Can You Imagine the Grief? The Invisible Loss

My dad used to tear up at history.

Not so much at funerals, not at movies. At history. We'd be walking the trails of a nature preserve outside our small Illinois town, me collecting critters, drawing on my arms with bloodroot, him pointing at things and naming them, and he'd stop, sit on a log, and start telling me about people who had been gone for four hundred years, like he was watching it happen in real time.

Squanto was the one who got him the most.

If you don't know the story: Squanto left his village, was captured, made it to England, learned English, made it back to the Americas, and came home to find everyone he had ever known was gone. His entire tribe. Dead from disease while he was away. The village was just there. The landscape remembered them. Nobody else did.

My dad would tear up telling it and ask me, "Can you imagine the grief?"

I was maybe eight. I couldn't. But I stored the question.

This is what has been on my mind.... There are griefs that get monuments. Mass graves. Historic markers. Documentaries. Someone tears up telling the story four hundred years later.

And then there are griefs that leave no ruins.

The invisible grief... The family that stays physically present while slowly making clear you don't belong. The people who watched and said nothing, year after year, told everyone doing the harm that the cost was zero. The village that was never quite yours. The landscape that remembers something the people in it refuse to name.

That grief doesn't get a monument. It doesn't even get acknowledged as grief. From the outside, nothing happened. You're still standing. Nobody died in a way that gets documented.

You just came home one day, and everyone was gone in a way nobody else could see.

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Last Father's Day, I drove to the nature preserve my dad built.

He secured the federal grant himself, back when he was president of the park district. He made that place exist for strangers, and then he walked me through it for years, teaching me to wonder at things.

It's overgrown now. The iron gate is rusted. The boardwalk is sinking back into the green. I took pictures because I knew it was the last time I'd go.

He died three years ago. He never stopped tearing up while telling the story of Squanto.

I think what he was trying to hand me on those trails, without either of us having words for it, was permission to feel grief across distance. Grief without a body to point to. The understanding that some losses are so total, so invisible, so unwitnessed that the only dignified response is to stop walking, sit down, and ask: can you imagine it?

I kept the question. I'm still sitting with it.

And I keep running into people who are carrying the invisible version. The massacre that left no ruins. The belonging that was never quite extended. The village that was technically still standing.

They don't have a language for it yet. The world keeps telling them nothing happened.

My dad would have teared up for them, too.

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