It hurts knowing my wife didn’t get to finish her life

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Veronica's life feels incomplete to me.

[00:00:02]And there's a lot of reasons for that, but one of them came up yesterday. I went to a celebration for a friend of ours who we've known for decades, and she went back to school later in life to get her MSW. She wanted to change her career course, so she did that.

[00:00:15]And Veronica never got a chance to do those things. She was going for an advanced degree when we met, and we got married, and we had kids, and that got put on the back burner. But she always wanted to go back, and she doesn't get to now.

[00:00:30]And that was something that was really important to her. And I realize there's nothing I can do about that. I can't change it.

[00:00:36]But it hit me pretty hard yesterday how many of the things that meant so much to her, she did not get to finish. And it makes it feel incomplete.

[00:00:47]Let's see what Hana has to say.

[00:00:50]This is a hallmark or main identifier of what I refer to a lot as an early or out of order death loss.

[00:01:02]It's this idea that the person died, you know, quote unquote before their time, and there were all these experiences that if there was a more normal lifespan for them, they would have experienced.

[00:01:18]So every time your child's friends reach a milestone age or start a new grade level or um do just about anything, you're experiencing the incompleteness of your child's life.

[00:01:36]Every time, like Jim was saying, there's a Mother's Day or an event for their kids, and their mother isn't there, his wife isn't there to experience it with them.

[00:01:49]They feel that.

[00:01:51]This is a very difficult part of the grieving experience cuz it's not just your grief, it's the grief you have for all the things that your person should have been able to be around for and aren't. And that loss is felt for years and potentially a lifetime to come.