If I had to come back in another lifetime, I think I’d want to be my own pet.

Seriously.

If you could see my ducks…the way they waddle around Duckingham Palace like they own the place, the way they get the exact right amount of space, safety, and adventure…you’d understand.

They don’t worry about what’s next. They don’t grieve the past. They don’t wake up in the morning feeling the weight of what could have been.

But we do.

We grieve the lives we never got to live.

The future we planned but never reached.
The child we imagined before we knew who they’d be.
The version of ourselves we thought we’d become.

Lately, in my conversations with clients, grief has been showing up in places they didn’t expect. Not in the loss of what was, but in the loss of what never came to be.

A mother grieving the version of her child she once pictured for her child, now reshaped by a diagnosis.
A woman grieving the career she stepped away from, the path that will always be the one she didn’t take.
A man grieving the ease he thought he was building, now staring at an entirely different reality. 

This kind of grief doesn’t get acknowledged. This kind of grief is quieter. Definitely harder to name.

There’s no funeral for a life that never happened. No rituals for the self we never became. No permission to mourn a possibility. And yet, it aches.

I believe that when we lose the idea, whether that’s of love or identity or the life we thought was ours, we don’t just lose a dream. We lose a piece of ourselves. A version of ourselves who existed in that imagined future.

And maybe that’s what makes this grief so hard to move through. It’s so complex. Because how do you grieve something that never existed? How do you let go of something that never had a a chance to live? How do you say goodbye to a future you were counting on?

I think it starts with realizing that the future you imagined for yourself or others wasn’t wasted. It mattered. It was real to you. And even though things may have unfolded differently than you thought, that imagined future is still part of you.

It shaped the choices you made. It carried you through hard moments. It gave you something to hold onto when the road ahead was unclear.

And now, the life that’s unfolding has something for you that you never could have planned. Something valuable. Something unseen. Something that still matters.

Have you ever grieved something that never happened? A version of yourself, your life, or a dream you thought was ‘the plan’?

Hit reply. I read every word.

Jonni

P.S. My ducks, of course, don’t spend time overthinking any of this. They just exist. Happy. Present. Trusting that life will give them exactly what they need, when they need it. And it feels like there’s something to learn from that. So, just for today, we can try to do the same. Just be here. Right where we are.