You heard the news and waited to feel something recognisable. Maybe relief arrived first, some sort of loosening, a sense that something you'd been braced against for years had finally stopped. Maybe grief came, which surprised you, or didn't come at all, which surprised you more. Maybe what arrived was nothing. You felt a strange flatness where you expected something significant to be. Or maybe it was all of it at once, cycling through in ways that made no sense and couldn't be explained to anyone who wasn't standing where you're standing.
When someone who hurt you dies, you're supposed to grieve. There's a cultural script for this: the funeral, the condolences, the gathering of people who loved them. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you're carrying something that doesn't fit the script at all.
This piece is for you. For the complicated, contradictory, often invisible experience of losing someone who also caused you harm.
Why nothing about this feels straightforward
Grief after loss assumes something relatively uncomplicated: a person existed, they mattered to you, and now they're gone. Even when a death is expected, even when the relationship was difficult, ordinary grief has a shape that others can recognise and respond to.
What you're carrying is different. You're grieving someone who hurt you, possibly for years, possibly in ways that shaped your entire understanding of yourself, love, and safety. The harm was real. The loss is also real. And these two things don't cancel each other out or resolve into a single feeling. They sit alongside each other, which is one of the strangest and most disorienting things a person can experience.
The people around you may not understand why you're not devastated. Or why you are devastated. Or why you seem fine for days and then aren't. Or why the relief feels shameful rather than straightforward. Grief after abuse doesn't follow the expected arc, and most of the support structures built around bereavement, the condolence cards, the check-ins, the gathering of people who share the loss, are built for a different kind of death.
Relief and the guilt that comes with it
For many people, relief is the first thing that arrives. Sometimes it comes before anything else, before grief, before anger, before any clear thought at all. A loosening of something that has been held tight for a very long time.
If this is what you felt, it doesn't mean you didn't care. It doesn't mean the relationship didn't matter. It means your nervous system had been in some degree of threat for years, bracing, monitoring, managing, and the source of that threat is now gone. The body registers the change before the mind has caught up. Relief is a physiological response to the removal of danger.
What often follows relief is guilt about having felt it. A sense that you should be sadder, or more generous in how you're remembering them, or less aware of the ways their death changes things for you practically and emotionally. Sometimes the guilt is reinforced by people around you who don't understand why you seem okay or who themselves are grieving straightforwardly and find your response confusing or even offensive.
The relief is not a verdict on who you are. It is information about what you were living with.
Grief is rarely simple.
Grief that doesn't look like grief
Even when a relationship was harmful, loss is still loss. And the grief that follows an abuser's death is often more layered and more complicated than ordinary bereavement.
You may be grieving several things at once, without being able to separate them clearly. The person who died, whatever they were to you, parent or partner, also contained moments of warmth, or the hope of warmth, or the version of themselves you wished had prevailed. The relationship you needed but never had — the parent who should have protected you, the partner who should have been safe, the version of the relationship that you may have spent years hoping was still possible. The future that is now foreclosed, because whatever small chance remained of acknowledgement, of repair, of them finally understanding the harm they caused, that possibility is now gone. And sometimes the version of yourself that existed in relation to them, the self that was always waiting, always hoping, always trying, that self also has to find new ground.
This grief is real. It deserves space. And it is often invisible to the people around you, because from the outside the death may look like a relief or a resolution rather than a loss.
Reflection: Which of these losses feels most present for you right now, the person, the relationship you needed, the foreclosed future, or something else? You don't have to rank them or resolve them. Just noticing which one is asking for the most attention tends to help the nervous system know where to begin.
Anger that arrives alongside or instead of grief
For some people, the death brings anger rather than grief or anger mixed into grief in proportions that shift without warning.
Anger that the acknowledgement never came. That they died without ever naming what they did or taking responsibility for it. That they got to leave without the reckoning that you may have spent years hoping for, or dreading, or both. Anger at the people around them who are now grieving without knowing what you know. Anger at yourself for still caring. Anger at the timing, the finality, the way death makes everything untouchable.
This anger is legitimate. It is your system responding to the specific injustice of harm that was never acknowledged, compounded now by a death that forecloses the possibility of it ever being acknowledged by the person who caused it.
It can help to know that the anger doesn't have to resolve into something softer for you to be healing. Anger after abuse and loss is often one of the clearest signals that you understand, accurately, what happened to you. The fact that they are dead does not require you to revise that understanding.
The foreclosure of repair
One of the most particular features of this kind of loss is the closing of a door that you may or may not have known you still wanted to be open.
Even for people who have done significant therapeutic work, who have processed the abuse, who have built lives largely free from the person who hurt them, even for those people, there is often a small, quiet part that still held some form of hope. That one day there would be an acknowledgement. A conversation. Some form of recognition that what happened was real and that it mattered.
Death forecloses that. Whatever the reality was, whether genuine repair was possible or not, the possibility is now gone. And the grief for the possibility, for the door closing on something that was already barely open, can be unexpected in its intensity.
If you feel this, the strange grief of losing something you didn't quite have and weren't sure you still wanted, it is real and it is worth naming. You're not grieving a fantasy. You're grieving a future that was always uncertain and is now definitively closed.
The funeral
Whether to attend is one of the most practically difficult questions, and one that others will have opinions about regardless of what you decide.
The arguments for attending are real. It may provide a sense of closure or ritual that supports your grieving process. It may be important for other people in your life whose grief is uncomplicated and who need you there. There may be practical, legal, or family reasons that make attendance necessary or significantly easier than absence.
The arguments for not attending are equally real. Being in the presence of people who are grieving someone you knew in an entirely different way can be profoundly isolating. Being expected to perform grief you don't feel, or to contain grief that others don't understand, is an additional emotional burden on top of an already complex experience. If your relationship with the person was dangerous, being in spaces associated with them may still carry activation that your body hasn't resolved. And you don't owe attendance to someone who hurt you, regardless of what others expect.
There is no correct answer. The question worth asking is not what you should do but what would actually serve your nervous system and your healing. If you attend, you might think in advance about where to sit, who to be near, what your exit options are, and how long you need to stay. If you don't attend, you might think about what alternative ritual or acknowledgement you want to create for yourself, because the death still happened, and your system may still need something to mark it.
You are allowed to make this decision based on what is right for you. That may require protecting that decision from people who don't understand the full picture of what the relationship was.
The family system and what it asks of you
When a parent or partner dies, you enter a family or social system that is in collective grief and that system may have a very different understanding of the person than you do.
People who loved them straightforwardly are grieving straightforwardly. They may be sharing memories that don't match yours. They may be constructing a version of the person that has no room for what they were to you. And implicitly or explicitly, they may expect you to participate in that version.
This can be one of the most alienating experiences available. You're holding something true that cannot be said, or that you're not ready to say, or that the room cannot hold. The gap between what is being said and what you know to be true can produce a particular kind of loneliness, being surrounded by grief that has nothing to do with your grief, in a space that has no room for what you actually feel.
You don't have to correct the record. You don't have to perform a grief you don't feel. And you don't have to explain yourself to people who are in the middle of their own uncomplicated loss. If you need to be less present than expected, you can be. If you need to leave early, you can. If you need to step outside and sit with yourself for a while, you can. Your experience of this person was real, and it deserves space, even if that space has to be private.
When the body doesn't know it's over
For some people, the death doesn't immediately change how their body feels. Hypervigilance that developed over years of living with or near someone dangerous doesn't dissolve because they've died. You may still brace at certain sounds, certain times of year, certain situations that were historically associated with threat. Your nervous system may continue running old threat assessments for some time.
This is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It's a sign of how deeply the nervous system encodes learned responses and how slowly it updates them when the thing it was responding to is now gone but not yet registered as gone at a body level.
The nervous system updates through experience rather than information. Knowing that they have died doesn't automatically reassure the body. What gradually reassures the body is accumulated experience of the threat not arriving, of the situations that once felt dangerous repeatedly turning out to be safe. This takes time, and it takes patience with yourself in the interim.
What healing looks like from here
There is no single path through this, and the timeline is yours alone. Some people find that the death opens something, a grief that was deferred, an anger that was suppressed, a processing that wasn't possible while the person was alive. Some find that not much changes immediately. Some find a gradual easing, a release of vigilance that happens quietly over months.
What tends to help is having somewhere to put what you're carrying, a therapist who understands the intersection of abuse and grief, someone who won't ask you to grieve in the expected way or to be kinder about the person than the truth warrants. The particular grief of losing someone who hurt you is not well served by ordinary bereavement support, which tends to assume that the person who died deserves the warmth directed toward them.
Rituals that acknowledge your actual experience, rather than the publicly presentable version of it, can also be meaningful. A letter you write and don't send, that says what was never said. A private acknowledgement of what the relationship was and what you carry from it. Something that honours your experience rather than the narrative that others are constructing.
And time with the truth. Not requiring yourself to arrive at forgiveness or resolution. Not requiring the grief to look a particular way. Allowing the complexity of it, the relief and the grief and the anger and the foreclosed future — to exist without being tidied into something more acceptable.
The death may change the quality of what you carry. It may not change as much as you hoped, or it may change more than you expected. Either way, what you experienced in that relationship was real. What you feel in its aftermath is real. And it deserves the same care and attention as any other significant loss, even when the world around you doesn't quite understand why.
If you're navigating this and would like support that understands the specific complexity of grief after abuse, I'm here.
kat@safespacecounsellingservices.com.au
0452 285 526
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it normal to feel relieved when an abuser dies?
Yes, and it is one of the most common and most shamed experiences in this situation. Relief is a physiological response to the removal of threat. If you spent years in some degree of vigilance, monitoring, or fear in relation to this person, your nervous system was carrying a chronic load. When the source of that load is gone, the body notices before the mind has had a chance to process what's happened. Relief doesn't mean you didn't care, that the relationship didn't matter, or that you're a callous person. It means your nervous system was accurately registering what the relationship was costing you.
I don't feel anything. Is that normal?
Yes. Numbness after an abuser's death is common and makes complete sense. When grief is complicated, when the loss involves someone who also hurt you — the nervous system can shift into a protective flatness rather than active distress. This is the same shutdown mechanism that operates in other overwhelming situations: too much to process, so the system goes quiet. The absence of feeling now doesn't mean feeling won't come later, and it doesn't mean the relationship didn't matter. It means your system is managing something it doesn't yet have a category for.
Should I attend the funeral?
There is no correct answer, and you don't owe attendance to someone who hurt you regardless of what others expect. The question worth asking is what would actually serve your nervous system and your healing — not what you should do according to someone else's expectations. If you decide to attend, thinking in advance about logistics, exit options, and who to be near can help. If you decide not to attend, it may be worth creating some alternative ritual or acknowledgement for yourself, because the death still happened and your system may still need something to mark it.
People around me are grieving and I don't know what to say or how to be.
You don't have to correct the record, and you don't have to perform grief you don't feel. Being present in a way that is honest for you, which may mean being quieter than expected, leaving earlier than expected, or simply being physically present without emotional performan is enough. You're allowed to say less than others might say. You're allowed to be somewhere else in yourself while appearing to be in the room. You don't owe anyone a performance of grief that doesn't match your actual experience of the person.
I thought I'd feel free, but I don't. Why?
Because freedom from an abusive relationship, even after death, doesn't arrive all at once, and it doesn't arrive as a feeling. The hypervigilance that developed over years of living with or near someone dangerous doesn't dissolve because they've died. Your nervous system may continue running old threat assessments, bracing at familiar cues, expecting something that is no longer coming. This is not a sign that healing isn't possible, it's a sign that the nervous system updates through accumulated experience rather than information. With time and the right support, the body gradually registers that the danger is gone. But that process takes longer than the death itself.
I feel guilty for not feeling sadder. How do I handle that?
The guilt is understandable, it often reflects the gap between what you're supposed to feel and what you actually feel, and that gap can itself feel like evidence that something is wrong with you. But your emotional response to this death is accurate information about what the relationship was. You're not failing to grieve properly. You're having a response that reflects the actual experience you had with this person. The guilt tends to ease as you allow yourself to understand your response as legitimate rather than requiring it to look different than it does.
Do I need to forgive them now that they've died?
No. Death does not create an obligation to forgive. Forgiveness, when and if it comes, is an internal process that happens on your own timeline and for your own benefit, not a tribute owed to the dead. There is no timeline on which you are required to arrive at it, and not arriving at it does not mean you haven't healed or that you're holding onto something you should release. You can acknowledge that they are dead and that the harm they caused was real, and you can hold both of those things without requiring one to soften the other.
