Reflections on Intimate Grief and the Care We Rarely Receive
Grief keeps its own calendar. It does not knock. It comes the way the tide comes, a little further up the shore each time, sometimes quietly, sometimes all at once.
It has been a little over two years since my Mother left her body. Her birthday falls on November 1st, on the very threshold of Día de los Muertos, when the veil is said to thin and the beloved dead are called close with marigolds and candlelight. I do not need a calendar to know the days are near. My chest knows. Something in me goes soft and is listening.
This season I keep returning to the days around her passing: the hallway, the house full of visitors, and the quiet that followed. I have written elsewhere about my sense of her name growing rare in the mouths of those around me. Here I want to speak about what it was to move through those first days, and to watch my father meet the silence.
I do not write this to blame anyone. Most of us were never taught how to stand beside sorrow without reaching to fix it. I write in the hope that someone reading may stand a little more gently beside someone they love.
The Hallway
When my Mother lay on life support, the hospital filled with people. Relatives I grew up with, who in adulthood I saw only at the edges of weddings and festivals, arrived in waves. I was overwhelmed, and I was also startled, because I could not remember some of them ever visiting my Mother in all the years I could count. Families grow large and scatter. We cannot be everywhere. I understand that. Still, the room where a woman is leaving the world is not a doorway one usually walks through for the first time.
I had already lived the hardest part. My Father and I were with her when everything changed. I had pressed my hands against her chest. I had watched her eyes open one last time, and watched her body reach for air.
Then I stepped into the corridor, and arms opened toward me, already heavy with weeping. Her siblings were grieving, as well as extended family, as was my Father, and those closest to us. This was a loss that belonged to a great many hearts, and mine was only one of them. But as people cried into my shoulder, slowly, without anyone intending it, I became the one who held. The grief in the building was enormous, and somehow it kept finding its way into my arms.
The ICU staff gently asked for fewer visitors. Still the door turned and turned, badges passed from hand to hand, a revolving door around her bed, while I stood outside the one room that was mine to be in.
No one asked how I was. Perhaps they did not know the question could be asked. Perhaps they could not imagine what my hands had held. I only know there is a loneliness that only a crowd can make.
What the Hallway Could Have Held
I have thought often about what might have felt different. Not more people, and not fewer. Only a different kind of presence.
There is a difference between pity and empathy, and the body knows it instantly. Pity looks at your sorrow from across the room and feels sorry that you are in it. Empathy walks in, sits on the floor beside you, and does not ask the sorrow to be anything other than what it is. Pity wants something from the one who grieves: to be comforted, to say thank you, to reassure. Empathy asks for nothing at all.
I think many of us reach for pity because we have not yet been shown the other way. If you have never lost someone this close, or have never let yourself fully feel your own losses, another person's grief can feel like a doorway you are afraid to step through. So we murmur and pat and say what we hope will make the heaviness lift, mostly for our own relief.
But there is a quieter, braver offering available to every one of us: to accept that we do not know what this feels like, and to stay anyway. I don't know what this is like for you, and I am here. That one sentence could have held me through the whole of that hallway.
I do not say this to shame anyone. Most of the people who came were doing the only thing they knew how to do, which was to arrive, to weep, to hold on to someone. I simply wish I had known then that it is allowed to quietly ask someone in the room what they need. And that sometimes the answer is nothing, only company in the silence.
The Door That Never Closed
The funeral was more than a week away. In our tradition, those days belong to the family and the community, and the house becomes a gathering place. I had not understood what that would mean. I was told by my older cousins that I would need to feed people starting the next day, from chai, lunch, snacks, etc. The door opened at ten or eleven in the morning and did not rest until seven or eight at night Luckily there was a sort of meal train that the women in the family created, so that we didn't need to worry about it. However, it was still odd since I was now the matriarch of the house and all this family was at home not knowing where to find things, so I often became the point person.
My Father and I, along with our closest family, had very little time and space to process what had happened. Others arrived over the course of that week in a blur, some from near and some from far. Everything felt disjointed, a family arriving and departing in pieces, never quite gathered in one place.
Everyone in that house was grieving. We were each underwater in our own way. Some were not yet able to feel their grief at all, and it came out sideways, as tension and argument, in a house that had no room left for it.
My Father, who's in his eighties, had never had high blood pressure in his life. Almost immediately after my Mother collapsed, it shot up. His heart was, quite literally, breaking. I wanted to protect him with everything I had, and I did not want to lose him too. So I told myself I had to stay steady for his sake, even as my own heart was breaking.
I did not want to grieve in front of everyone. These were my relatives, and I was grateful they came. But we had never shared the great highs or lows of our lives together in adulthood, and grief this deep is not something I can open in a room where I have not been witnessed before. To be asked, without anyone saying it aloud, to perform something so sacred felt foreign. What I needed was a place to fall apart, and the house had none to give.
When Grief Turns Sharp
Grief does not make everyone gentle. In those days, two elders in my family met me with sharp edges, and I want to name those moments without naming anyone, because I do not believe they intended to be cruel or perhaps lacked the awareness to know what they were expressing and their impact. I believe they had nowhere to put their emotions, so I became the place of projection for what they felt.
The first happened while my Mother was still on life support. I told an elder that it was good she had come by the day before to see her. She replied that if I had not come home, she would have stayed longer, as though I had stood in the way of her time with my Mother, when I had only gone home to prepare for the ceremony. It was a strange thing to hear at the bedside of someone I loved, from a person who was a close relative that had not visited her at home in a long time.
The second came the day after my Mother was taken off life support. I was talking with another elder about my Mother and other family matters, and I let some of what I was feeling show. My voice was met with a raised one. I had caused my Mother stress, I was told, because I had not married.
I will not pretend those words did not land. They found the most tender place at the most tender hour. But what stayed with me afterward was something larger than the sting. Over those days I came to see that I held more emotional capacity than many of the people older than me. Even the aunties, only a little younger than my parents, came up to me at the funeral crying and leaned into me, as if I were the one who could hold it. It was as though they were facing their own mortality through my Mother's passing. I found it strange that they were weeping harder than I was, and turning to me for comfort. Perhaps they believed that showing their sadness was a way of standing with me. I honestly do not know. I only know that it was emotionally heavy, and that I carried it.
I share this not to condemn anyone, and not to excuse what was said. Grief can turn the tender into the sharp when it has nowhere else to go. I hold those moments now as a reminder of what unmet sorrow does, and of how much room it takes to sit beside someone else's.
The Quiet After the Gurdwara
When the funeral and the bhog at the Gurdwara were over, some family came back to the house. And then, little by little, it was quiet. The house that had been full from morning until night emptied of voices. Very few people reached out. Very few came to visit.
It was a different kind of silence than I had braced for. My Mother's absence was in every room, and my Father, in his eighties, was learning to live inside it.
I asked for help in the only ways I knew how. To those who did not know how to show up, I suggested something simple: send food, or schedule a time to chat with my Father via phone or video chat. I thought of it as lowering the threshold, making it easy to love him and for people to show up in case they didn't know how. No one in our large extended family responded.
My Father was deeply disappointed. For almost fifty-eight years of marriage, he had given his love and effort to staying connected with my Mother's family, and he said so plainly: all of it had not resulted in anyone checking on him. It disappointed me too, as he needed them and this was not a void I could fill. The history they shared together moving to the US, raising children together and making it was something sacred they shared with both my Mother and Father.
I do not know what kept people away. Perhaps they did not know what to say. Perhaps grief made them shy, or they assumed someone else had called. I try to hold all of that with grace. And still, I have learned that there is a difference between showing up for the funeral and showing up for the long, quiet months after it. The first asks for a few hours. The second asks for love.
The Tent That Felt Like a Womb
A few days after the funeral, I left. I had already committed to Bhakti Fest, and an invitation to offer sound healing there was not something I could let go. Mostly, I simply needed to be somewhere that no one needed anything from me.
I had cried only once, alone in a parking lot, in those first hours after my Mother was at the hospital. But I did not truly begin to grieve until I arrived at Bhakti Fest.
I walked into the women's tent, and it felt like a womb: dim and warm and breathing. Nina Rao was singing goddess chants, and all the women were singing along, their voices rising and falling together like one body. The tent was full. A woman I had never met shifted over and made a space for me to sit in the crowded tent.
And I began to sob.
In that moment I felt the goddess there, the Divine Mothers holding me. I did not have to explain what was happening. I did not have to hold up anyone else's sky. I could finally let it move through me, the way water moves once the dam has gone.
I know how to go down into grief. I have walked through my own dark night of the soul, and I know the way through is inward and down. Even there, among friends who loved me, my descent was gently interrupted. People reached to lift me out of it, because sorrow is heavy to watch and the heart wants to make it lighter. I do not blame them. But I learned something in that tent that I carry still: sometimes the holiest thing one person can do for another is to do nothing at all, and stay.
The Space a Woman Makes
I have thought many times about the woman who moved over.
She may not have known my name. She could not have known that my Mother had left her body only a short while before, or that I had pressed my hands against her chest, or that I had spent a week being strong for a room full of people. She saw someone arrive in a crowded tent and she made space. That was all. It was one of the most generous things during such a tender threshold I was crossing. It felt as though the Goddess herself was welcoming me into this huge initiation of losing my Mother.
I hold women's circles. I know the architecture of what held me that day: the circle that does not need an explanation, the singing that carries what words cannot, the permission to weep without being managed. Sitting in the tent, I was no longer the facilitator, the daughter who stayed steady, the one with the answers. I was simply a woman in grief among women, and the whole of it was allowed.
It changed how I understand what I offer. We often imagine that holding space requires skill, a particular technique or a well-chosen word. But what I received in that tent was simpler and older. A shifted body. A shared song. A great many voices saying, without saying it, you do not have to carry this alone, and you do not have to be anything but what you are.
I think that is what the Mothers do. They make room. And perhaps it is what we are all being asked to learn, in the hallways and kitchens and living rooms where someone we love is breaking open: to move over, and make space for their grief.
The Pass I Thought I Needed
On my Mother's first day in the hospital, when we were told she would not survive, I did not cry. Not in the room, and not in the corridor. It was only when I got into my car to drive home, alone for the first time since it began, that the sobs finally came. I sat in that parking lot and bawled, the way a body does when it is at last allowed to stop holding. Losing my Mother has been the most heartbreaking moment of my life.
Then I went home, where a ceremony had already been planned for that evening, and I chose to sit in it. I would sing for her. I would pray for her. I would not weep for her there, because her spirit was still near, and I wanted her to feel that she was free to go. I love her deeply and continue to miss her. And I knew she was ready to let go, whether or not we were.
I did not want to be pulled under by everyone else's waters. I am sensitive to energy, and the sorrow in that building was a tide. In that moment it felt like I had been handed a free pass, permission to tend myself without apology.
But why did I feel I needed a pass at all?
So many of us who are women wait for permission to care for ourselves. I watched my Mother put herself last for much of her life. I witnessed the toll it took on her body and spirit to not care for herself as much as she cared for others, and I do not want to carry that pattern forward. Grief keeps teaching me this lesson, again and again: my own wellbeing is not something I have to earn or excuse.
Waves, Two Years Later
In the beginning, grief was the whole sea. I could not see the shore. Now, more than two years on, it moves differently. It is no longer a flood that covers everything. It is a wave that arrives, lifts me, and sets me down again, usually when I have stopped bracing for it.
Sometimes it comes on the days I expect: our birthdays, the anniversary, the first cool mornings of autumn. More often it comes on ordinary afternoons. At a family gathering, when I remember her laughs and desire to be the last person to leave. In the face of a elder women at the Gurdwara who carry the furrowed brow, her smile or the tilt of her head. In the middle of a task, when I reach for something I would have asked her about.
I have stopped asking grief to be tidy. I have stopped believing that it should be finished by now, as though sorrow were a project with a deadline. What I am learning instead is that grief and love are the same river seen from two banks. The deeper you love, the deeper you grieve.
This is part of why Día de los Muertos moves me so. There is a tenderness in a tradition that does not ask the dead to leave, that sets out marigolds and candles and the foods they loved and says, simply, come close. It is a way of saying that the ones we miss are still part of the household, that remembering them is not weakness but devotion.
I do not need the dead to be gone in order to continue living. I need room to carry her, and some days that room is a candle, and some days it is a song, and some days it is only a long exhale in the car.
What Grief Asks of Us
Intimate grief is a threshold. And often the most loving thing we can do is stand beside someone at the door without trying to pull them through.
If someone you love is grieving, you do not need the right words. Ask how they are, and then stay for the answer. Let their sorrow be larger than your comfort. Let yourself not know what it feels like, and be there anyway.
And if you are the one grieving, may you find a tent, a circle, a quiet room, some place where you do not have to explain yourself or hold up anyone else's sky.
Today is her birthday, and I am sharing these words in her honor. Later I will make Gajar Ka Halwa, the way she used to. She had such a sweet tooth, and I will make it for the sweetness of her love and her memories, and I will let the wave come when it comes.
Who has held space for you without trying to fix you? And who in your life might be waiting for you to simply stay?
