A Companion Reflection to There Is No Fixing It
by Robert Drake
In a recent essay I wrote about the impossibility of fixing grief, and about presence as the only honest response to another’s loss. This is a companion reflection — another room in the same house. It begins with something I have been sitting with for a very long time, something I rarely hear named in all the conversations about grief and dying.
When someone we love dies, we lose more than them.
We lose a witness — sometimes the only remaining witness to parts of our life.
I have lost nearly twenty people dear to me — both parents, my kid sister, close friends taken too soon and too violently. Each loss has taught me things. But there is one thing they have taught me collectively, through accumulation, that no single loss could have shown me alone. This teaching usually comes only through many losses over many years.
With each death, a portion of my own life became unwitnessed.
My sister was two years younger than me. As children we shared a bedroom. We went to the same YMCA and the same summer camp all summer long for many years. We grew up inside the same world, the same family — five siblings and a father mostly absent. We climbed the same trees and roamed the same fields together. We shared the same particular texture of ordinary days that no one else inhabited quite as we did. She knew the child I was before I knew myself. She held a version of me — early, unformed, becoming — that exists now only in my own memory.
When she died, that version of me lost its only other witness.
We are known, truly known, only by a small number of people over the course of a lifetime. Not known in the casual sense of being recognized or remembered, but known in the deeper sense — witnessed through unique experiences and contexts and understood by no one else. Someone who was there. Someone who remembers who you were before you became who you are. Someone who can say: yes, that happened, I was there, I remember you then.
When that special person dies, the chapters of your life they carried die with them. Not entirely — you carry them too. But they lose their external confirmation. They become, in a sense, unverifiable. A private archive with only one remaining custodian.
This is not the same as missing someone, though you miss them too. It is something quieter and more disorienting. A portion of your own life has become suddenly unwitnessed and unanchored. And you may not find language for that feeling for a long time, if ever.
What I have come to understand, through the accumulation of nearly twenty close, personal losses, is that this is also a story about loneliness.
Not the loneliness of an empty house or a silent phone. Something structural, certainly spiritual. Something that builds slowly, loss by loss, over the years.
Each death steals a witness. Over time, more and more of your life exists only inside you, held by no other living person. Whole eras of who you were — the young person, the one still becoming, the one before the losses began, or eras in our older, still evolving lives — grow increasingly solitary. The people who knew you then, who were present in those rooms, those years, those ordinary days that turned out to matter more than anyone knew at the time — they are gone. And with them goes the shared reality of who you were.
I am seventy-two years old. I have outlived both my parents, my sister, and nearly twenty dear friends. There are chapters of my life now that exist only in my own memory. No one else remembers those times with me. No one else can confirm them, inhabit them, laugh or grieve over them alongside me. I am, for long stretches of my own history, the last witness standing.
That is a particular kind of loneliness. It does not announce itself dramatically. It accumulates. And it is one of the least named dimensions of a life lived long enough to love many and lose many.
No one but Kirk was with me when I drove my Porsche off the mountainside into the snow from an icy curve in Bear Valley. No one but Colin would remember looking at each other during the psychedelic years of the seventies and understanding what I was seeing or thinking without having to speak it. No one but Joe would know the icy cold and deep peace of the early fishing morning in the White Mountains of Arizona. No one but Mom would remember me and understand my reasons for hitchhiking through Mexico or wanting to study Arabic after camping with the Bedouin. No one but Carol would remember me telling her, clinging to a limb below me, to climb back down from the tree I was already climbing or I would have to pee on her — she did not climb down. No one but Richard would remember seeing the Little People deep in the desert of Death Valley. Only Rod could speak of my nature as a young man and his roommate in Bloomington as a young philosopher. Dad alone would know my pride catching my first fish. And my first wife alone knew me as a brand new father — an imperfect one, for sure — but that is part of the reality that seems now a little less real.
For those of us who work in end-of-life care — in hospice, in palliative medicine, in social work and chaplaincy — this is worth holding as we sit with the dying and the bereaved. When someone is losing a spouse of fifty years, or a lifelong friend, or a sibling who shared their childhood, they are not only losing the relationship. They are losing the person who remembered them young — who remembered them when. Who knew the story from the beginning. Who held the evidence of a life lived.
That is an enormity that deserves to be named, not folded silently into the general weight of grief. It is something to be grieved in its own right — named honestly as loneliness.
And there is this, too, for those of us in this work: even our patients take something of us with them when they die. The ones we have sat with for months, laughed and cried with, accompanied through their final season — they knew us in a particular way that no one else did. They witnessed us in our caring, in our presence, in our most human moments alongside them. When they die, that witness goes too. We carry our patients’ losses. We rarely speak of the losses they carry of us.
For the bereaved reading this: if your loss has left you feeling not only bereft but somehow less real — less confirmed in your own history — that is not confusion or self-absorption. That is one of the truest things about grief, and one of the least spoken.
You are not only mourning them. You are mourning the you that only they could see — that only they knew.
There is no resolution to offer. The witness does not return. The loneliness of outliving them does not fully resolve either — it becomes, over time, part of the landscape you inhabit.
What I have found is that naming it matters. That sitting with this particular grief — the grief of the unwitnessed self — without flinching from it or rushing past it, is its own form of faithfulness. To them. To yourself. To the reality of what was shared and what has been lost.
Grief is not pathological. It is the natural cost of having been witnessed, and of having witnessed in return. It is the price of having been known. And then of having lost.
And the loneliness that accumulates as the witnesses go — that is not a malfunction either. It is what love looks like across a long life. It is what it means to have been present, truly present, to the people who made you who you are.
There is no fixing that. There is only the willingness to carry it honestly — and to remain, as faithfully as we can, a witness to those who can no longer witness with us.
Robert Drake is a clinical interfaith chaplain, death doula, eco-theologian, mediator and end-of-life educator with nearly twenty years of experience in hospice, palliative care, psychiatric, pediatric oncology, emergency medicine and medical aid in dying. He serves as volunteer Director of Spiritual Care Education for the Academy of Aid in Dying Medicine and works with individuals and families throughout the Pacific Northwest through Drake Living & Dying Design. He can be reached at Support@DrakeLDD.com.