Grieving the Life You Expected:
How to Make Peace With a Future That Will Not Happen

There is a kind of loss that rarely gets a card or a casserole. What ended was a future: the marriage you thought you were building towards, the career you were sure you were ten years into, the friendship you assumed would still be there when you were old.

The book Who Told You That? The Beliefs That Keep You Small, and the Choices That Set You Free gives this grief its own place. It sits in the Interlude, “Making Peace With What Was”, between Chapters 23 and 24 – a section Mariyah Acka’a describes as alongside forgiveness, “and sometimes instead of it, if you need it”.

If you are reading this in the middle of something raw, please be gentle with yourself. Grief can be heavy work, and some of it is best done with a counsellor, therapist or someone you trust beside you. If you are struggling to stay safe, please reach out now – in the UK, Samaritans are free on 116 123, day or night – and you can find more support on our safeguarding page.

Grieving the hope, not only the loss

In the Interlude, Mariyah writes about her marriage – not the ending itself, but what came before it. For years, she says, she had been quietly adjusting her expectations downward, performing a version of contentment that was “adjacent to contentment but was not quite it”. By the time the marriage was visibly in trouble, she had been mourning it for much longer than she realised.

From that, the book names something many people recognise immediately:

The hardest grief to make peace with, the book says, is often “not the loss of the thing, but the loss of the version of the thing you always believed it would become”. Grieving that hope is not about rehearsing injury or assigning blame. It is about being able to say: I wanted something. I believed in something. And what I wanted is not what I received. And that is a real loss.

The book goes further still. Writing about her brother, Mariyah describes the particular weight of what cannot be finished – the conversations in their sixties that will not now happen, the version of him who would have lived to see what she built. Her words to anyone carrying something similar are simple: “You are allowed to grieve the future, not only the past.”

Ambiguous loss, and losing a version of yourself

Chapter 23 draws on Pauline Boss’s term ambiguous loss – a loss with no clear ending, such as someone still living but gone from your life, or a relationship that never had a proper ending. It resists resolution: no ritual, no closure. The book says plainly: “your grief is real. Its complications do not make it less legitimate.”

Then there is the loss of a version of yourself. The self you were in a marriage that no longer exists. The professional identity that ended with a redundancy letter. The parent-self whose children have grown and gone. The person you were before a diagnosis, or before a rupture so complete you can hardly remember who you were when things were otherwise. Mariyah writes that she knows at least two of these from the inside: “the wife I was for twenty-three years, and the sister I was before the rupture.”

“There is no funeral for a former self,” the book observes. Unrecognised by the world, these losses often go unhonoured privately too. Chapter 23 offers four questions to return to over time, not to answer quickly:

1. What did the version of me that I have lost know how to do – not the role or title, but the actual capacities?
2. What was I carrying in that version of myself that was never really mine?
3. What has the loss revealed about what I actually value?
4. What does the person who survived this loss know that they did not know before?

And one permission most of us are never given: “You are allowed to become someone different.” Not instead of who you were, the book says – in addition to it.

How to make peace with the past – without a timetable

The Interlude is careful about what making peace is not: pretending it was okay, forgiving before you are ready, “deciding that because time has passed, you should be over it”, or performing a resolution for people who are more comfortable when you stop talking about it.

Making peace, in the book’s sense, means looking clearly at what you are carrying, naming specifically what was lost, grieving what should have been as distinctly as what was, and recognising what the weight is costing you now. Often the decision has to be made “not once, but repeatedly, on the days when it resurfaces”.

The book is also honest that this is not a finish line. Mariyah writes that some stages took her years, and that she is still in some of them. What she describes is a shift rather than an arrival: the weight moving from the front of your awareness to “something you know is there, that you carry with respect”. In her words: “It does not mean you are done. It means you have begun.”

For ruptures with people, the Interlude offers a word Mariyah made because English did not have one: sankora – “right in the heart, wrong in the reading, both, wholly, at once.” It lets you hold that you were right to hope, and still grieve what did not arrive, without turning it into blame. For some ruptures – and only if it feels like release rather than self-betrayal – it can also help you consider that the other person was acting from their own reading of love. Some people act from cruelty, the book is clear, and you owe no one an invented loving motive. If you would like to explore this privately, The Forgiveness Path walks through it at your own pace.

When joy feels like betrayal

One of the gentlest parts of the Interlude is about the first laugh after loss – and the guilt that arrives right behind it, as if joy were proof you did not care enough. “Joy is not betrayal,” the book says. Grief and joy are not seasons that take turns; they can share the same day. And joy tends to come back slowly, “in teaspoons”: a song played to the end, ten minutes of sun, a meal cooked for no one but you.

If you are finding it hard to let two true things sit side by side – the grief and the life still asking for you – Hold Both is a short, private practice for exactly that.

Where to go deeper

• Read the Interlude, “Making Peace With What Was”, and Chapter 23 on losing a version of yourself, in Who Told You That?
• Work through the Interlude in the Choose Forward workbook – a five-movement protocol (Naming, Hope, Unfinished, Stayed, Threshold). Movement 2, Grieving the Hope, Not Only the Loss, includes a permission statement for the future you wanted. You choose the depth that is right for you today, and there is no completion deadline.
• Try The Forgiveness Path or Hold Both when you want a quieter, guided space.
• Take the free Freedom Assessment, or read Chapter 1 free to begin at the beginning.

As the workbook’s Interlude closes: “You are allowed to grieve what should have been.” And you do not have to do it alone.

Keep reading