Unfriended: The Quiet Grief of Losing a Friend

There’s a strange kind of loss no one warns you about. The kind you feel when a friend disappears from your life without warning.

We don’t talk enough about friendship breakups.

Why do breakups only seem to count when they belong to romance?

No one sends flowers when a friendship dies.

There’s no funeral, no eulogy—just a quiet space where something holy used to live

And it may seem unexpected to use the word holy to describe a friendship, but I think that’s what gives it weight. We don’t usually talk about friendships that way—but maybe we should.

The right friendship can feel sacred, life-altering even, like it lives in a trusted part of us. And so, when it dies, I think it deserves a word with the same reverence.

Because the truth is, a breakup is a breakup—romantic or not. The silence stretches in all the same ways. The grief curls up in all the same corners. We just don’t have a word for the space it leaves behind

Losing a friend cuts deep—and maybe that’s the point.

We used to prick our fingers and call it forever—like a little blood could somehow make a bond unbreakable.

But no one tells you what to do when the wound outlasts the friendship.

There’s no roadmap for how to grieve someone who’s still alive, just walking around with every embarrassing story, every inside joke, and all your secrets hidden in their back pocket.

Our friends carry our truth, our history—the pieces of us that only they know.

Yet, we treat friendship breakups like a phase—or worse, a non-event.

No one ever says, “There are plenty of other friend fish in the sea.”

There’s no ice cream binging.

No playlists.

No group chats to dissect the screenshots.

But the mourning is real, quiet and complete.

We don’t realize how easily a friendship becomes part of our inner map. A close friendship sneaks in like air— you don’t notice how much you need it until it’s gone.

And you feel strange for still feeling sad about it, but you shouldn’t.

How could you not grieve someone who once knew you better than you know yourself? With one look, you knew exactly what the other was thinking. And now, no one seems to speak the same language.

It’s funny how BFF stands for best friends forever— which apparently also means until one of us disappears and no one talks about it.

The only thing you can do is give it space.

Let it hurt.

Let it harden.

And right as the scab is about to fall off,

Facebook will likely remind you of a random Tuesday in 2011 when you cry-laughed over something that wasn’t even funny.

Some friendships slip away quietly—I like to call this the slow fade. You just stop texting, the check-ins get fewer, until one day you realize it’s been months since you’ve talked. There’s no fight, just a quiet kind of drifting.

Other times, it ends with fire. Think: dramatic exit. Accidental insults that turn into full-blown meltdowns. An explosion that leaves you in a wreckage of something you just assumed would always be there.

And then there are the blindsides. A vanishing act—here one minute, gone the next. A puff of smoke and silence. No warning. No explanation. Just absence—thick and sudden—like the wind got knocked out of you.

I once had a friend of thirty years walk out of my life—poof, gone, with no real goodbye.

When she left, it felt like losing a limb.

Like some essential part of me had been removed, and I was expected to just go on functioning without it—without her.

I’ve also been the one to walk away. I ended a friendship that no longer felt safe for me to stay in— when it started affecting my own peace and mental health, I realized I couldn’t keep shrinking myself to stay close to someone, who was already at peace with losing me. Letting go was painful, but staying would’ve been a different kind of loss.

Now and then, I catch fragments of their lives through other people—just enough to remind me that I don’t know them at all anymore.

Sometimes, we get the urge to reach out—just a simple “Hey, I miss you.” But the silence is thick—it’s not just distance anymore, now it’s history. And reaching out can feel like knocking on a door you’re unsure still opens.

Would it even bring comfort? Or would it just tear open what’s already blistered and trying to heal?

Sometimes we’re not even reaching for who they are now, but for a version of them that reminds us of who we were—at a time when life felt lighter, when we laughed more, when everything made sense.

And maybe that’s one of the hardest parts, realizing their story keeps going, but we’re no longer written into it.

At some point, you have to stop reopening the wound and just let them go. Fold the memories neatly, tuck them inside a drawer, and close it. Send them love and light—and hope it reaches them, wherever they are.

When we’re kids, new friendships are everywhere—on the playground, in gym class, at sleepovers.

But as we get older, making new friends is difficult. Everyone’s busy, guarded, or already spoken for.

So when you lose someone close, it’s not just heartbreaking, it’s the quiet realization that some people truly are irreplaceable.

You might wonder if you’re being too sensitive, too nostalgic, too stuck in the past—but you’re not. Grief doesn’t care about timelines.

Not every friendship is meant to last forever—some are seasonal, some are situational, and some simply run their course.

It doesn’t mean you failed.

Maybe friendships don’t last forever, but that doesn’t make them any less important. It doesn’t mean the love wasn’t real.

Truth is, sometimes people just grow in different directions. Maybe we need to normalize the ebb and flow of connection—and how some people drift in, and others simply drift away.

Maybe the worst part of losing a friend is that the world just keeps spinning like nothing happened.

The love, the laughter, the late-night conversations— they all counted.

They still do.

So if you’re grieving a friend no one talks about anymore, you’re not alone.

We carry them quietly—in the space between then and now, in our muscle memory, in our spirit, in all the ways they once brought light into our lives.

And sometimes, if we’re lucky,

that light still flickers within us.

We honour the friendship and we

honour the ending—

even if the world doesn’t know how to give it a name.