A few weeks after I lost Bradley, I tried to record a podcast about grief. It took three or four tries to get through it without my voice breaking. Then the recording was corrupted and gone.
Maybe that was time and the universe happening for me, not to me. Maybe I needed more time. But I kept coming back to the same question: what happens when grief arrives in the middle of a life that has no room for it?
Bradley was my six-and-a-half-year-old rescue Great Pyrenees. He was huge, beloved, and completely woven into our life. I bought a new car in part because the old one did not make it easy for him to get in. He had congenital kidney disease we found late, and he went from doing reasonably well to kidney failure overnight.
When it happened, I went completely still. Not the kind of still where you are crying on the floor. The other kind. The kind where you keep working, answer emails, make decisions, and do the things that need doing while something underneath you has stopped.
I have known that stillness before. I knew it when my dad died more than a decade ago. I knew it when my mom had a catastrophic heart attack and stroke, when I helped guide her care through hospice, and when she died earlier this year. Bradley’s death did not feel smaller because he was a dog. It felt enormous.
This is the part of midlife no hormone panel can measure. You will not find it in your blood work. It is grief, caregiving, and the sheer weight of what so many women are carrying every day, and why so many of us do not let ourselves feel it until it forces its way out.
Medical note: This article offers education and support, not a diagnosis or personal treatment plan. Grief has no correct timetable. If low mood, anxiety, sleep disruption, or grief is seriously interfering with daily life, or if you are worried about your safety, contact a qualified healthcare or mental health professional. In the United States, call or text 988 for immediate crisis support, and call emergency services if there is immediate danger.
The work nobody sees when you become the decision-maker
My relationship with my mom was complicated. We were very different people, and there were old hurts in it. She grew up in a time when she could not have her own bank account or her own credit card, and I think she carried unfulfilled dreams she never got to act on. Then, in the space of 24 hours, a catastrophic heart attack and stroke took her from living fully independently to needing full assistance with every activity of daily living. She ultimately needed intensive long-term care. That was not a failure of love. It was how I made sure she had the care she needed.
Overnight, I went from being a daughter to being her medical proxy, chief decision-maker, medical manager, and financial manager. For nearly three years, I sandwiched caring for my mom with seeing patients every day, building Menrva, and finishing my PhD dissertation, then going to her assisted-living center at night, then coming home to the paperwork, legal documents, medication changes, and insurance issues of somebody else’s life. I used to joke that I had a second part-time, 20-hour-a-week job just managing my mom’s affairs.
That is the invisible work. Caregiving is not only the hours of hands-on help. It is the phone call with the facility, the question about a medication, the form you did not know existed until it was urgent, and the guilt of not being able to be in two places at once.
And this is not a niche experience. AARP’s Caregiving in the US 2025 report counts roughly 63 million Americans, about one in four adults, as caregivers. Around 16 million of us are in the sandwich generation, caring for an aging parent and a child at the same time, and the average person in that position is about 51 years old. The load is not split evenly: roughly 60% of caregivers are women, and we spend measurably more time on caregiving tasks each day than men do.[1] Honestly, I think the real number is higher, because in 22 years of talking to women I have seen how often a woman quietly becomes the caregiver for her spouse’s parents too, even when her husband is technically the one responsible.
The word sandwich can sound tidy. It is not. A recent industry survey found that 64% of working women in the sandwich generation report being at a breaking point, with rising mental-health strain, higher healthcare costs, and real lost productivity, and burnout runs highest in the women carrying the most complex loads. We ask women to manage a parent’s decline, a household, a career, their own hormonal chaos, and their kids, including the boomerang child moving into the basement for the third time, all at once. Then we act surprised when something breaks.
If one person cannot safely provide all the care a loved one needs, more support is not abandonment. The National Institute on Aging names specific ways to share the load: caregiver support groups, adult day services, home health support, and respite care.[2]
You can mourn someone who is still sitting in front of you
My mom’s stroke led to dementia, and I thought I had already grieved her, because in many ways I had lost the person she had been. Then I grieved again through the two weeks I sat beside her in hospice as she slowly died. And then I grieved when she was gone.
That does not make the love less real, and it does not mean I did grief wrong because it did not resolve on schedule. This is often the worst part of caring for a parent in decline, especially with dementia: the mourning starts at the decline, not at the death. You are already grieving and bargaining while they are still alive, because the person they were is gone. Caregivers sometimes call this ambiguous loss, a person physically here while illness changes who they are to you, and the sadness, frustration, anger, loneliness, and confusion that come with it are all part of it.[2]
You can feel devoted to your parent and resentful of the paperwork. You can be relieved a crisis is over and devastated by what it took. You can have a complicated history and still grieve with your whole body. Those are not contradictions to clean up before you are allowed to call it grief.
My dad has been gone well over a decade. A song, a smell, a laugh that sounds like his, and I am right back at the surface. That is not me being broken. That is what grief actually is. It does not move in a straight line, and it does not respect a timeline anyone else assigns to it.
Bradley was not a smaller loss
Almost immediately after Bradley died, part of my brain wanted to apologize for the size of the loss. It wanted to say, “He’s a dog. People are dealing with real things. Get it together.”
But a dog can be part of the architecture of your day: the car ride, the morning rhythm, the greeting at the door, the physical presence in the house. When that presence is gone, the silence can be startling.
That instinct to apologize has a name: disenfranchised grief, grief that other people do not openly acknowledge or sanction as real. Look at anyone’s post about their dog dying and someone will show up in the comments to say it does not matter, there are real problems in the world. Pet loss is one of the most common examples, and research shows grief after a pet’s death is consistently judged less valid than grief for a person, even when the emotional response is just as strong. When we suppress that grief because we do not believe we are allowed to feel it, it does not disappear. It complicates healing and makes it harder to move through.[3]
I went looking for the research, and it stopped me in my tracks. A 2026 study led by psychologist Philip Hyland, published in PLOS ONE, surveyed close to a thousand UK adults about every kind of loss they had experienced, parents, siblings, children, friends, pets, and which hit hardest. About a third had lost a pet, and nearly all of them had also lost a person close to them, so these were not people comparing apples to oranges. They were comparing a pet’s death to human losses they had actually lived. Of that group, one in five, 21%, said the pet’s death was the single most distressing loss of their life. Not close to, not almost as bad as. The most.[4]
Here is the part that makes me angry on behalf of everyone who has apologized for crying too hard over a dog. When researchers looked at prolonged grief, the pet-loss rates were similar to, and in some categories higher than, several human losses we are taught matter more. And yet the official diagnostic manuals that psychiatrists use, DSM-5-TR and ICD-11, do not allow prolonged grief disorder to apply to a pet at all, not because the evidence says it should not, but because of how the category was written to require the death of a person.[4][5] We built a clinical framework that tells people their grief does not officially count while the data underneath it says the opposite. So do not let a manual that has not caught up to the evidence tell you how much your loss is allowed to hurt, and do not turn a study into a self-diagnosis either. A diagnosis is not the measure of whether a loss deserves tenderness, support, and time.
If you are a pet owner and you have not had a pet loss yet, you will, because they do not share our lifespan. Your nervous system did not get the memo that it was supposed to be a smaller loss. And it turns out, neither did the research.
The grief that never gets a funeral
Some losses have no service, no casseroles, no bereavement leave.
There is the career you put on hold during a family crisis. The version of your mother you hoped you might get to know. The relationship that was never uncomplicated. The plan you scaled back because your family’s needs grew bigger than your own. The time you thought you would have.
I was fortunate that I did not have to abandon my PhD, though it took far longer to finish because caregiving took the time I had reserved for it, dropping from a day a week to once a month. Many women do have to bury dreams, or delay them so long they no longer recognize what they wanted. We rarely call that grief, even when it sits in the body like one. And when another loss comes, that old box in the back of the closet opens, and the tears over a dog are suddenly not only about the dog. The grief you thought you finished with your dad, your mom, your old life, or a deferred dream may be in there too.
Why women do not “skip” grief
I do not think women skip grief because we do not feel it. I think we skip it because we do not have a slot for it.
There is no calendar block that says: fall apart today for two hours, then pull yourself together before the Zoom call. There is a patient waiting. A child to pick up. A parent’s medications to sort. A dissertation chapter due. There is always another task that looks more urgent than being sad.
When I watched my mom have a stroke in an emergency room over the course of hours, I thought I would have time to feel the grief right there. Instead, I had to get up and fight for her care. Grief did not go away. It changed shape.
It can look like a short temper you do not recognize, exhaustion that sleep does not repair, tears that arrive over something seemingly unrelated, or going through the motions while checked out. For years in my 30s I was someone who got sick the moment I went on vacation, the instant I took my foot off the gas my body fell apart, and so many women know that exact pattern. Those experiences have many causes and are not proof of a diagnosis. They can be the backlog finally finding a crack.
For women in perimenopause, this gets especially tangled, because hormone changes, physical symptoms, and poor sleep overlap with caregiving stress, grief, anxiety, and depression, and heaven forbid your sleep is already jacked up by the transition. ACOG notes that both perimenopausal changes and the pressures common in the 40s and 50s can affect mood and coping.[7] The point is not to explain grief away as hormones. It is also not to dismiss disruptive sleep, mood, or menopause symptoms as something you simply endure. Both deserve to be heard.
Make room, but do not make grief another assignment
I do not have this mastered either. I am still grieving Bradley. I am still not okay. I still have moments of grief about my mom and my dad.
What changed for me was saying it out loud to actual people instead of only narrating it to myself in the car or on the bike. It felt a little illegal to say it out loud at first. It should not.
I also started scheduling the fall-apart, literally putting it on the calendar the way I would anything else, because otherwise I would fill that space with busyness. After Bradley died, my husband and I spent two weeks in a slow, quiet, almost medieval town in Italy. I know that kind of trip is not available to everyone, and it is not a prescription. The important part was not the place. It was that I stopped filling every inch of quiet with activity.
For you, it might be an afternoon alone, a familiar walk, a drive with no podcast on, a journal, a support group, or asking somebody else to make one of the calls. The National Institute on Aging suggests concrete asks, a meal, a visit, time with the person you care for, because they are easier for others to say yes to.[2]
These are openings, not a grief checklist. You do not have to process beautifully or arrive at acceptance on anyone else’s timeline. Sometimes the first act of care is refusing to call yourself fine when you are only functioning.
Questions women ask when grief and caregiving collide
Is it normal to grieve a parent before they die?
Yes. When illness, stroke, or dementia changes a relationship, the mourning often starts at the decline, long before the death. Some people find terms like ambiguous loss or anticipatory grief helpful, and others do not need a label. What matters is that mixed feelings do not make you a bad daughter or caregiver.[2]
Why does pet loss feel so overwhelming?
The bond, the daily routines, and the sudden change in your day all matter, and pet grief is not lesser because someone else tries to rank it. Research documents substantial, sometimes profound grief after pet loss, but it cannot tell you how you should feel or whether you have a disorder.[3][4]
What if I am still grieving years later?
A wave of grief years after a loss is not, by itself, a sign that something is wrong. Prolonged grief disorder is a specific clinical condition involving intense, persistent grief that significantly disrupts daily functioning. You never need a label to deserve support, and if grief, anxiety, or low mood is getting harder to carry, a mental health or healthcare professional can help.[5][6]
The weight deserves to be named
If you are caring for a parent who no longer resembles the person who raised you, holding together a household or a career, grieving a dog who was family, or telling yourself you will deal with your feelings when life calms down, let me say this plainly: life is never going to calm down enough to hand you permission.
You have to take it.
You are not unusual for carrying some version of this. Most of the women I talk to are carrying it right now. But the weight itself is extraordinary, and it deserves to be named, not simply managed. If you have put your grief in a box in the corner of the closet to deal with later, consider dusting it off and feeling it now, because the next grief will spring that box open anyway. It is better to move through it than to pretend it is not there.
At Menrva, we believe midlife care must make room for the whole person. If perimenopause or menopause symptoms are adding to what you are carrying, explore care options for women and bring the full picture to a qualified clinician. Your grief does not cancel out your physical health, and your physical health does not cancel out your grief.
And if this opened something in you, tell someone. Share it with the woman who may not have had five minutes today to hear that she is not alone. I hear you. I am with you.