial service as described in Memorial Service for Yourself After Estrangement Ends in Death. These acts aren’t about closure but about holding your grief alongside your life.

Next Steps After Writing Your Private Eulogy
Therapeutic Support: Seek trauma-informed therapy to process layered grief and complex emotions.
Community Connection: Join groups or forums that recognize disenfranchised grief to reduce isolation.
Somatic Practices: Use grounding, breathing, or movement to soothe nervous system distress.
Private Rituals: Develop ongoing personal memorials or grief practices that feel meaningful and safe.
Self-Compassion: Allow yourself to grieve without judgment or pressure to resolve complicated feelings quickly.

Natalie’s experience shows how the private eulogy can open a door, but the work continues well beyond that moment. In her therapist’s office, she finally names what she needed and what she never got, releasing shame and embracing relief. Her tears mark a beginning, not an end. This ongoing process honors the full complexity of loss and the contradictions it carries.

You’re not alone in this work. Many women carry similar stories of love intertwined with pain, and many have found ways to hold both without erasing either. As you continue, know that your grief is valid, your truth is worthy, and your healing is possible, even if it looks different from what others expect. For additional support and guidance, explore resources like Betrayal Trauma Complete Guide or connect directly through Annie Wright’s contact page. This path is yours to walk with courage and care.

References

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Doka, Kenneth J. Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989.
• Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Klass, Dennis, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1996.
• Shear, M. Katherine. “Complicated Grief.” The New England Journal of Medicine 372, no. 2 (2015): 153, 160.
• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.

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