There Is No Funeral for the Person You Might Have Been

I’ve been thinking a lot about endings recently. By my count, I’ve attended around 16 funerals in my life. Two of those were in this year alone: my best friend’s grandmother’s funeral in June, and a close relative’s funeral in May. Many of those losses affected me in a profound way, maybe quite obviously. Others were for people I hardly knew, like the parents of my mom’s friends. After my great-aunt died, someone who I was close to, I found myself thinking not only about her death but also about the deaths of people I love that will someday follow. This may be bleak, but it reminded me that everyone and everything I love is temporary, something that I had previously understood as an abstract fact. 

What struck me most about these losses was not the act of death itself. It was the mourning surrounding it. Specifically, it was why we reserve the language of mourning almost exclusively for death when so much of life requires us to grieve things that are still very much alive. But mourning is really the process of accepting that something meaningful has ended. Death is one way things end, but it is hardly the only way. In fact, many of the losses that shape us most arrive long before anyone dies.

By the time we graduate, most of us will have mourned something. We will mourn childhood homes, not because they disappear, but because they will change. A bedroom will become a guest room. Familiar neighbors will move away. The streets that once felt like the center of the world will begin to feel strangely small. We will mourn ambitions that once felt inevitable: the medical school acceptance we would get, the professional athletic career we were destined for, the novel we were certain we would publish by 25. We will mourn identities that no longer fit us: the gifted child, the class president, the person who always had a plan. And we will mourn futures we imagined with complete confidence: relationships we thought would last forever, cities we were sure we would live in, careers we built entire versions of ourselves around. One day, we simply realize that a chapter has ended, and that the person we were when it began no longer exists. These experiences may seem small compared to death, but they involve many of the same emotional tasks. They require us to let go of what was and make peace with what is.

The strange thing is that most of this mourning — not the typical bereavement mourning but this mourning that comes with endings — happens invisibly. Death comes with rituals. Losses of every other kind usually do not. When someone dies, society knows what to do. We gather in a church, a funeral home, or a cemetery. We send flowers and bring food, and stand in uncomfortable clothes and listen to stories. We carve out a period of time from our jobs and our lives — if we can — in which the ordinary demands of life are temporarily suspended. That kind of pause is not exactly feasible for every instance where we mourn for every loss, but it is certainly something to notice. There is no funeral for the version of yourself that once seemed certain to exist.

Instead, these losses are easy to dismiss because, in some cases, they do not possess the finality of death. And yes, sometimes they truly are less final than death. Yet the fact that something is not dead does not mean it has not ended. A possibility can vanish just as completely as a person can. 

What strikes me is that college may be one of the greatest concentrations of these invisible forms of loss. We arrive expecting transformation, but transformation always contains an element of mourning. To become someone new requires relinquishing former versions of ourselves. Every serious commitment closes off alternative paths. In my own life, I quit ballet and never became a professional ballerina. Realistically, that future may never have happened anyway. But what I lost was not only a career possibility. I lost a particular vision of myself. For years, I understood who I was through dance. I organized my time around it. I imagined a future that extended naturally from the life I was already living. When I stopped, I did not simply leave an activity behind. I had to let go of a story I had been telling about myself. College is full of these disappearances. We often think of these choices as gains because they move us forward. But every gain contains a corresponding loss. To choose one life is, inevitably, to give up many others.

A little less than two years from now, I will not simply be leaving Amherst. I will be leaving countless unrealized futures. There will be classes I never took that I wanted to, friendships I never deepened that I regret, versions of myself I never became. The same is true for everyone here. Graduation is often described as a beginning, but it is equally an ending. It marks a mass extinction of possibilities.

Søren Kierkegaard once observed that life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward. What he captured in this observation is the peculiar uncertainty of choice. We never know exactly what we are sacrificing when we walk through one door and close another behind us. Only years later do we begin to glimpse the outlines of the lives we did not live. Most of them are not tragic. Some would probably have made us miserable. Yet there is still something mournful about recognizing that those possibilities of ourselves are gone forever.

We have surprisingly little language for this loss of futures. We know how to celebrate achievements and announce the next step. We post ourselves in photos with our caps, gowns, and canes. What we rarely admit is that excitement and grief are often occurring simultaneously. The anticipation of what comes next does not erase the sadness of what must be left behind. Perhaps that is what mourning really is: The recognition that a meaningful chapter of life deserves acknowledgment before it is replaced by another. Not because we wish to remain in the past, but because moving forward responsibly requires us to understand what we are leaving behind.

In that sense, mourning may not be the opposite of growth, but rather one of its preconditions. People who never mourn are often people who never fully recognize what they have lost. They rush into the next thing before understanding the significance of the last. Mourning forces us to pause long enough to take a measure of our lives. It asks us to say, “This mattered.” Only then can we truly say goodbye. Funerals give us a place to do that. Most other endings do not.

So perhaps part of becoming an adult is learning to create those spaces for ourselves. To sit with endings that no one else recognizes. To acknowledge the losses that receive no public ceremony. To mourn friendships, identities, dreams, and chapters of life without feeling embarrassed by the fact that they are gone.

Sigmund Freud devoted an essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” to the question of what happens after loss. He argued that mourning is work. When we lose someone, or even lose an idea of ourselves, we do not simply move on all at once. Instead, we gradually detach ourselves from countless emotional investments tied to that person, place, or future. The process is slow because loss is rarely simple. We may love someone and resent them all the same. We may miss a dream while also recognizing that it was never right for us. We may long for a former version of ourselves while knowing that we could never truly go back. Mourning requires us to confront these contradictions rather than escape them. It asks us to acknowledge what was valuable, what was disappointing, and what can no longer be recovered. For Freud, successful mourning did not mean forgetting. It meant accepting reality deeply enough that we could invest ourselves in life again instead of remaining trapped in a world organized around what had been lost.

We often associate mourning with death because death creates an undeniable absence. But the same process occurs whenever an important part of our lives ends. The challenge is the same: accepting that we cannot return to what was and deciding how to move forward anyway. Perhaps this is why mourning can be so difficult. It asks us to hold two truths at once. Something was meaningful, and now it is gone. We must mourn, we must not forget what we have lost. We must learn to carry that loss without allowing it to stop us from continuing to live.