Four years ago, during my family’s third move in six years, I felt like I was slowly unraveling. My husband had lost his job in Austin, Tex., and was offered a new one in the Philadelphia suburbs, so we trucked our two children, two cats and an embarrassing amount of stuff cross-country to start our lives over from scratch. I tried to sound optimistic to our new neighbors: Moving is hard, but we’re excited to put down roots here. I’ve never lived in suburbia, but I love the giant trees. Inwardly, I howled: What have we done? I’ve lost all my friends! Screw the trees!

I helped my children settle in to their new schools and our temporary rental house, but I couldn’t settle myself. My husband worked longer hours; on weekdays, we rarely saw him. I felt a sense of loneliness and isolation so deep that it seemed like someone had scooped out the insides of my bones. Among the boxes in our garage sat some that were decades old, filled with my parents’ belongings. My mother had died of cancer nearly 25 years before, when I was still in my teens, and my father died of a heart attack seven years later. I ached for them now in a new way, especially my mother. I longed for her guaranteed love, her saying, Everything will be all right — a kernel of security I used to carry, but which had been lost somewhere along I-40 while our cats were strung out on cat Xanax, yowling a mournful tune.

One night after we arrived, I read an article about “Complicated Grief,” a diagnosis for bereavement lasting over six months. Six months? What would they say about 25 years?

For months, we house-hunted, and the cats hid under the blankets for hours; some days, I hid with them. I stared at the bedroom’s cracked plaster ceiling and wondered why I wasn’t coping better. I wasn’t as resilient as I’d thought, that was for sure — but maybe this move unearthed a deep, unfixable character flaw: an inability to handle life and stay happy.