When the World Had to Grieve Young

What the AIDS crisis taught me about grief, connection, and what we still get wrong…

I’ve been sitting with grief lately. Not the kind that blows your life apart in one afternoon, but the quiet kind, the kind I don’t talk about until it claws its way out sideways.

I was watching a show about the AIDS crisis, something I’ve seen covered a hundred different ways. But this time it was different. The story wasn’t told by seasoned adults looking back. The actors were young, the same age as the people who actually lived it. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty-two. Barely out of childhood, facing the kind of loss most people don’t even know how to name at that age.

I’m not comparing the AIDS crisis to anything I’ve lived through. I know it was far more devastating and complex than what I’m touching on here. I’m speaking to one small part of it, the grief young people carried and how seeing that perspective changed the way I understand grief today.

It showed me a perspective I’d somehow never truly seen until now.

I’m a millennial. My closest “collective trauma” parallel is COVID. As awful as it was, I didn’t watch my entire generation disappear around me. I didn’t carry the weight of stigma, secrecy, and silence layered on top of grief that no one wanted to look at. I didn’t lose ten friends in the same month and have nowhere safe to collapse.

Seeing their faces, actual young adult faces, made it real in a way I hadn’t felt before. It made me think about how much grief they carried, and how little space they were given to survive it.

And maybe that’s why this part of history always pulls at me. Grief has never frightened me. I don’t freeze up around it. I don’t feel the need to tidy it away. I’ve always known how to sit with it. Maybe that’s the empath in me. Maybe it’s lived experience. Maybe it’s both.

But watching this show made me wonder what they needed that they never got. What could have been different if someone had just said: “I’m here. What you’re feeling makes sense. You’re allowed to fall apart.”

That absence of witnessing is its own kind of trauma.

The grief we didn’t see, and the grief we still avoid

Those young adults weren’t just grieving friends. They were grieving identity, safety, belonging, and the futures they thought they’d have. And they were doing all of it in a world that wasn’t ready to hold them.

We still don’t do this well. Not then. Not now.

Back then, mental health wasn’t part of the conversation. Today, we talk about it, but I see how easily many people outsource their emotional needs to screens, feeds, and handheld devices that can explain a concept but cannot hold a heartbeat.

And I understand the appeal. My son recently asked how a nuclear power plant works and then, of course, “So what happened at Chernobyl?” I handed the question to AI because sometimes you need clarity, accuracy, and a quick explanation before bedtime.

But grief? That’s not something anyone can hand over to a chatbot.

AI can teach, clarify, define. It can’t look me in the eye. It can’t sit in silence with me. It can’t say, with a voice that trembles because it means it, “I’m sorry that hurt you. You didn’t deserve that.”

And when someone’s heart is cracked open, that matters. A human presence matters. Someone who doesn’t rush the moment matters.

We’re in a new kind of epidemic

We’ve normalized turning to devices for moments that actually require people. Loneliness is rising. Isolation is rising. And a lot of people don’t realize they’re handing their grief to something that can’t hold it.

It’s fine to ask AI for help when you’re confused. It’s fine to lean on it when you need information.

But when someone is grieving, they need a witness, not a workaround.

What I can learn from those young adults, and what I see every day

You don’t have to have lived through the AIDS crisis to recognize what happens when people are forced to carry the unbearable alone.

Personally, I see it in betrayal trauma. I see it in postpartum darkness. I see it in women who hold everything together until the bathroom becomes the only place they allow themselves to break down. I see it in the people who smile through devastation because they don’t want to be a burden.

Grief needs oxygen. Grief needs a name. Grief needs people.

And if no one ever said this to you before, you deserved someone who could sit beside you without demanding you rush through the hardest parts.

What this might mean for you

If you’ve been carrying a grief that feels too quiet, too old, too “not serious enough,” I want you to hear:

It mattered. It still matters. And you don’t have to keep carrying it the way you have been.

So much of my work happens in the space of grief. I’m comfortable with the hard emotions, the ones that feel messy or overwhelming, because that’s where people often feel the most alone. I sit with clients as they unpack what they’ve been carrying, without rushing or turning away.

If that’s the kind of support you need, you can book a clarity call here to start your healing journey.

I keep picturing those young faces from the show. The fear. The courage. The grief they never got to speak out loud.

I don’t want to repeat that. I want to be part of the generation that listens. I want to be one of the ones who stay.

Because grief shouldn’t be endured alone, not at nineteen, not now, not ever.

👉 Book your free Clarity Call here

You deserve to come home to yourself.
Jennifer

🌊 www.caughtinawave.ca