There is a grief that many people carry quietly, often for years, without ever calling it grief.

It is the grief of childlessness — of a family that didn't come to be, a future that was imagined in vivid detail and then, gradually or suddenly, closed. It is carried by people who tried and couldn't, by people whose circumstances closed the door, by people who chose a different path and still find themselves grieving the road not taken.

This grief is real. It is significant. And it is one of the most underacknowledged losses in our cultural conversation about grief.