When a Family Member Dies, and You’re the Outside Child

The grief isn’t for the person. It’s for the story you never got to live.

Last night, a cousin sent me a text saying that my biological father’s sister passed away on Wednesday. The funeral’s in North Carolina this week, on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. The family’s been asked to gather out front by 1:30.

But I don’t know how old my aunt was, how she died, or much of anything about her life. I met her once at my biological father’s funeral. We stood in the same room, two strangers bound by blood but nothing else. When we met, there wasn’t a smile of recognition, no warmth, no light in her eyes. Just a blankness and an obligatory, performative hug.

We spoke on the phone once after that. It was the kind of conversation where you both know there’s nothing really to say. There was no spark. No shared memories. No curiosity. No “we should get together soon.” No “I love you.” Just the dull ache of knowing you should feel something but you don’t.

She was supposed to be my aunt, one of those women who hugs you tight, slips you a little cash when no one’s looking, tells you family stories, remembers your birthday, keeps your secrets. Someone who nurtures, shows up, and does all the things aunties are supposed to do. But she wasn’t that for me. And it’s not because she was a bad person. It’s because I’m an adoptee and an “outside child.”

As an outside child, I am and always will be the flesh-and-blood reminder that someone crossed a line, somebody stepped out and cheated, somebody abandoned their children, somebody left another family behind in turmoil. I am a living echo of a secret. The whispered shame tucked behind family photos, the missing name in the family tree. Outside children grow up at the edge of the story, never fully written in. We are always the afterthought, the outsider, the mistake no one wants to claim but nobody can forget. An outside child is the proof that a family broke somewhere. We are the walking wound that never quite closes, no matter how much time passes.

Add to that, adoption makes you and your blood relatives legal strangers, forever. That’s the law. It cuts the ties and redraws the lines, like your story started somewhere else, with someone else. And the rest of them, your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, even your own parents, they’re rewritten as footnotes you don’t get to know. You grow up with people telling you, “That’s not your family anymore.” And so when the phone rings to tell you someone has died, you don’t even know how to hold the news.

It’s like being handed a folded obituary for a stranger and told, “Here, this is supposed to matter to you.”

But you don’t have the memories, the bonds, the history to make it real. You missed all of that. It’s a hollow inheritance being an outside child. A seat at the table you don’t get to fill. A story you were never invited into. And now, the woman who was supposed to be your auntie is gone, and all you can do is stare at your phone, wondering what you’re supposed to feel.

For an adoptee or an outside child, news of a relative’s death can land like a ghost passing through you. It’s not grief in the way people expect. There are no tears over shared memories, no aching nostalgia, no pangs of “I wish we had more time.” You don’t have any time to speak of, no memories stitched together by birthdays, holidays, or phone calls. You barely have a name, maybe a vague resemblance, and that’s it.

When you hear that someone who’s technically family has died, you’re left standing there, holding a story that ain’t really yours. People might expect you to care, to show up, to mourn, do something. But what exactly are you really mourning?

A stranger?

A missed connection?

A relationship that never happened?

You’re not mourning a person. You’re mourning the IDEA of a family you never got to have. You’re mourning the idea of what could have been.

When I learned that one of my twin brothers had died during COVID, it felt surreal. He died in his sleep from a heart attack, and I didn’t know him well. I didn’t know his favorite color, what he liked to eat, how he walked, how he laughed or cried. We never even had an argument. We were strangers. But what do you do when there’s no attachment, no bond, no story to tell?

I didn’t attend my brother’s funeral. My name wasn’t in the obituary. No mention of me, no acknowledgment that I existed, that I shared blood with him. It was as if I had been erased, like I was never part of his life, like I was never part of this family. And maybe, in their eyes, I wasn’t. Maybe leaving my name off was easier than trying to explain where I came from. Easier than saying, “Oh, that’s the outside child, the one we don’t talk about, the reminder of a mistake that someone tried to bury years ago.”

I wasn’t there to cry, to remember, to stand graveside and say goodbye, because what memories did I have to hold onto? We were strangers. And maybe that’s why they left my name off. To them, I wasn’t really a sibling. Maybe I was an interruption, a complication they didn’t know how to fold into their grief. Maybe it was shame. Maybe it was silence passed down through generations. Or maybe they just didn’t think I mattered enough to include.

But erasing me doesn’t erase the truth. I existed. I’m here. And I’m left with this: a funeral I didn’t attend, a brother I didn’t know, an obituary I wasn’t in, and the hollow feeling of being the child who was never really counted.

Sometimes I get angry at my mother and father for creating this mess and my lifelong ache. The anger comes in waves, thick, heavy, and choking. They made choices that that shaped the jagged edges of my life. I blame them. I blame them for the silence that has followed me into rooms where I should have felt warmth. I blame them for the awkwardness in the air when I showed up at family gatherings, the glances that didn’t linger, the questions no one asked.

I blame my parents for the awkward, bootleg paternity tests. Y’all know what I’m talking about. Those long, uncomfortable stares across the room, the way people would scan my eyes, my nose, my hair like they were looking for evidence. The whispers,"Yeah, that's his/her daughter,” like I was some disputed fact, a secret they were trying to decode by matching my face to my parents’ mistakes. It was a forensic exercise in shame, a twisted ritual to confirm I belonged, even as some of them never really wanted me to.

I blame my mother and father for my name being left out of the obituary, for the absence at my brother’s funeral, for the fact that I’m always the outsider looking in. They did this. They made a child and then placed her at the margins of the family I came from.

They chose not to raise me. My mother and father stayed in the shadows and then left this earth, letting time and distance do the dirty work of forgetting. And now, I’m left holding the fragments of a family I was never really part of. I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t deserve to be the outsider in my own bloodline. But here I am, the product of their decisions, paying the price for their choices.

For a minute this morning, I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself taking the trip to North Carolina to attend my aunt’s funeral. I did the same when news came that my older brother died.

I saw myself walking into that church. It was like stepping into a play where everyone knows their lines except me. The aunts, the cousins, the siblings. I could see them all in a shared script, trading stories, hugs, tears. And me? I’m the glitch in the program. Here comes the outside child no one talks about but everyone knows exists. Here I am, the secret in plain sight. The reminder.

What are you supposed to do in that room?

Sit there and nod politely while people tell stories about a woman who was supposed to be a relative but was never your anything? Stand at the edge of the grave and pretend you feel something? Hug people you don’t know, who don’t know you, who aren’t sure how to hold you in their arms because you don’t fit neatly into their world? Do you go to the repast and listen to the stories that you weren’t part of, never invited into, a guest at your own family’s table?

This is what happens when there are outside children. You’re not just a person. They see you as an event. An incident. A slip. A mistake. Something shameful. They look at you and see the crack in their family’s foundation. They might not say it, but you can feel it in the way they glance at you too long, or not at all. The whispered questions. The awkward introductions. You are the living, breathing evidence of a rupture in their family narrative, and they don’t know what to do with you.

I was given away, adopted out, written out of the story, but here I am showing up like a plot twist they thought had been resolved. And now you’re sitting in the pew, standing by the grave, eating the food, breathing the air of a family that has no place for you.

They don’t know how to claim you. They don’t know how to grieve with you. They don’t know how to acknowledge you without acknowledging the secret you represent. So they smile tight smiles, maybe avoid direct eye contact, maybe offer a few awkward words. But the truth is, they’re just as unsure of what you’re doing there as you are. That awkwardness and unspoken discomfort is the inheritance of an outside child. That’s the legacy of a family that broke and tried to pretend it didn’t.

When someone in the family actually invites you, when they reach out and say, come, when they make room for you at the table, when they say, you matter here, it does something to your heart. It stirs up a messy, complicated hope. For an outside child, an invitation is never just a simple gesture. It’s a rupture in the silence, a small but seismic crack in the walls that have kept you out. It says: “Maybe you’re not completely invisible. Maybe someone sees you, even just a little. Maybe someone’s willing to challenge the family’s quiet agreement to leave you in the shadows.”

It can feel like a lifeline. Like you’re being tugged, however tentatively, into the fold of something you were told wasn’t yours. It doesn’t erase the years of absence, the ache of not belonging, but it acknowledges that you exist. That you’re somebody’s kin in this worlds.

And yet, that invitation can also carry weight because it makes you ask: Why me? Why now? Is it guilt? Is it obligation? Is it a fragile attempt at inclusion, or just a way to soothe their own conscience?

But even with those questions swirling, it still matters. Because for an outside child, being invited instead of erased is a rare, fragile thing. It’s a small, flickering light in a history of being left out. And sometimes, it’s enough to make you show up, even if you don’t know where you fit, even if you don’t know what you’re supposed to feel.

I don’t think there is a script for people like us. You acknowledge the loss in whatever way feels true to you. Maybe you sit with the strangeness of it, maybe you light a candle, maybe you keep scrolling on your phone. Maybe you do nothing. There’s no right way to mourn someone you never had.

And listen, I don’t really blame my relatives. We don’t have the attachment. They don’t feel me the way family is supposed to feel each other. And how could they? We never built the bond. I’m an echo, a name they might have heard in whispers, a face that showed up once at a funeral and then faded back into the fog of their lives.

It’s not really their fault. It’s the absence. The long, empty years when I wasn’t there at cookouts, at birthdays, at holiday tables. I wasn’t in the photos, the group texts, the inside jokes. I wasn’t there to be known, to be loved, to be folded into the family story. And they didn’t have the chance to know me, to attach to me, to see me as more than a reminder of something that broke.

That’s what lack of attachment does. It builds a wall between people, even when blood says there should be a bridge. It creates a kind of emotional amnesia where you forget, or never even learn, how to hold each other close. My relatives don’t know how to feel me because we never had the chance to practice the feeling. I can’t expect them to feel bad for a stranger, to include a name that doesn’t feel like it belongs.

For real, it ain’t personal. It’s just the math of absence. The cruel arithmetic of a family fractured by choices made long before I could speak.

RIP, Auntie.