Grieving For Those We Barely Know

by

You get the news that someone you barely know has died. “Barely know” is important here; it’s not that this person was a complete stranger, but rather someone who inhabited the periphery of your life—a distant relative, a friend of a friend, a colleague from another department. The news arrives, typically, through an email or a text, the kind of digital missive that lands softly but explodes silently in your mind.

And suddenly, you realize you’re grieving. Except you don’t exactly know what you’re grieving or why.

There’s a weird dissonance to this kind of grief, a nebulous sensation that doesn’t fit into the neat categories of mourning we’re used to. It’s not the gut-wrenching sorrow of losing someone dear, but neither is it the cold indifference you might feel for the death of someone with whom you have no relationship. It’s more like a gray zone, a liminal space between connection and disconnection, where the boundaries of what it means to “know” someone blur into something almost metaphysical.

Part of the strangeness of this kind of grief is the realization that you’re grieving at all. It’s not expected and certainly not what we’re prepared to handle because there’s no handbook for this. We have rituals for mourning close loved ones—funerals, memorials, wakes—cultural scripts that guide us through the process. But when it’s someone we barely know, we’re on our own, left to navigate a landscape where the usual signposts are missing. This is where the real work of grieving begins.

You’ve been handed a jigsaw puzzle, but half the pieces are missing, and the picture on the box isn’t clear. You don’t even know if you want to complete the puzzle because, really, what’s the point? Yet you can’t help but try assembling fragments of memories, snippets of conversations, and the faintest echoes of shared experiences, all to make sense of the nonsensical.

Here’s where it gets tricky: this grief isn’t just about the person who died. It’s about you, too. Because in grieving someone you barely know, you’re forced to confront the fact that your life is intertwined with so many others in ways that are both profound and trivial. This person, who was little more than a blip on the radar of your life, somehow mattered, even if you’re not exactly sure why. And that’s unsettling because it means that everyone—every casual acquaintance, every stranger you pass on the street—might matter in ways you can’t quite comprehend.

This kind of grief also forces you to grapple with your mortality in a way that’s both abstract and deeply personal. If this person, who was just a peripheral figure in your life, can evoke such feelings, what does that say about the interconnectedness of all human experience? What does it say about the fleetingness of life, about how we touch each other’s lives without even realizing it?

Then there’s the guilt. Because there’s always guilt with grief, isn’t there? Guilt that you didn’t know this person better, didn’t appreciate them more, didn’t realize how much they mattered until they were gone. But there’s also the guilt of grieving at all, the sense that maybe you’re appropriating someone else’s pain, that you’re mourning someone you had no right to mourn. It’s a weird kind of impostor syndrome, where you feel like you’re pretending to grieve, even though the emotions are real, if not entirely understood.

Grieving someone you barely know is about grappling with the fundamental mystery of human connection. It’s about acknowledging that even the most tenuous of relationships can have an impact, that even the faintest trace of another person in your life leaves an indelible mark. It’s about accepting that grief is not a linear process but a complex, messy, and deeply personal experience that defies easy categorization.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s about recognizing that in grieving someone you barely knew, you’re grieving all the people you’ll never know, all the connections you’ll never make, all the possibilities that remain forever unrealized. To grieve is to be human, and to be human is to be connected to every other soul on this planet in ways both seen and unseen.