On Caring for Others When You Are Also Grieving
I rarely saw my mother cry. I heard her. Often. The sound of her crying alone in her room was something I knew well as a child—a sound that lived behind closed doors, muffled and private. I would stand in the hallway sometimes, not moving, not knocking, just listening. My small body doing the math of something I didn’t yet have words for: she is in there and I am out here, and there is a door between us that is not mine to open.
On the rare occasions she did cry in front of us, she would say she was crying because she was so happy. I didn’t know what to do with that then. I’m not sure I fully know what to do with it now. What I do know is that it taught me something I never consciously chose to learn: Grief is something you do alone. Something you hide. Something that, if seen, might burden the people you love most. So, I learned to hide it too.
“I was so busy tending to everyone else’s pain that I kept setting mine down.”
When my mother died, I was the oldest of four. And without anyone saying a word, I understood my role. I would be the rock. I would hold it together. Because if I fell apart, we all would. And with her gone, it was me. It had always been me. That expectation—that unspoken, bone-deep expectation—made it almost impossible for me to fully grieve the loss we were all grieving. I was so busy tending to everyone else’s pain that I kept setting mine down. And somewhere in the middle of all that tending, I forgot to ask the question I most needed to ask: Is this mine to hold?
There is a term I recently came across that stopped me in my tracks: responsibility dysmorphia. It describes what happens when we feel overly responsible for everything and everyone around us. The compulsion to fix, to heal, to carry—even when what we’re carrying was never ours to begin with.
I think so many of us who love deeply live here. We have this perceived responsibility to not burden others with our grief, our loss, our pain—and yet we simultaneously feel responsible for holding the burden and losses of everyone around us. And slowly, quietly, our roles become our worthiness. We find our value in the carrying. In being needed. In being the one who doesn’t fall apart. But what does it cost us?
Here is what I have come to believe, and it has taken me a long time to get here: Sometimes carrying someone else’s grief is not the thing that keeps us from our own. Sometimes it is the doorway back to it. When we sit with someone we love in their sadness—really sit with them, not to fix or manage but to witness—something opens. Their grief touches something in us. Reminds us of what we are also carrying. And in that shared space, we find ourselves grieving too. Together. In communion. But here is the part that took me longer to learn: this is only true when the carrying is chosen. When it comes from love rather than fear—or guilt. Because guilt is its own driver. And it is the sneakiest one of all. Guilt looks like love from the outside. It shows up. It tends. It stays. But inside, it is asking a completely different question. Love asks: What does this person need? Guilt asks: What will it mean about me if I’m not there?
I have shown up for people’s grief out of guilt. I know what that feels like—the going through the motions, the presence that is really just an absence wearing the right clothes. I was there, but I wasn’t really there. I was managing my own discomfort about what it would mean if I left. And that kind of carrying—the guilty kind—doesn’t open anything. It closes. It takes from you without giving anything back, and it doesn’t truly serve the person you’re with, either, because they can feel the difference even when they can’t name it.
The compulsive carrying that comes from responsibility dysmorphia is driven by fear and guilt both. Fear of falling apart. Fear of being a burden. Guilt that whispers: If you set this down, you are failing them. And the way you know the difference between that and intentional presence is this: compulsive carrying leaves you emptier. Love—the real kind, the chosen kind—opens something. Even when it’s hard. Even when it hurts.
That’s the work. Learning to tell the difference in real time. Asking honestly: Am I here because love brought me here? Or because guilt won’t let me leave? And when the answer is the latter—when you recognize that you are carrying out of guilt rather than love—setting it down is not abandonment. It is honesty. It is making room. Room for your own grief to surface. Room for someone else to step in and carry what they actually can. Room for care to stop being a one-way street and become something more honest—something that moves between people, not just through one person and into the ground.
I think about my children now. They are 11. And I know that any significant loss that comes will not just be mine anymore. It will be ours. Recently, I caught myself doing it—the thing my mother did. I had stepped away from them, into another room, and closed the door quietly behind me. I told myself I didn’t want them to feel like they had to take care of me. But standing there alone, I recognized the reflex for what it was. The same closed door. The same muffled grief. The same lesson passing itself forward without my permission. What if letting them see me grieve is one of the greatest gifts I can give them? Not falling apart without support—but showing them that grief has a face. That it is allowed to be seen. That crying together over someone we all loved is not weakness. It is love, expressing itself honestly. What if we gave our children permission to grieve by grieving alongside them? Grief can live in many spaces—alone and in community, in private and in the open. It doesn’t have to choose. And neither do we.
The question is not about abandoning the people we love. It is about discernment—about learning, in real time, what you can truly carry and what needs to be set down so that someone else can pick it up. So that you can receive, not just give.
Is this mine to hold?
Sometimes the answer is yes, this is mine. And in holding it, I find my own way through. Sometimes the answer is no—and releasing it is its own form of healing. And sometimes the most honest answer is: I don’t know yet. And that is okay. Sit with it. Ask your heart. The answer will come—and when it does, trust it.
Is this mine to hold?
Ask it gently. Ask it often. Ask it when you are standing in the hallway outside a closed door, not sure whether to knock. Ask it when you are carrying so much of someone else’s grief that you’ve forgotten where theirs ends and yours begins. Ask it when you close a door behind you and realize, with a quiet start, that you learned this from someone who never meant to teach it.
The question is not a way out. It is a way through—to yourself, to the people you love, and to the grief that has been waiting, patiently, for you to finally let it be yours.
