What To Say (And Not Say) To Someone Grieving
Types of Grief
Traumatic
A sudden, unexpected loss
Examples: A car accident or a natural disaster like flood, earthquake, or tsunami.
Anticipatory
Feelings of grief and loss before the loss occurs.
Examples: Feelings around a person diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Ambiguous
When a loved one is physically alive, but emotionally or psychologically absent. Loss without closure.
Example: A person who is lost and hasn’t been found, a living parent who will never be a good enough/healthy parent for you, a person who has a cognitive health issue and who is no longer the same, etc.
What To Say & Do
Empathize
Validate
Be curious
Ask questions
Be comfortable not having answers
Be comfortable sitting in silence
What To Say/Do
Focus on what you appreciated about the person
Remind them of a specific memory you shared with the person
Be specific
Be okay with silence
Offer help and follow through with it
Offer to listen and talk to them and follow through with it
Call them
Visit them
I’m here to listen if you want to talk
I’m here to listen if you want to vent
I’m here to listen if you want a distraction
I’m here if you want to be with someone
I’m here if you want to cry with someone
Send something to them based on their preferences and likes
I have no words for your loss/pain
What do you like to eat?
Can I bring you food?
Can I make you food?
Can I send you food?
Do you need someone to help you with your child? Do you need someone to pick him up from school? Do you need someone to help him with his homework? Etc.
Do you need help with your home? I can help clean and tidy up. I can help take out the trash. I can hire a cleaner. Etc.
Do you need anything done right now?
What Not To Do
Assume
Mind read
Make it about you
Rationalize
Fix or solve
Compare
Assume
Make judgements
Make it about you
What Not To Say/Avoid Saying
At least you had X amount of years/time with your person
I know how you feel
I know what you’re going through
You don’t need to feel X/sad/hurt/angry
This reminds me of when my dad/mom/uncle/grandma/partner died
It’s time for you to move on
Get over it
It’s been X years, it’s time to move forward
Everything happens for a reason
Cheer up
It’s for the best
Calm down
Time heals everything
You’ll feel better soon
You should be over this by now
You’ll better in X amount of years/days/months/weeks
I don’t know how you can handle this grief, I couldn’t be able to handle this
I don’t know how you do it
It could be worse
Things could be worse
Other people have it worse
At least you still have your X person/grandma/uncle/wife/husband/brother/sister
If there is anything I can do, please let me know
Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with
They’re in a better place
They were really old
It was God’s will
This is part of God’s plan
It was their time
Your father/mother/sister/wife/husband/person wouldn’t want you to feel X
Life goes on
Reminders For Those Grieving
Healing is not linear
Grief is not linear
What works for one person won’t work for everyone
Healing and grieving is individualized
There is not a right or wrong way to grieve
Remember to breathe
Distract yourself from time to time
Name, feel, and process your feelings
Engage in grief rituals
Engage in grief ceremonies
Support groups are available
Grief therapists are available
Read books or articles on grief to feel less alone and feel more connected
Watch videos or listen to podcasts
Take good care of yourself
Get adequate amount of sleep
Eat regular meals
Eat nutritious meals
Ask for help
Express your grief (art, writing, dance, movement, singing, etc.)
Connect and/or reconnect with your culture
Connect and/or reconnect with spirituality
Connect and/or reconnect with your religion and/or faith
Connect and/or reconnect with friends, loved ones, and/or family members
The Circle of Grief by Susan Silk
Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma.Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma.
Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people.
Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order.
Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, "Life is unfair" and "Why me?" That's the one payoff for being in the center ring.
Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.
When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you're going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn't, don't say it. Don't, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don't need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, "I'm sorry" or "This must really be hard for you" or "Can I bring you a pot roast?" Don't say, "You should hear what happened to me" or "Here's what I would do if I were you." And don't say, "This is really bringing me down."
If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that's fine. It's a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.
Francis Weller’s The Wild Expression of Grief
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”
“At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”
“Silence is a practice of emptying, of letting go. It is a process of hollowing ourselves out so we can open to what is emerging. Our work is to make ourselves receptive. The organ of receiving is the human heart, and it is here that we feel the deep ache of loss, the bittersweet reminders of all that we loved, the piercing artifacts of betrayal, and the sheer truth of impermanence. Love and loss, as we know so well, forever entwined.”
“When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.”
“Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another. The indigenous thought is when one of us is ill, all of us are ill. Taking this thought a little further, we see that healing is a matter, in great part, of having our, connections to the community and the cosmos restored. This truth has been acknowledged in many studies. Our immune response is strengthened when we feel our connection with community. By regularly renewing the bonds of belonging, we support our ability to remain healthy and whole.”
“My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.”
“Grief keeps the heart flexible, fluid, and open to others.”
“Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation. Ritual is the pitch through which the personal and collective voices of our longing and creativity are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond our conscious minds and into the realms of nature and spirit.”
“Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigenous to the psyche. It has evolved with us, taking knowing into the bone, into our very marrow. I call ritual an embodied process.”
“Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time. Any form will do—writing, drawing, meditation, prayer, dance, or something else—as long as we continue to show up and maintain our effort. A practice offers ballast, something to help us hold steady in difficult times. This deepens our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them. Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion. (See the resources at the end of this book for more on developing the practice of compassion.)”
“Grief rises and falls with every breath, clings to the chambers of the heart and makes each step we take a challenge. It is a dense space, filled with sensations that carry our tears and our palpable aching. We cannot escape these times; we cannot outrun what is intimately entangled in our moment-to-moment world. It is now that our apprenticeship is most called upon. We are asked to stand alongside these difficult and painful visitations, these epiphanies of lamentation.”
David Kessler’s Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief
“Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn't mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.”
“People often say, “I don’t know how you’re doing it.” I tell them that I’m not. I’m not deciding to wake up in the morning. I just do. Then I put one foot in front of the other because there’s nothing else to do. Whether I like it or not, my life is continuing, and I have decided to be part of it.”
“You don't have to experience grief, but you can only avoid it by avoiding love. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined.”
“Your loss is not a test, a lesson, something to handle, a gift, or a blessing. Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen.”
“A loved one’s death is permanent, and that is so heartbreaking. But I believe your loss of hope can be temporary. Until you can find it, I’ll hold it for you. I have hope for you. I don’t want to invalidate your feelings as they are, but I also don’t want to give death any more power than it already has. Death ends a life, but not our relationship, our love, or our hope.”
“I guess the real question is, Why not me? Why did I think I was going to get through this life without sorrow, pain, or grief?”
“Your pain will not always be like this,” I told her. “It will change.” This is a message that the grieving need to hear, and in the moment of saying it, I often observe a shift. The person looks up at me and says, “It will?” And he or she suddenly becomes lighter.”
“People often think there is no way to heal from severe loss. I believe that is not true. You heal when you can remember those who have died with more love than pain, when you find a way to create meaning in your own life in a way that will honor theirs. It requires a decision and a desire to do this, but finding meaning is not extraordinary, it’s ordinary. It happens all the time, all over the world.”
Pauline Boss’s Loss Without Closure
“I think it’s personal too. We come from culture in this country of, I think, mastery orientation. We like to solve problems. We’re not comfortable with unanswered questions, and this is full of unanswered questions. These are losses that are minus facts. Somebody’s gone. You don’t know where they are. You don’t know if they’re alive or dead. You don’t know if they’re coming back. That kind of mystery, I think, gives us a feeling of helplessness that we’re very uncomfortable with as a society.”
“Yes. With ambiguous loss, there’s really no possibility of closure. Not even, in fact, resolution, whichever word you prefer to use. Therefore, it ends up looking like what the psychiatrists now call “complicated grief.” That is, in fact, a diagnosis, complicated grief. It’s believed that it requires some kind of psychiatric intervention.”
“In fact, that is the first question I ask: “What does this mean to you?” Because until I know what this means to them, I have no idea about how to intervene. If I say, “What does this mean to you?” They may say, “It’s a punishment from God,” or “It’s a punishment from my loved one. He’s always been after me,” or something like that. Then I know what their viewpoint is and can proceed that way. Or they may say, “I always fail at everything. That’s what this means.” Then you know you proceed that way. Or a person might say, “This is another challenge, and I think I can manage it.” This is another meaning. It was like the alarm clock story I told. Perception matters very much, and it opens the window for how you would proceed toward resilience and strength.”
From: On Being
Rachel Naomi Remen’s How We Live With Loss
“I think it’s correct. I also think that no one is comfortable with loss; that being that we’re a technological culture, our wish, or our first response — let’s put it this way. Our first response to loss is to try and fix it. When we are in the presence of a loss that cannot be fixed, which is a great many losses, we feel helpless and uncomfortable, and we have a tendency to run away; either emotionally or actually, distance ourselves. And fixing is too small a strategy to deal with loss.”
“The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance ourselves from life.”
“Wholeness includes all of our wounds. It includes all of our vulnerabilities. It is our authentic self, and it doesn’t sit in judgment on our wounds or our vulnerabilities. It simply says, this is the way we connect to one another. Often, we connect through our wounds, through the wisdom we have gained, the growth that has happened to us. Because we have been wounded allows us to be of help to other people. So it’s not a moral judgment. Integrity simply means what is true; to live from the place in you that has the greatest truth. And that truth is always evolving, as well.”
“But over time, things evolve and change. And at the very least, people who have lost a great deal can recognize that they are not victims, they are survivors. They are people who have found the strength to move through something unimaginable to them, perhaps, in the past. And just asking people that question — You have suffered a really deep loss; what have you called upon for your strength? — most people haven’t even noticed their strength. They’re completely focused on their pain.”
From: On Being