Grief…. we know how to grieve family and friends, but what about the therapist, hairdresser, guard, bookseller, or housemaid who quietly became part of our lives? This essay explores the grief we rarely speak about and the gentle ways we can honour those who stood just outside our family circle but left a lasting place in our hearts.
Just a few days ago, our family’s acupressure therapist passed away. For almost twenty years, he had been only a phone call away whenever someone in our family suffered from back pain, frozen shoulders, muscle spasms, headaches, or simply the aches that come with growing older. He would arrive with calm confidence, patiently examine every pressure point, explain what the body was trying to communicate, recommend natural remedies, and treat each one of us with remarkable care. His passing is still too recent to feel entirely real, and perhaps that is why it has made me think so deeply about a different kind of a grief.
There are countless books, articles, support groups, religious teachings, and conversations that help us understand grief. We are taught how to mourn the loss of a parent, a spouse, a child, a sibling, or a dear friend. In recent years, we have also become more open about grieving our beloved pets, recognising that love is not measured by species or language. Yet there is another kind of grief that rarely finds its place in our conversations, a grief that quietly visits us when someone who was never officially part of our family leaves our lives forever.
Over the years, I have lost several such people. Some of those losses happened long ago and remained tucked away in memory, while one has happened only few days ago. Together they have made me realise that there is an entire category of grief that almost all of us experience, yet very few of us know how to acknowledge. These are the people who quietly accompany our lives without ever occupying the centre of them, and somehow that makes their absence all the more surprising when they are gone.
What made him extraordinary was not simply his skill but his generosity with knowledge. He never wanted us to become dependent on him because he believed healing should empower people rather than bind them. Over the years he patiently taught us how to locate pressure points, how much pressure to apply, how to understand the body’s signals, and how to relieve many kinds of pain ourselves. Looking back now, I realise that every lesson he shared was quietly preparing us for a day when he would no longer answer the phone, and perhaps that was the greatest gift he could have left behind.
His death also brought back another memory that I had almost forgotten. When I was in college, my father called the neighbourhood hairdresser who had been cutting his hair for decades and had eventually begun cutting my brother’s as well. Instead of hearing his familiar voice, someone from his family answered the phone and told my father that he had passed away. I remember feeling unexpectedly sad because, until that moment, I had never imagined grieving a hairdresser. He had simply been one of those familiar faces who quietly measured the passing years of our lives with every visit, and his absence made me realise that familiarity itself is a form of affection.
Only recently, another quiet loss entered my life. One morning I arrived at the office and noticed that our oldest security guard was missing from his usual place. For years he had greeted us with the same warm smile, opened the gate every morning, and silently witnessed the rhythm of our working lives. When I asked where he was, someone gently told me that he had passed away the previous night after suffering a heart attack. The building looked exactly the same, but grief had somehow entered before I did because one familiar face had disappeared forever.
My son had a doctor when he was little, a gentle, kind-hearted doctor who seemed untouched by the relentless rat race of medicine. He saw patients for only a few hours each day from his own apartment, and appointments were made with a simple text message. We all called him Rashid Bhai, and over the years he became much more than our doctor. My son adored him, and the affection was clearly mutual.
During one particularly severe bout of illness, it was Rashid Bhai who diagnosed and treated my son’s worst cold with remarkable insight. Years later, when we consulted doctors abroad, they looked at his prescription and agreed it had been excellent, continuing the very treatment he had started. That quiet validation only deepened our respect for him.
Then, one day, without warning, he died of a massive heart attack. I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of helplessness, as though the one person who truly understood my son’s body had suddenly disappeared. Even today, whenever my son falls ill, a small part of me still wishes I could send a message to Rashid Bhai, knowing he would know exactly what to do.
As I reflected on these experiences, I realised that our lives are filled with people whose importance only becomes visible in their absence. There are booksellers who remember the kinds of books we love before we ask. There are stationery shop owners who know which notebook or fountain pen we always buy. There are delivery riders who ask after our parents, pharmacists who recognise our prescriptions without looking twice, family doctors who know our medical histories by heart, and housemaids who spend years raising children, celebrating festivals, caring for elderly parents, and quietly becoming part of the household. They may never appear in family photographs, but they leave fingerprints all over our memories.
Psychologists sometimes describe these relationships as “weak ties” or refer to this experience as “disenfranchised grief,” a form of grief that society does not always fully acknowledge because the relationship does not fit traditional categories. While the terms are useful, they somehow feel inadequate because there is nothing weak about someone who has quietly accompanied your life for twenty years. These are relationships built not through dramatic declarations of love but through reliability, familiarity, trust, and the countless ordinary moments that slowly become part of who we are.
Perhaps that is why this grief often catches us by surprise. These people know versions of us that even close friends may never see. They have watched us grow older, recover from illness, celebrate birthdays, prepare our children for school, search for books, complain about aching backs, and simply live the ordinary routines that make up a human life. They become silent witnesses to our personal history, and when they leave, it feels as though a small chapter of our own story has quietly closed forever.
There is another reason this grief feels so profound. We do not merely lose a person; we lose continuity. The next therapist will not immediately understand how our body responds to treatment. The next barber will not know exactly how our hair falls. The next bookseller will not instinctively recommend the kind of novel that keeps us awake until midnight. The next security guard will greet us politely but will not know that we are always rushing through the gate a few minutes later than everyone else. Trust cannot be inherited, and familiarity cannot be replaced overnight because both are patiently built over time.
Housemaids deserve a special place in this conversation because so many of them spend decades caring for families that are not biologically their own. They watch children become adults, celebrate weddings, comfort people through illness, and carry the daily rhythm of a household with remarkable devotion. Years after they leave, we sometimes hear that they have passed away, and grief quietly returns because they were never merely employees. They were witnesses to our childhood, our joys, our losses, and the countless ordinary days that became our lives. They shed light in our lives like the sun only quietly.
The Grief No One Prepared Us For
Perhaps the first step in living with this grief is simply giving ourselves permission to feel it. We do not need to apologise because someone was “only” our therapist, “just” our hairdresser, or “simply” the security guard at the office. The heart does not measure relationships by professional titles or family trees because it remembers consistency, kindness, and the comfort of familiar presence. Grief does not ask whether someone was related to us by blood before deciding whether they mattered.
I have also found myself thinking about how we might remember these people in ways that resemble the relationships themselves. Quiet relationships deserve quiet rituals because they were never built upon grand gestures in the first place. We can whisper their names during our evening prayer or meditation, light a single candle or incense stick, and spend a few moments offering gratitude for the kindness they brought into our lives. No one else needs to know because remembrance does not become more meaningful simply because it becomes more visible.
We can also honour them by continuing what they taught us. If a therapist shared knowledge that eased our pain, we can pass that knowledge on to someone who needs it. If a bookseller introduced us to an unforgettable author, we can buy that book for another reader. If a teacher awakened our curiosity, we can encourage a young mind with the same patience. In Buddhism, there is a beautiful practice of rejoicing in another person’s wholesome actions and wishing them peace. Perhaps the greatest tribute we can offer is to allow their goodness to continue through our own hands.
Another quiet ritual is to write about them before memory begins to fade. We often keep journals about major milestones in life, but perhaps we should also record the names of those ordinary people who quietly shaped us. A few pages describing a therapist’s wisdom, a bookseller’s recommendations, a housemaid’s affection, or a security guard’s daily greeting become a small memorial that no monument could ever replace. Memory preserved with gratitude is one of the gentlest forms of love.
As I think of Milon, our acupressure therapist today, I remember far more than his healing hands. I remember his patience, his humility, his willingness to teach, and his belief that knowledge should always be shared rather than guarded. His warm smiles when he entered, asking for a milk tea from our maids or cold water. Laughing loudly on jokes, or teasing my son on his height. He never measured his success by how often we needed him but by how much we learned from him, and that is a rare kind of generosity that continues to heal long after the healer has gone.
Perhaps we spend too much time celebrating the people who change history and too little time honouring the people who quietly change our everyday lives. They stand just outside the family photograph, yet somehow belong in every chapter of our story. The security guard who welcomed us every morning, the hairdresser who watched the years pass one haircut at a time – watching our hairline grow thinner, the bookseller who filled our shelves, the housemaid who loved a family that was never officially her own, and the therapist who gently eased our pain for two decades all deserve a place in our remembrance.
They may never appear in history books, but they remain written into the invisible map of our hearts, reminding us that grief is never measured by blood, titles, or obligation. It is measured by kindness, by constancy, and by the quiet ways one human being becomes part of another’s ordinary life. I dedicate this blog to all the familiar faces who quietly became part of our lives and left just as quietly, often without warning. They touched our days in ways we seldom noticed until they were gone. May they all find peace, and may we never forget the countless small kindnesses through which they changed our lives.
