What do you say to a person who’s grieving? Finding the words is often so difficult and awkward. Maybe we say things partly to alleviate our own pain—the pain of watching the griever suffer. We want to help. But what words really help?
When my husband died suddenly, I was almost afraid to tell anyone about his death for fear of what they’d say. Too often the phrases made me cringe inside, even though I could see they were trying to comfort me. But the words just didn’t help a lot of the time. In fact, they sometimes made coping with my grief more difficult.
Maybe knowing what grief is can help. It’s such a big thing. It has an array of feelings coming and going that boggle the mind. Or it’s a single feeling that we feel trapped in. If we can realize the incredible depth and complexity, maybe we can figure out what to say–and what not to say.
~ Grief is loss of something or someone dear. And it may be more like an amputation than a cut on the arm in that it’s not about “healing” or “getting over” or “recovering from.” Those all mean we’ll return to the way we were before the loss. But we are different without that loved one. Adjusting, making do, working on reinventing ourselves (sometimes as a “one-armed” person)—those are the struggles of grieving.
~~ Grief is in the heart of the griever. Each of us holds the lost person, being or object in our hearts in a unique way. To say, “It’s only a dog” or “it’s only a ring” implies this grief should be minimal compared to other losses. Or assuming that grief should be bigger at a loss of a parent can be just as off base. There’s no measuring griefs.
~~ Grief contains an unlimited supply of feelings. We can take none of them for granted. We may have a full range or live with one most of the time. Assuming we know which ones another person is living with at any given moment is often a mistake. Saying something about a specific feeling like, “I know how sad you must feel,” can be way off the mark.
~~Grief takes its own time. As David Ives’ amazing play, “All in the Timing,” illustrates, timing matters. In his play, a man and woman meet in a cafe. When either says something that gets in the way of building a relationship, a bell dings, allowing them to try another line. Saying, “It just takes time” or being shocked when someone breaks into tears years after a loss would be bell-dingers for us as we think what to say instead.
~~ Grief is trying to find reasons for the loss. We want to understand why it happened to us. But we have to find our own answers. So, “It was God’s will” may not comfort but infuriate or injure. To paraphrase Reverend Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People) when others said it was God’s will about his son being born with progeria: “I refuse to believe in a God who would do such things on purpose.”
~~ Grief is figuring out what the dead person would want us to feel and do. Helping someone by saying the deceased wouldn’t want them to go on feeling bad is like saying, “Your feelings are wrong” or you know better. Instead, better to leave this unknown alone.
~~ Grief is a journey we do alone. We can have all sorts of support and good will, but it is a solitary path. Saying, “I understand how you feel because I lost….” is perhaps the least helpful thing we could say. We can trust that we don’t know what the other feels and not say we do.
It seems the more we understand grief, the narrower our choices are in what to say to a grieving person. I believe a look in the eye, a nodding of the head, a reaching for the hand, may suffice. Maybe the wisest thing of all is like the Alison Krauss song says: “You say it best when you say nothing at all.”