The Grief I Didn’t Feel… Until I Did | Losing a Friend

What happens when someone you loved dies… and you feel nothing?

In this deeply personal episode of The Voyage Cast, Eddie shares the unexpected experience of delayed grief after the death of a close friend. After first hearing the news through a Facebook post, he felt almost no emotional response. But days later, at the celebration of life, something broke open.

What followed was a wave of grief, memories, guilt, and reflection.

In this episode, Eddie explores the complicated reality of grief that doesn’t arrive on schedule. Drawing on insights from C. S. Lewis, psychological research on self-forgiveness, and his own experience as a therapist and friend, he reflects on why grief can come in waves, why unresolved relationships make loss more complicated, and why guilt is often part of the grieving process.

This conversation also wrestles with deeper questions about time, regret, forgiveness, and the meaning that death gives to life itself.

If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, especially a relationship that ended with unfinished conversations, this episode offers a thoughtful and honest exploration of what complicated grief can feel like.

Topics in this episode include:

• Delayed grief and emotional numbness

• Losing a close friend

• Why grief often comes in waves

• The psychology of self-forgiveness

• Regret and unfinished relationships

• What death reveals about love and time

If you’re navigating grief or reflecting on someone you’ve lost, this episode may help you understand your own experience a little more clearly.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hey everybody, welcome back to the VoyageCast. This is Eddie, and today's episode is going to be a little bit different. It's going to be a little bit more personal. It's going to be about grief, but not the kind of grief that shows up the way you would expect. I want to talk about a complicated grief, a delayed grief, the kind that makes you question even yourself. Now it's taken me honestly a few days to sit down and record this. I didn't want to just vent my feelings to the world. I don't think that's useful. I wanted to process first so I could understand what was actually happening inside of me before speaking publicly about it. Now I'm sharing this for two primary reasons. Speaking helps me kind of formulate my thoughts and understand what my ideas and feelings are, and it also slows things down enough for me to see what's really there. But the second reason I want to share this is because I want to use my experience to help you, the listener. As I do with many of my clients, I share my stories to help people, and I think that makes a difference. Many of us, you see, will lose someone we loved imperfectly, just as I have experienced. Someone with unfinished conversations, someone we assumed we had more time with. And when that happens, because it will, of course, the emotions don't always arrive cleanly. Well, let me get into it so you can understand what the story is, and maybe you can relate to this. Maybe this will be useful for you. I found randomly one day a friend of mine died on Facebook. I was just scrolling and saw it. You know, it's one of those posts, just in the middle of everything, photos, opinions, noise, whatever. And somewhere in there was this announcement that he had passed away and a bunch of people commenting on it, and I was really confused because there was no explanation, no details, no mention of how or why, just he's gone, he's not here anymore. And I didn't feel anything. And that bothered me more than I expected, that I didn't feel anything. I kept thinking, what kind of friend hears that your buddy dies and you just nothing. Well, the truth is grief rarely announces itself the way we think about it, or the way we think it will. And over the next few days and weeks, there was a stirring in me, a shifting in me. Um, but the sadness didn't come out all at once. Um maybe it'd surface here and there for a minute or two and then just gone, you know.

unknown 2:38

Um C.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

S. Lewis described grief this way. He said, in grief, nothing stays put. You emerge from one phase of life, but it always recurs round and round and round again. Now that is pretty accurate, I think, for me, probably for you guys, in terms of how grief goes. I mean, it wasn't absent, it was moving. And as it moved, other emotions came with it. There was anger beneath it. Because you see, years ago, my friend was struggling. I tried to show up, I reached out, I leaned toward him, and he didn't want it. That's okay. You know? It hurts, right? Because it's not just the help he didn't want, because at some point he didn't want the relationship. And there's something uniquely painful about being pushed away by someone who once felt like home. And he was that kind of friend, the kind you do ordinary life with holidays, weeknights, weekends, Sundays, barbecues, pool parties, whatever, shared faith, shared history, so much. So when I heard he was gone, I think the first emotion wasn't sadness. It was kind of that old rejection that I experienced with him. Grief and anger are not opposites, right? Sometimes anger is simply grief that has not felt safe enough to soften. And maybe my system needed that first layer, you know, needed that first layer to kind of break. For a while, nothing really moved. Weeks go by. We went to the celebration of life. People went up and told stories, um, and I watched his family grieve, and I broke. You know, it wasn't gradual. I wasn't really controlled, it just came out. I just cried. As all this kind of finally settled in, our pastor then came up after the family spoke, and he kind of regaled stories and his thoughts of who this friend was to us, and the pastor was friends with him too. So we all knew this guy. And this wasn't like a generic praise. There were specific stories, there were specific traits about this friend that anybody would do well to be like. He was a lovely man. Parts of him were just unmistakably him. And we'll never have that again. Hearing someone put language to his character clarified something in me. Maybe a good way to put this is through another lens of C. S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors. Um, he once wrote that you can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. And yet, strangely, sometimes it is only after the tears come that you finally see clearly. And that day the tears didn't confuse my love for him. They revealed it, right? But under the grief was frankly a lot of guilt. I went through an array of emotions, which I'm sure a lot of you will if you go through something like this. I could have pursued him more, right? The regrets start coming in. I could have tried again. But when relationships end in an unfinished way, the mind does play kind of a what-if game. But I also knew that punishing myself is not going to do any good. It's not gonna honor him, it's not gonna honor the truth of what happened. And in psychology, self-forgiveness is described as releasing self-resentment while growing compassion towards yourself, not as denial, not as an excuse. Forgiveness does not pretend nothing happened. It includes honesty, it includes responsibility, which we both held. You see, he was an adult, he made choices. So did I. Self-forgiveness does not erase regret, though. It simply refuses to turn regret into lifelong condemnation. Keep that in mind. I showed up in the seasons that I was invited to in his life. And when I was no longer invited, I respected that. And that does not eliminate any kind of pain or ache that I feel. But it does create space for grace. Grace for being human, grace for not knowing how much time was left, grace for loving imperfectly. But there's a weight to death, isn't there? You see, as I sat with all of this, one thing became really, really clear to me. There is something about death that gives life its weight. As long as time feels endless, we assume there will be another conversation, another opportunity, another chance. Until there isn't. And death reminds us that there is no guarantee. And love was always the point, wasn't it? I recently heard a quote, uh, often attributed to Jim Carrey, but I'm not able to verify that. I don't know if it really is his. But it goes something like this: it says, grief is not something you move on from, you move with it. The love does not disappear, it just transforms. It feels really true to me in all of this. Because I'm not moving on from my friend. I'm learning how to carry both the love and the loss. If you ever lost someone and you had unfinished business, please hear this. Numbness doesn't mean you didn't care. Anger doesn't cancel your love. Tears that come later are still real tears. And guilt does not always mean you failed. Sometimes it simply means that you wish there had been more time. I wish there was more time. Thank you for listening and letting me share this. I hope this resonated with you. I hope it helps you maybe feel less alone if you've been through a complicated grief. And if you're in the middle of grief right now, especially this kind of complicated grief, be be patient with yourself, man. Grief doesn't stay in one place, does it? It moves. Sometimes it circles back. And the only thing we can do is go through it. Well, this is Eddie, and this is the Voyage Cast, and we'll see you next time. But do remember that if you need help, if you are grieving, if you are struggling, Voyager's counseling is here. You're in Colorado, you can hit us up. If you're anywhere in Colorado, we can do telehealth. You know, you don't have to be alone in your grief. Hit up a friend, hit up a pastor, hit up somebody that you can connect to to deal with your grief if you are going through it. You know, if it's not counseling, do that. Just get help. Don't be stuck. It's not worth it. Alright, we'll see you next time. Take care.