I keep seeing a version of one question from parents online, and it's too honest to leave sitting in a forum. It goes something like this:
Her kid isn’t a ballplayer. The years went into music, not a sport. But the shape of it was one I knew in my bones the second I read it. A decade-plus of one thing. The lessons, the drives, the money, the early mornings, the whole family calendar bent around it. And then it ended. And she wrote the most honest sentence I’ve read in a while:
I can’t seem to get over it. What’s wrong with me?
Here’s my answer, straight: nothing is wrong with you. What you’re feeling is grief. And the reason it loops — the reason it won’t resolve the way you keep expecting it to — is that nobody ever handed you a ritual for it.
Think about how we handle the losses we’re allowed to have. Someone dies, and there’s a funeral. A marriage ends, and there’s a date, paperwork, a before and an after. We build ceremonies around loss because the ceremony is the thing that finally lets us set it down (Norton & Gino, 2014).
And you might be thinking: we do have a ceremony. Senior Night. The poster boards, the flowers, the long walk to center court with mom and dad. You’re right — it’s real, and it’s lovely. But look closely at who it’s actually for. Senior Night honors the athlete. You’re up there as a supporting character in their send-off — the hands that drove, and paid, and packed the cooler at six in the morning — clapping for the ending while nobody in that gym says the quiet part out loud: that it’s your ending too. You get a carnation and a lump in your throat, and then everyone goes for pizza. The ritual looked like it included you. It walked right past you.
So the loss is real, but you were never actually given permission to mourn your own piece of it. You just carry it home, a little confused about why something with no name is this heavy.
There’s a second layer, too, and it’s the one I had to be honest with myself about. In Behind Every Great Student-Athlete (Mayo, 2026), I called it the thing that really gets us in the stands: the kid’s career slowly stops being theirs and quietly becomes ours. Our sense of self gets soldered to it until we can’t tell where their season ends and our own identity begins. The kid grows up and out. A lot of us never quite do. So when it’s over, it isn’t only their thing that’s ending — it’s a version of you. The one who had a team, a season, a bleacher full of people who knew your name. That version is losing its home. Of course it aches.
And here’s what got me when I went looking for help with all of it. We understand a fair amount about the athlete when it ends — how a kid’s whole sense of self can narrow down to the sport until the final whistle leaves a hole where it used to be. But when I went hunting for the same honest look at the parent’s side — us, the ones in the stands — I almost came up empty. Almost. There’s a small study from 2008, tucked away in a sport-psychology journal, that sat down with a handful of parents whose daughters had left elite gymnastics and actually asked how they were doing. Its finding, in plain language: when the kid walked away, it knocked the parents sideways too — their friendships, their routines, their whole sense of place in a world they’d lived and breathed. Six families. One quiet paper (Lally & Kerr, 2008). That, plus a scattering of studies like it — nearly all about elite, high-level athletes — is most of what’s been written down. For the ordinary parent in the ordinary bleachers, almost no one has put it into plain words. So consider this me trying.
I’m not writing to you from the far side of this. I’m right in the middle of it. My eldest is off at college. My middle daughter — a swimmer and water polo player — has already told me, flat out, that she’s done with all of it after senior year. And I’ve had to decide what my job is in the face of that. It is not to talk her out of it. It’s to hear her. And then to keep showing up and filming her games for no reason on this earth except that I love to watch her play — right up to the last one, the one nobody films. I know what’s coming. I’m banking every one until then.
So what do you actually do with it? Two things, today:
Name it as grief, out loud, to one person. Not “I’m being silly.” Not “I should be over this by now.” The true sentence: something I loved just ended, and I’m grieving it. Calling a feeling by its real name is what lifts it out of the loop.
Give the ending the ritual it never got. This is the one that matters most, because the reason it won’t close is that nothing ever marked it. That’s the piece I couldn’t fit in a reply box — so I built it into this week’s members’ tool, The Last-Season Ritual: a sit-down worksheet for putting a real ending on a thing that mattered. What the years gave you. A letter your kid gets to keep. A small, deliberate closing whistle you blow on your own terms — so the loss has somewhere to land instead of looping. The free piece explains why it hurts. The tool is how you set it down. Find it at the bottom of this page.
One last thing — for the parent who wrote to me, and for you. The sport ends. The music ends. For very nearly every kid, it ends earlier and quieter than we’re ever ready for. But the whole point of the years was never the thing itself. It was the person walking out the far side of it — and whether, at thirty, they still want you around. That part doesn’t end. That part is just getting started.
I’m a sports parent, same as you — just one who reads the science so you don’t have to. I’m not a therapist, and if this sits heavier than a hard week should, please talk to someone who is; there’s no medal for carrying it alone. But if it’s the ordinary, enormous grief of a chapter closing, then hear me clearly: you are not failing to get over it. You’re mourning something that deserved to be mourned. Let’s give it its ending.
— Dobb
Got a question you want answered here? Paid members bring theirs to the monthly Ask Dobb thread — it opens as our community fills in. This one I lifted (with permission, every detail changed) because too many of us feel it in private and never say it.
Sources
Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2014). Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 266–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031772
Mayo, D. (2026). Behind Every Great Student-Athlete. Inkful Borders Publishing.
Lally, P. & Kerr, G. (2008). The Effects of Athlete Retirement on Parents. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology 20(1), pp. 42-56. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200701788172
