30/06/2024
What to say (or not) when someone is grieving...
What to say (or not to say) when someone is grieving
- Joanne West Cornish, 1 July 2024
This year, July 1st marks 30 years since my son Matthew died suddenly in an auto accident. I do not normally commemorate that terrible date, but this year I have decided to write about the aftermath.
Matthew was only 25 when he died. My life was forever changed by the phone call in the middle of the night. And perhaps now would be a good time to help others understand how to help someone in grief. A recent message online from a friend reminded me I had once told her I should write about what to say, and just as important, what not to say.
Most people think they need to say something that makes a person who is grieving feel better. It is human nature to want to take away pain from someone, but no words can do that. And because most of us don’t know what words to use when someone is in such pain, we tend to avoid their grieving altogether. But because we care, we should try.
In truth, we are all afraid of grief, afraid that it is somehow contagious and will bring us down as well. Understanding it, however, can take the fear away and allow us to help someone suffering with something they can neither understand nor want despite being saddled with it.
This advice doesn’t fit every situation, as grief can demand different things, but what I do offer is a guideline based on my own experience and those of others.
I believe the most effective words you can say to someone in grief are these three: “I’m so sorry.” Don’t ask if there is anything you can do to help; a grieving person probably cannot focus on a task for you. Instead, look for what is needed. For example, the lawn may need mowing, or the dishes need washing or the bathroom need cleaning, or any number of little things we take for granted but cannot do when we are paralysed with grief. Just show up and take action.
Alternatively, there are times a person grieving wants to be alone. Sometimes the room is full of people, and the responsibility of entertaining them while actually trying to make them feel better is overwhelming. Take the hint and come back another time.
Tell the griever you love him or her and want to help. Hugs are great, but don’t say you know how they feel, because no one who hasn’t walked in their shoes can know how it feels. Do tell them you are “here for them”, then actually be there. If you don’t live nearby, phone regularly or text your support. Stay in touch.
We are only human, and when broken, no one can put us back together. When someone we care about is grieving, we can help best by sitting beside them and listening. Don’t leave when you feel uncomfortable. Grief is in itself not comforting. Stay and acknowledge someone’s pain, letting them know you are there “with” them. Inside those painful moments are where healing can be found, and being willing to enter that pain alongside a person is the finest act of a friend.
When Matthew died, one long-time friend phoned me from another US state and told me to get on my knees and ask God what I had done for this tragedy to happen. What “I” had done? Really? I never spoke to her again.
Another friend phoned six weeks after Matthew’s death, asking if I was better. When I said I wasn’t yet, she said, “Oh, I thought you would be much better by now.” She could not know that timelines for grief are almost always longer than we think.
The worst thing someone can say is “everything happens for a reason.” My answer when someone said this to me was “so tell me the reason Matthew died.” Was it so I could grow as a person? Was it for some better good? Those words are the kind of garbage that can destroy lives while being categorically untrue. All those words are designed to stop us from doing the one thing we absolutely must do… and that is to grieve.
Grief is brutally painful and happens not only after a death, but when relationships fall apart, opportunities shatter, businesses fail or dramatic illnesses break people’s souls. Losing a child cannot be fixed. Death is non-negotiable and final. As is grief, and must be experienced if we are to get past the worst of it. I don’t mean that you could ever “get past” grief, but you can eventually learn to bear it with grace within you.
Four weeks after my son’s death, an extraordinary thing happened. Gwen Atkisson, a woman I had known only peripherally phoned me. She explained that her own son had died a few years before and that a “magical woman” helped her. Gwen wanted to help me just as that woman had helped her. I was certainly ready for help, struggling alone with my grief and self-imposed guilt and not wanting to make others feel bad by burdening them with my pain.
Gwen told me the woman she was talking about had introduced her to another mother who had lost a child around the same time. Neither knew each other, but in parallel they began the grief process. Then Gwen said she had recently found a woman named Bunny McWhorter, who had also lost her son not long before I had lost my own. She invited the two of us to lunch. Gwen explained at that lunch full of more tears than were on the menu about how strangling it is not to be able to express or feel the profound grief we were drowning in. By having another person with the same pain to hear yours, you can say exactly what you’re feeling.
Your loved ones want you to be whole again. They can’t know you will never be the same. For more than a year, Bunny and I would speak almost daily, have lunch and cry, send messages of pain that the other understood, weep and wail without guilt. Bunny and I traversed the trail of tears together and made it out the other end almost whole and without bitterness. Anger is also a part of grief and can be crippling. Life was brighter with Bunny beside me, usually on the phone, but still there. Now thirty years later, I still bless Gwen, who in her wisdom put Bunny and me together to comfort each other in ways that others could not.
You will never be the same person you were before profound tragedy strikes. Healing or becoming whole again after navigating through grief, always leaves you changed. Now I live “beside” my grief, because it will always be there but no longer crippling. Matthew will live forever in my heart, and I focus on the gains, not the losses.
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