Sometimes moving on is difficult because pain has become the final proof that something mattered.

Sometimes the pain is functioning as evidence. If it stopped, it might seem as though the thing was not important, or that the person is being forgotten, or that the loss was smaller than it was. So the hurt is preserved, out of a kind of loyalty, long past the point where it is doing anything useful.

If letting go feels like a betrayal, look for another way to mark what mattered. A ritual, a conversation, something you keep or do each year. The significance can be held somewhere other than in ongoing pain, and the pain was never a good record of it anyway.