Not all stories get happy endings.
- Dr. Kiley Dunne Lizama
- May 7
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 5
(TW: Grief/Death)
I didn't cry when my father died.
I thought I might. I braced for it, even. But when the call came, all I felt was stillness—like my body understood something my heart hadn’t caught up to yet. Grief didn’t arrive as a wave. It was the air itself.
Thin. Unnamed. Everywhere.
We hadn’t spoken in years—not in the way that counts.
To say I lost my father in 2022 isn’t entirely accurate. I lost him long before that—quietly, across borders and time zones, through years of missed birthdays and half-finished sentences. When he died, I didn’t lose a relationship. I lost the possibility of one.
And that kind of grief is harder to name.
He grew up in the Republic of Ireland during the Troubles, a time marked by curfews and checkpoints, whispered family secrets, and unresolved tension that sank into the walls. The few stories he shared about that time were measured, vague. There was always something just beneath the words—grief, maybe. Shame? Silence passed down like an heirloom.
In his adult life, he became a peace negotiator. He traveled the world trying to help fractured nations mend themselves—offering structure, strategy, calm.
He spent a lifetime mediating conflict in other people’s lives. He just never figured out how to show up in his own.
He knew of me. He’d met my husband. He knew I was a therapist, knew the cities I lived in, and that I had pets. But he didn’t know the names of my friends. He didn’t know how I take my coffee or how my nose flares when I’m really upset.
His understanding of me came filtered through the green glow of WhatsApp messages, the blue checkmarks confirming a semi-connection. He never saw my life in motion.
After he died, I scoured the internet for interview footage, old op-eds, photos from news articles. I was trying to piece together a mosaic of him from fragments offered up by strangers. A man so deeply engaged with the world, so full of insight and conviction.
And yet, I don’t know if he ever knew how to say my name with the intimacy of presence.
I don’t hate him. I’m not even angry, most days. But I can’t tell you how I feel with any kind of certainty. His death didn’t bring closure—it just closed the door.
What lingers now is something quieter: the ache of never having been truly known.
In my clinical work, I’ve sat with so many folks who grieve parents still alive.
There’s a particular ache in being invisible to someone whose love you’ve been taught should be unconditional.
You want to be chosen, seen, known—but you also want to stay whole. And those desires don’t always live peacefully together.
I recall a beautiful soul, tender and brilliant, who spent decades trying to be noticed by her mother. Every life milestone—new job, new city, new relationship—was met with judgement or suspicion.
“She doesn’t ask about my life,” she whispered. “I’m afraid she doesn’t want to know me.”
I nodded. “That hurts.”
We didn’t try to fix it. We just named it. Let it exist.
Some grief is like that. It’s not a problem to solve. It’s a heavy inheritance to carry.
Over time — maybe with age, maybe with heartbreak and loss — I started to understand that healing isn’t always forward motion.
Some people don’t get closure. Some wounds don’t seal. Some stories never resolve.
And that’s not failure. It’s reality.
When my father died, I realized I had spent most of my life waiting for a version of him that never arrived.
I’d hoped for a phone call, an email, perhaps a shared meal where he asked me something real. Anything. Something unguarded.
It never came.
And strangely, once that hope ended, there was a quiet relief.
No more auditions. No more trying to be someone he might finally see. The ache remains, but the striving does not.
I often think about how grief is framed in the Western world: as something linear. A series of stages. A process you move through and then past. But that isn’t how it has lived in me nor in most people I know.
My grief is not a tunnel. It’s a landscape. I know its trees. Its strange weather. Its dry seasons and brutal winters. I’ve built a small life inside it.
And some mornings, when the light hits just right, it feels like home.
I’ve come to believe that peace doesn’t always mean resolution. Sometimes peace is the quiet relief of not waiting anymore.
Not waiting for a parent to become someone they never learned how to be nor want to learn to be. Not waiting to be seen in a way they are not capable of.
Peace, I think, is showing up to your own life anyway. Fully. Without apology knowing it’s gonna hurt.
My father died not knowing me. That truth still stings. But it has also carved out in me a capacity to witness others.
When folks come to me aching for parents who don’t or can’t see them, I don’t reach for a tool. I sit beside them.
I say,“That’s hard.”
And I mean it.Because I’ve lived it.
Some stories don’t have happy endings.
But they still deserve to be told.
And in the telling, something sacred happens: We become real to one another.
And that, for me, is enough.
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