Episode 198 | The Grief Series
There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes not from being alone, but from being surrounded by people who were supposed to show up and didn’t.
It’s the loneliness of watching a friend watch your stories and never comment on your posts. Of getting the call that the college friends who were all in your wedding unfollowed you on the same day without a word. Of living in the same state as your parents and still raising your kids without a net. Of needing your mom and realizing, slowly and then all at once, that who she is now can’t give you what you need.
This is the final episode of the Grief Series, and we went there.
The Friend Grief Nobody Warns You About
My guest, Emily Merrell, is a connector at her core. She founded Second Degree Society, a networking community built around the idea that who you know changes everything. She has built a life and a business around bringing people together. And she still knows what it feels like to watch a friendship quietly disappear.
We talked about the specific grief of being an entrepreneur and realizing your friends are not going to be your front-row cheerleaders. The ones who say, “I’d rather take a bullet for you than come to one of your networking events.” The unsubscribes you see and immediately spiral around. The friends who watch every single story but won’t engage with a post. The ones who show up to support you in a way that feels more like charity than genuine investment.
That particular sting, being someone’s project instead of their person, is one most ambitious women know and almost none of us talk about.
Emily shared a friendship that started in college, the kind with deep roots and real history. This person was on a panel at one of her first events. She assumed, the way you do when you’re in your twenties and building something, that this friend would always be there. Then she found out, through someone else, that she hadn’t been included in the wedding party. She was walking down Broadway when she heard. She was hysterical.
Years of distance, a bachelorette party she didn’t attend, a baby shower she missed, and now a friend she texts every birthday who never responds. Not with conflict. Not with a conversation. Just silence.
That’s the grief of the open loop. The one that never closes because no one ever said what happened.
When Your Ambition Becomes the Problem
I shared my own version. A group of women I’d been close with for decades, friends who were at every baby shower, every wedding, real deep friendships. In September 2023, they all unfollowed me on the same day. One spokesperson reached out to say I wasn’t included on the annual girls’ trip, with no further explanation. And that was it. No conversation. No closure. Just gone.
To this day I have heartache over it.
Emily and I talked about the pattern underneath stories like these: ambition is triggering. Not because there’s anything wrong with being ambitious, but because when you’re doing the thing you said you were going to do, it holds up a mirror to everyone who hasn’t started yet. And sometimes people would rather step away from the mirror than look at what’s reflecting back.
That doesn’t make it hurt less. It just makes it make more sense.
What I know for sure: the women who walked out were not reacting to me. They were reacting to themselves. And I’ve had to get very comfortable sitting with something I’ll probably never fully resolve, which is that I will never understand why, and I have to keep going anyway.
The Grandparent Grief That Lives in Your Chest
This is the part of the episode that surprised me with how much was still sitting there unprocessed.
Emily and I both came into motherhood with a picture of what grandparents would look like. Hands-on, present, proactive. The kind who call to ask diaper sizes and show up with gifts and say, without being asked, “Go on a date. I’ve got the kids.”
Neither of us got that.
Emily talked about having her mother-in-law visiting while we recorded, watching her be the grandmother she had always hoped for, and feeling the grief of the contrast in real time. Her father-in-law has not seen her daughter since she was eight weeks old. She turns eight in September. He has never called on a birthday. Never sent a gift. Her mother, who she lives in the same state as, has never once offered to babysit.
The one time Emily asked for help, directly and specifically, to cover three hours of school pickup so she could record this episode, she was told no. Her mother-in-law had other plans.
I sat with that for a long time after we talked.
Because this is the grief that compounds. It’s not one thing. It’s every sporting event where it’s just you and your husband in the stands while other kids have grandparents three rows deep. It’s the friend who mentions casually that both grandmothers trade off school pickups every day so the parents can work till five. It’s the first grade teacher who tells you her in-laws take the kids every Friday night so she and her husband can reconnect, and you’re standing there trying to hold your face together.
We live in a culture that prizes independence and distance. We celebrate kids who move across the country. We don’t talk enough about what it costs the generation raising the next one when the village that’s supposed to exist by birthright simply doesn’t show up.
Grieving Your Mom While She’s Still Here
This is the one I want to sit with longest, because I think it’s the most common and the least spoken.
I talked about reaching a point in motherhood where I have never needed my mom more, and simultaneously finding that who my mom is right now is more painful to reach for than to let be. Her mental health has made her unavailable in ways I didn’t anticipate. She can’t hear hard feedback without becoming defensive. She doesn’t have the capacity to ask how I’m doing in any real way. Our relationship feels like it’s floating, not gone but too painful to really hold.
Emily described something similar. Her mom is well-meaning. When she’s physically present, she’s engaged and loving. But the proactive showing up, the forward-thinking helpfulness, the “let me take something off your plate before you have to ask,” it’s never been there. And after twelve years of motherhood, Emily has stopped expecting it.
What we both named, and what I think a lot of women are carrying quietly, is this: there was a version of our mothers who made us feel unconditionally safe. The version who you could tell anything to, and you knew you were still loved. And somewhere along the way, whether it was their own mental health, their own grief, their own limitations, she stopped being fully accessible. And we’re grieving her while she’s still alive, while she still calls, while she still tries in the ways she can.
That’s complicated grief. And it doesn’t have a resolution. It just has to be named.
What You Do When the Village Doesn’t Come
Emily offered something practical inside all of this, because she’s someone who takes grief and looks for what she can actually do with it.
She turned off her unsubscribe notifications. She stopped watching who unfollows. She started separating her business identity from her full self, making space to be known as a mom, a reader, someone who likes to walk, not just a founder. She read Let Them, gave herself permission to stop fighting for invitations to parties that didn’t include her, and started building the table she actually wanted to sit at.
And I’ll add to that: sometimes building the village means being honest enough to ask for help even when you’ve been conditioned to believe nobody will come. It means finding the friends you can call who will show up with dinner rather than “How can I help?” It means recognizing that the people who can go deep with you, who will sit with your actual grief and not redirect to silver linings, are the ones worth pouring into.
This episode exists because Emily was willing to cry on a recorded line and share it with strangers. That’s what belonging actually looks like: not the village you were promised, but the one you build, conversation by conversation, with the people brave enough to go there with you.
“I think the only solution I can offer is to be honest, and to find people and conversations where you can feel a little less alone in that feeling.”
This is the final episode of The Grief Series. Four conversations, four extraordinary women, one through line: the grief that lives inside the ordinary parts of life is real, it’s widespread, and it’s survivable when we stop pretending it isn’t there.
Thank you for being in it with me.
Find Emily on Instagram at @emilyamerrell and at seconddegreesociety.com.
This is The Grief Series. Listen now!
xx, Ash
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