Fifteen Times, and Nobody Tells You How to Grieve a Client

I found out Miss Carol died from a Facebook post. Not a phone call. Not a text from her daughter, who I'd talked to a hundred times over the years about her mom's blood pressure, her new hip, her insistence on doing her own gutters until she was eighty-one.

Three days after the funeral. That's when I found out.

I'd cleaned that woman's house every Thursday for nine years. I knew which cabinet she hid her chocolate in so her son wouldn't find it. I knew when she'd had a bad night because her sheets would still be on the bed at ten in the morning — that never happened otherwise.

I was there for more Thursdays of her life than most of her own family was. And there was no seat for me anywhere in how her death got handled.

The relationship with no name

This has happened more than fifteen times now. Long-term clients — years, sometimes over a decade — who I watched decline, whose secrets I kept, whose homes I knew better than my own some weeks.

Then they die, and there's no ritual for what I am to that family. Not a relative. Not close enough for the funeral program. Not distant enough to not care. Somewhere in between that nobody's built language for.

How much trust actually gets built

People don't realize how intimate this work is. I've held keys to homes where family members didn't have keys. I've noticed the first signs of memory loss before anyone in the family did — because I'm the one who saw the stove left on, twice, in the same month.

I've been told things a client aging in place hadn't told her own daughter, because I was safe in a way family sometimes isn't.

Sometimes I end up part of the estate transition without anyone deciding to include me — a family member calling to ask where Mom kept the good jewelry, because I'm the one who'd know. Useful right up until the house sells. Then nobody's problem to keep in touch with.

Giving myself permission to grieve

I've started making myself grieve on purpose now. For a long time I didn't. I'd think, she wasn't my mother, I don't get to feel this.

I was wrong. You don't need a title to have loved someone. You don't need to be on the family tree to have been changed by knowing them.

Caregivers, aides, cleaners — the people who show up in the unglamorous middle of somebody's life — we carry real relationships the world has no ceremony for. Nobody sends us flowers. Nobody expects us to need any.

Let them in the room

If you do this kind of work, if you've buried a client quietly, alone, without permission to call it grief — it counts. It was real. You were allowed to love them, and you're allowed to miss them.

And if you're the family member reading this: the person who's cared for your parent for years, who knows their routines better than anyone — when the day comes, they're grieving too.

Let them in the room.

About the Author

Jessica DeCandia is the owner of You Have It Maid and has spent more than 14 years inside thousands of homes throughout the Fort Worth area. Through cleaning, organizing, downsizing, and helping families through life transitions, she has developed a unique perspective on aging, overwhelm, family dynamics, and what homes can teach us about the people who live in them.