# Losing the person you did this with > When the person you did this with dies, or one day stops answering, the grief often has nobody it can be told to. What that is like and what actually helps. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/losing-the-person/ - Section: Safety and practice - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. I could not find this written down anywhere. When the person you did this with dies, or one day stops answering, a great many people have nobody at all they can tell. That is the part this page is mostly about. --- ## In short - Grief for a secret partner frequently has no outlet at all, because the relationship existed only between the two of you. - You are on no list that gets told, so people commonly find out weeks late, from a social media post or from the silence itself. - When somebody stops answering you usually never learn which kind of ending it was, and closure is often not available. - One trusted name written down on each side is the whole of what it takes to make sure the other person is told. Two adults, over 18, and one of them is now not there. There is a page on [ending an arrangement deliberately](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/ending-it-well/); this is the other kind, with no warning and no announcement. My own position. Two people from this scene are gone. One died, and I found out nine weeks later from a photograph of the wake. The other stopped replying in the spring of 2021 and I have given up expecting to know why. I have also been the friend somebody could not tell, and made a mess of it. No training in bereavement, and none of this is counselling. ## The grief with nowhere to put it You are on no list. Hospitals ring the next of kin, families work the address book, and your name is on neither. So you find out late, from a mutual acquaintance who assumed you knew, or from a post in your feed on a Wednesday morning. Or from nothing. The silence is the notification, and it takes weeks to be sure. Then the funeral, in one of two versions. You stay away, because a stranger in the third row gets noticed and asked about. Or you go, stand at the back, and say the word colleague. I know a woman who drove ninety minutes to a crematorium, sat behind a pillar, left before the curtain and was home in time to cook her husband's dinner. She has told nobody but me. Then the house is cleared, and things of yours are in the bottom of that wardrobe. No phone call gets them back. ## Why it lands harder than people expect Somebody who has spanked you, or whom you have spanked, has seen you in a state most of the people at your funeral never will. They know what you sound like at the point you stop being able to hold your face straight. They have a word for something you have never said aloud to anybody else. So when they die, that version of you loses its only witness. Thirty years of it, in some cases, existed inside one other head and now it is nowhere. There are no photographs, on purpose, because you both agreed there would not be. Kenneth Doka named this in 1989. Disenfranchised grief: loss a person is not socially permitted to mourn, because the relationship is not recognised. That solves nothing, though somebody has at least described the category. ## The one who simply stops answering The messages stop. You leave it a week, because phones break. You send one more, kept light. Nothing. By the end of a month you have gone from irritation to worry and you are checking the last-seen date on the profile, which is a bad habit and one I have had. You will probably never learn which it was. Dead, ill, found out by a spouse, arrested, frightened, or finished with it and unable to say so. I know people who have carried one explanation for a decade with nothing behind it. I would not tell you closure is on offer. What happens is duller: it stops being the first thing you think of in the car, then it stops being weekly, and eventually it arrives twice a year and takes an afternoon. Send one last message that asks for nothing, then stop looking, and do not go to their house or their work. The discretion that kept them safe was keeping you safe too. ## The body part of it Grief and [drop](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/sub-drop/) feel similar from the inside. Flat, cold, no appetite, tearful with nothing attached to the tears. A loss landing in the days after a session makes the two stack, and [top drop](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/top-drop/) compounded by bereavement is a rough week. Then the part almost nobody says. Somebody who has lost a partner they played with often finds the wanting arrives at appalling moments. During the funeral. The night of the day you found out. It is ordinary, and it is not a betrayal of them. ## Things that actually help - Write what you would have said, and do not send it. Longhand, addressed to them, in whatever register the two of you used. It gets the sentence out of your mouth, which is most of what is missing. I kept one in a drawer and burned the next, which was better. - Tell one person some of it. Not all of it. "A friend of mine has died and I cannot explain who he was to me, but he mattered" is a complete sentence. Whoever hears it fills in their own version and you never correct it. - Decide about the implements on purpose. Keeping them is legitimate and so is putting the lot in a skip on Saturday. Deciding neither is how you meet them by accident at the back of a cupboard in eighteen months. - Mark the anniversary yourself, since nobody else knows there is one. Put it in the diary now. It arrives whether or not you have made a plan. ## Playing again There is no correct interval and anybody who gives you one is guessing. Somebody who wants a session three weeks after the funeral is not callous, and in my experience is reaching for the only reliable way they have of putting themselves down for an hour. Somebody who cannot face it for three years is not broken. Tell whoever you are with, beforehand, that you might come apart for reasons nothing to do with them, or a decent person spends the evening sure they hurt you. Watch for the version where you are auditioning a replacement for a specific dead person. Wanting that is understandable and unfair on the new one, who will feel it inside a month. ## If you are the friend A woman I knew slightly from a munch told me, six weeks after, that the man she had been seeing for four years had died. I said the sympathetic thing and then asked how the two of them had met. It sounds harmless. It made her account for the relationship before she was allowed to grieve it. She gave me two tidy sentences and never raised it again. I had been the only person she told. So: do not make them explain the relationship. Do not ask what it was, whether it was sexual, or how serious it had got. Say the person's name out loud, in ordinary sentences, because a grief like this goes months without anybody saying it. Ask small questions. "What was he like first thing in the morning?" is answerable. "How are you?" is not. And tell no one. ## If you are in one of these now Administration rather than alarm, and it takes ten minutes. Decide in advance how the other one would be told if something happened to you. The mechanism is a single trusted name on each side: somebody who can make a phone call, who holds a number for the other, and who needs to know nothing else. Write it somewhere findable, alongside a will or in a password manager somebody else can open. If you are married to somebody else, or she is, this still works: the trusted name is a third party and the only message travelling is that a person has died. The alternative is the other one sitting in a flat for two years wondering whether you got bored of her. > ## If you need to talk to somebody > > > > Samaritans, **116 123**, free, at any hour, and you do not have to explain who the person was to you. Cruse Bereavement Support deals with grief specifically and runs a free national helpline and an online chat, with the current number and hours at [cruse.org.uk](https://www.cruse.org.uk). Mind has practical information on grief and on finding a counsellor at [mind.org.uk](https://www.mind.org.uk). A bereavement service will not ask you to justify the relationship. Other UK helplines are on the [support page](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/). ## The part I cannot do anything about Most people this happens to are convinced they are the only one, and the evidence that would correct them is unavailable by design. In my own circle in one city I know of four carrying a death nobody has been told about. The grief is real and the relationship was real, whatever paperwork it lacked. ## Read next - [Ending an arrangement well](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/ending-it-well/) - [Sub drop, and why it is delayed](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/sub-drop/) - [Can I do this without anyone knowing?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/can-i-do-this-without-anyone-knowing/) - [Getting help and support](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) ## Sources 1. Doka, K. (1989). *Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow*. Lexington Books. 2. Cruse Bereavement Support, [cruse.org.uk](https://www.cruse.org.uk). ## Common questions ### My partner died and nobody knows we had this kind of relationship. What do I do? Tell one person something, even a partial version. 'A friend of mine died and I cannot explain to you who he was to me' is a complete sentence, and it does most of the work of being known. Samaritans on 116 123 and Cruse Bereavement Support will both take the call without needing the details. Grief for a relationship that cannot be acknowledged has a name in the bereavement literature, disenfranchised grief, and it has been studied since the 1980s. ### Is it wrong to want to be spanked after someone dies? No, and it happens to a great many people. The wanting frequently turns up at the worst available moment, including the week of the death and sometimes at the funeral itself, which is distressing mainly because nobody warns you that it can. It says nothing about how much you loved the person. ### What does it mean when a play partner suddenly stops replying? Usually you never find out, and that is the honest answer. The range runs from death and illness through a spouse finding out, fear, a change of mind, or having gone off it and being unable to say so. Send one final message that asks for nothing, then stop looking, and do not turn up at a home or a workplace, because the discretion that protected them was protecting you too.