“She asks me, "How do you grieve someone you never met?" With each patient, I hear similar questions. It keeps emerging, this pulse. It presses in every room, leans on every shoulder, demands an answer: How do you grieve future loss? Underneath that, more questions: How do you deal with the viciousness of a broken dream? How do you move on from the picture of life in your head? How do you keep moving through a parallel-universe life? My patients suffer from good dreams. What I mean is, it's not the nightmares that keep them up. It's the hope. Daydreams of another life. Instead of homesick, they're timesick. Before becoming a chaplain, I thought grief was about missing the past. About reflecting on all the things before, the stuff we had until mortality crawled through the window. It's true. We grieve the past. But mostly no one gets a chance to grieve the future. It doesn't seem to read as a real loss. I need to tell you about this because nobody told me: The dream that didn't happen is as much of a loss as losing the one that did.” TimeLossGriefFuture Book:As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve Source: As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve