Grief God Still Sees

Grief likes tidy boxes.

Widow. Child. Parent. Friend.

It wants you to stand in the right line, speak when invited, and mourn in approved tones.

But there’s no box for the woman who grieves her ex-husband.

It’s been four years now. Four years, two graduations, one engagement. Endless summer nights at the lake, where the water still holds the day’s warmth and the loons call as if nothing has changed. Two cross-country trips. Several hairstyles that came and went. Mountains climbed—some with sore calves and windburned cheeks, others on sheer resolve. All of it without him.

I cried when I first heard. Of course I did. The kind of crying that leaves you hollowed out, as if grief carved its name into you and walked away. Since then, the tears have come in waves, big moments mostly. A high school graduation. An engagement. Moments that should have his name stitched and his voice rolled into them.

But the sharpest ache comes quietly.

It comes when I want to call and tell him how our sons are growing into adventurous men, loose-limbed and brave in a way that would’ve made him grin. The kind of young men who are lighthearted, take risks, and laugh easily. It comes when a smirk slides across one of the boys’ faces, and it’s his smirk—same angle, same mischief—and my breath catches before I can stop it. I miss him most in those moments. The ordinary ones. The ones no one thinks to warn you about.

Scripture says, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). Near—not corrective, not impatient, not asking me to justify why this still hurts. Just near. And some days, that nearness is the only thing holding me upright.

Lately, the sadness has been heavier. That’s a hard thing to admit. Harder still to explain. How do you categorize grief that doesn’t quite belong anywhere?

It’s a strange thing, grieving your ex-husband.

On paper, divorce is clean. A signature. A date. A line drawn in ink that says this chapter is closed. But when you share children, that line is a polite fiction. Parenting means a lifetime of shared air—school functions and team sports, parent-teacher meetings and after-school lessons, endless pick-ups and drop-offs. Graduations. Weddings. Funerals. Family reunions. And if grace really pours out heavily someday, grandchildren. You expect to keep showing up in the same spaces for decades, standing side by side for the sake of the children we made together.

But now, that’s not the plan. Not even an option.

I grieved the death of our life together once, when divorce stripped it down to bare beams. But his death was a second loss altogether, final in a way divorce never was. A grief that keeps unfolding as our boys grow into men. One that keeps showing up uninvited in the days and lessons and moments he’ll never see, in the questions they don’t ask out loud, in the weight they carry quietly, like boys do—chin up, shoulders set, heart tucked deep where the cold can’t reach. Without his voice, his advice, his pride.

“For everything there is a season,” Ecclesiastes tells us, “a time to mourn” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4). What it doesn’t say is that mourning only comes once. Some losses echo. Some grief revisits you years later, begging to be acknowledged again.

And then there’s the quiet loneliness of it all.

There was a current wife. A family still living inside the story I once belonged to. Their grief had names and space, casseroles and places to sit. Mine felt like an inconvenience, an awkward footnote. Something best kept small and well-behaved.

After all, he was my ex.

But Scripture doesn’t rank sorrow. It simply says, “Weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). No qualifiers. No footnotes. No hierarchy of who gets to hurt the most.

I miss him more than anyone probably thinks I should. More than feels appropriate. More than I ever say out loud.

Love doesn’t vanish because a marriage ends. History doesn’t evaporate because a judge signs a decree. You don’t spend years building a life, raising children, learning the shape of someone’s humor and heartbreak, and then stop caring because it would be more comfortable for everyone else.

So I keep going. I make coffee. I show up for my boys. I stand at the edge of lakes and watch the light move across the water, trusting that nothing is wasted—not love, not loss, not even grief without a name.

Here in Maine, I know winter. I know the ground looks dead long before it’s done. And I believe—steadfast as bedrock—that God sees this grief too. The unclaimed kind. The unnamed kind.

One day, Scripture promises, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4). Until then, I trust that even this sorrow is held.

Not dismissed. Not minimized. Held.
And that’s enough to keep me standing.

Prayer
Lord, You see the grief I don’t know how to name, the sorrow I carry quietly. Draw near to me in this place. Hold what others don’t understand. Teach me to trust that nothing I feel is wasted in Your hands. Amen.