Watching Someone Else Cope With Grief Is the Most Helpless I’ve Ever Felt

How do you heal what can’t be fixed?

Photo by Levin Anton on Unsplash

Someone in my family is dying.

My family is not exactly “normal” in the sense that I’m related by blood to only one of them. My mother’s half-sister invited me to live with her and her husband almost ten years ago, not long after my mother passed away. Since then, I’ve been “adopted” into this exterior family as if I were just another seam in the fabric of their lives.

I don’t know how to articulate it well — or even show it well — but I owe all these people so much for how they’ve accepted me, troubles and all, as one of them.

I’ve been through sorrow with them before. The matriarch of the family passed away four years ago, and I remember sitting in one of the back rows of the funeral home’s visitation room because I wanted to give them respect and distance in one of their darkest times as a family. When bagpipes played as a farewell to their lost mother and grandmother, I felt this swell of emotion and almost cried even though I had known her only fleetingly throughout her later years as she battled Alzheimer’s.

Now, I look back and wonder why I was so intent on making myself seem apart — though during the visitation I made sure to greet friends of the…