Losing a grandparent: the grief the world quietly ranks as minor
By Rachel · Updated 2026-07-21 · 2 min read
The short answer
Grief for a grandparent is often minimised because it is seen as the natural order of things, but a grandparent can be one of the most important attachments of your life. For many people they were a source of uncomplicated love, safety and belonging that parents, under pressure, could not always give. "They had a good innings" hurts because it treats a long life as a reason not to mourn. The length of someone's life does not shrink the size of the hole they leave.
"Well, they had a good innings."
Someone will say it, kindly, meaning to comfort you, and it will land like a door closing on your grief before you've even walked through it. As if a long life were a reason to be grateful rather than a longer time to have loved them. As if you should be over it by lunch.
The loss the world files under "expected"
So many of you have told me how alone this grief can feel, precisely because everyone treats it as fine.
A grandparent dying is the natural order of things, people say. It was always going to happen. And so the sympathy is brief, the time off is grudging, and you are left privately gutted by a loss the world has already ticked off as acceptable.
But being expected does not make something small. Your own death is expected too. Expected grief is still grief.
The one who made you feel safe
Here is what the ranking gets wrong about grandparents.
For a lot of you, they were the least complicated love in your life. Parents are often stretched thin, worried, disciplining, tired. Grandparents got to be the soft place. The one who thought you were marvellous exactly as you were. The house that smelled of a specific thing, the food made only for you, the sense of being unconditionally, uselectively adored.
Losing that is losing a kind of safety you may not find again. A person you could do no wrong in front of. The last adult who remembered you as a small child and loved you across the whole span.
A long life does not make a small loss. It just means you had longer to be loved by them.
And sometimes, the family's centre
For many families, a grandparent was the hinge everything hung on.
The Sunday lunch. The house everyone came back to. The keeper of the recipes and the old stories and the reason the whole scattered family gathered at all. When they go, sometimes the gatherings go with them, and you find yourself grieving a whole world that quietly closes behind them.
That is a real secondary loss, and nobody warns you it is coming.
Letting it count
So let it count. Take the day. Cry at the funeral even if you're the only grandchild who does.
You are not being dramatic for being floored by the death of someone who was, for a long time, one of the safest people in your life. "A good innings" is the score. It says nothing about the missing.
Say their name, keep the daft phrase they always used, cook the thing they cooked. The length of their life was a gift. The hole it leaves is the exact measure of it.
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