01: Grieving and Losing Loved Ones in Your 20s || (OLL’s Personal Files)
- OLL Author
- Nov 10, 2025
- 4 min read
“Losing someone you love in your 20s feels like a glitch in the narrative — a moment when the world expects you to be building, but instead, you're unraveling.”
🕊️ Introduction: The Unspoken Grief of Young Adulthood
Grief in your 20s is a quiet rebellion against the timeline you thought you were following. While peers post promotions, engagements, and travel reels, you’re navigating funeral arrangements, probate court, and the aching silence of absence. It’s a grief that often goes unseen—because youth is supposed to be resilient, right?
But when death enters the chat—whether it’s a parent, sibling, friend, or mentor—it doesn’t just break your heart. It rewrites your emotional code. It forces you to grow in ways you never asked for, and often, without a roadmap.
This entry in OLL’s Personal Files examines the legal, emotional, and cultural aspects of grief in early adulthood, particularly within fandom spaces where loss is often expressed through stories, characters, and community.
⚖️ The Legal Side of Loss
Grief doesn’t just live in your heart—it shows up in paperwork, deadlines, and decisions you never imagined making so young.
1. Wills, Estates, and the Unprepared
Many 20-somethings are suddenly named executors, expected to manage estates with no prior experience.
If there’s no will, intestate succession laws determine who inherits—often leading to confusion or conflict.
Navigating probate court, life insurance claims, and digital assets (social media, cloud storage, crypto wallets) can feel like a second job during mourning.
2. Next of Kin and Medical Power of Attorney
If a loved one becomes incapacitated, who has the legal right to make decisions? It’s not always who you expect.
Advance directives and medical POAs aren’t just for the elderly. Young adults should consider them—especially if they’re in caregiving roles or live far from family.
3. Grief and Employment Law
Bereavement leave varies wildly by employer and state. Federal law doesn’t guarantee it.
FMLA may offer protection but navigating it while grieving can be overwhelming.
Some workplaces offer compassion. Others expect performance. Knowing your rights matters when your world has stopped but your job hasn’t.
🎮 Grief in Fandom: When Fiction Mirrors Reality
Fandom often becomes a sanctuary—a place where grief is allowed to exist, even when the real world demands composure.
1. Finding Solace in Stories
Anime like Your Lie in April, Anohana, and Naruto don’t shy away from death. They show us how characters mourn, rage, remember, and rebuild.
Watching someone else grieve—especially when you can’t find the words—can be cathartic. Fiction gives us permission to feel.
2. Digital Memorials and Parasocial Grief
The loss of a beloved streamer, voice actor, or fictional character can hit hard. It’s real grief, even if the relationship was one-sided.
Tribute art, fanfiction, and online shrines become ways to honor and process. They’re modern rituals in a digital age.
3. Community as Coping
Discord servers, Reddit threads, and fandom forums often become informal grief support networks.
The line between escapism and healing blurs—and that’s okay. Sometimes, logging into a space where people understand your pain is the most grounding thing you can do.
🧠 Personal Reflection: When the World Didn’t Pause
Grief in your 20s is dissonant. You’re expected to perform, to show up, to keep pace with a world that rarely slows down. But inside, everything has changed. You’re not the same person who walked into that meeting, answered that email, or smiled through that conversation. You’re someone who’s seen the fragility of life—and who now carries a weight that others can’t see, name, or always understand.
In the last seven years of my 20s, I’ve experienced a series of losses that reshaped my emotional landscape. I lost my adopted mother to cervical cancer. My adopted father died in a car accident. My grandfather, a steady presence in my life, passed after a long battle with dementia and diabetes. And most recently, I lost a childhood friend to the devastating reality of domestic violence.
Each loss was a rupture. But the world didn’t pause. The inbox kept filling. The deadlines kept coming. The metrics still mattered. And I found myself grieving in fragment stealing moments to mourn between meetings, responsibilities, and expectations. I didn’t grieve at all. I couldn’t. I had to learn how to grieve in intervals, in quiet corners, in the spaces where I could finally exhale.
I’ve always believed that grief is deeply personal. There is no universal timeline, no checklist, no “correct” way to mourn. Time itself becomes subjective stretching, collapsing, looping back. Some days feel like progress. Others feel like they have a relapses. And that’s okay.
We live in a world that often practices selective outrage, selective humanity, and selective compassion. Grief doesn’t trend. It doesn’t go viral. And because of that, it’s easy to feel invisible in your pain. But I’ve learned that healing requires intention. It requires unplugging from the noise of the internet, the pressure to perform, and the illusion of constant connectivity.
Healing, for me, has come through personal hobbies—writing, watching anime, creating checklists that bring order to chaos. It’s come through community—spaces where empathy isn’t rationed, and where people understand that grief is not weakness but evidence of love. It’s come through kindness—toward myself, toward others, and toward the memories I carry.
Grief doesn’t make you less capable. It makes you more human. And in that humanity, there is strength, softness, and the possibility of renewal.
🧭 Final Thoughts: Making Space for Loss
Grief doesn’t follow a statute of limitations. It’s not linear. It doesn’t care about your age, your job, or your deadlines.
In your 20s, grief can feel like you’re mourning in a vacuum—like everyone else is sprinting while you’re crawling. But you’re not alone. Whether you’re drafting a will, watching Clannad for the fifth time, or just trying to get out of bed—your grief is valid. And it deserves space.
Let fandom be your refuge. Let law be your tool. Let community be your anchor.
🧰 Resources
Local legal aid and grief counseling services
💬 OLL’s Personal Files Outro
This series is where law meets life—and where fandom helps us feel less alone.If this resonated with you, share your story or suggest a topic for the next case file. You never know who might need it.
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