The Temporary Kinship of Grief

Dr. Kiley Dunne Lizama, DSW LMFT

(TW: Grief/Death)

The house had never been that full, and somehow never that quiet. In those six weeks, time warped—days stretched endlessly while nights blurred into each other, punctuated by whispered check-ins, the rhythmic beeping of machines, and the collective breath we held as hers began to slow. I didn't expect the grief to start before she was gone, but it did—an anticipatory ache that lodged itself in my chest.

Grief makes strangers into siblings, and sometimes siblings into strangers. The house became a container for both—the deeply intimate and the painfully unfamiliar. There were relatives I had barely spoken to before, now handing me water bottles and folded blankets like we'd grown up together. We took turns at her bedside without ever needing to speak about who was next. We fell into a rhythm of care rehearsed not by closeness, but by necessity.

There wasn't time to name the discomfort of being emotionally exposed around people I only knew through stories and photos. We simply were—suddenly and unavoidably—witnesses to each other's softest moments. People who had been distant figures in family photographs transformed into gentle hands adjusting pillows, into the quiet presence that appeared with tissues when tears finally came unbidden in the small hours.

Every task felt sacred. Feeding her shakes. Washing her skin. Holding the door open for someone coming out with swollen eyes. That kind of caretaking stays with you—not just the physical fatigue, but the emotional bracing it demanded. Being tender in front of people you didn't really know, vulnerable while still performing strength.

The grief didn't make us gentle. It made us raw. There were arguments too, sharp and quiet, words spoken in exhaustion, tears that followed like storms after lightning. But even our breaking belonged to that suspended world—two figures finding themselves on opposite ends of a bench, not talking, just existing in the same wounded space.

After the funeral, when the last casserole dish was returned and people left in waves, the house felt hollowed out. Not just by her absence, but by the dismantling of that temporary world. Each time the front door shut behind someone, I felt that small shattering again. The late-night companions of vigil departed first, then those who had traveled from distant places. Finally, the ones who had made themselves at home in corners and couches, their bags packed like reluctant pilgrims preparing to leave a shrine.

I didn't realize how many goodbyes grief requires. There was the big one—her death, irreversible and defining. But there were so many smaller goodbyes layered within it. Each departure felt like another small death, as if we were peeling away from something sacred we had built together in those liminal days. It was strange to miss people I still didn't know well. But I did. I missed the way we checked in with our eyes. I missed the murmur of shared purpose, the quiet choreography of moving in and out of rooms.

A part of me wanted everyone to stay, even if we were tense and tired and had run out of words. I wanted to keep orbiting each other. To delay the part where we returned to our separate lives and pretended we could pick them up like nothing had changed.

But they left. Of course they did. That's what people do. We leave the moment behind, the house behind, the visible grief behind. We carry on—and we carry it.

What lingers isn't just the absence of her. It's the absence of the strange, sacred world that existed in those weeks. The temporary kinship. The sense that nothing mattered more than caring for her—and, by extension, each other. I've never known time to move so slowly and then disappear all at once.

This is the part no one warns you about: sometimes grief isn't just about the person who died. It's about the people who stayed—and then left. The ones you bonded with through tears and chores and vigil. The ones who held your hand while she faded, but don't know what to say now. The ones who saw you at your most unguarded—and then disappeared back into their lives.

And so you're left with an echo. Not just of her voice, but of theirs. Not just her absence, but the absence of the fragile constellation we formed around her. Grief, it turns out, is not just about who you lose. It's about what you lose with them.

What remains now is quieter. It lives in the stillness of early mornings, in the way I sometimes set the table for more people than are coming. It shows up in dreams—where we're all back in the kitchen again, washing dishes in comfortable silence, the sound of her breathing still audible from the next room.

I don't wish to return to that grief. But I miss its honesty. The way it stripped everything down to the bone. The way it made space for love, even when that love was awkward or incomplete. We were never the same after she left—not because we all changed, though we did, but because for a brief moment, we were deeply known by one another, even in our distance.

And now, like her, that version of us is gone. All I can do is honor it. Carry it. And when the ache returns—not just from loss, but from remembering—I let it sit beside me.

Quiet. Unresolved. Still sacred.

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