The future you expected may need a proper goodbye before another one feels possible.

Plans are not only arrangements; they are pictures of a life you had already begun to inhabit. When one ends, the loss is genuine even though nothing physical was taken, and it can feel unreasonable to grieve something that never arrived. That expected future needs to be set down before a different one can seem like anything other than a consolation.

Give yourself the rituals of an ending if they help: saying it out loud, telling someone, marking the date that was going to matter. There is no schedule for this. New plans tend to become possible on their own, once the old one is no longer waiting.