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How to Comfort a Grieving Friend
After my husband died, I learned there is no one-size-fits-all approach
Sometimes “I’m sorry for your loss” doesn’t cut it. A friend’s father died a year ago. He told me about it over lunch at the pub, and I reached for a response, some safe sentence to tell him I cared.
In the years of supporting my husband through his cancer, and now my two years as a widow, I’ve learned to be careful with this moment. There are so many wrong things to say.
So I uttered the one safe sentence I’ve settled on: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Then I patted myself on the back for mastering this death-grief thing.
“Ugh,” my friend said. “I hate when people say that. What does that even mean?”
Well, shit. I thought I was an expert at all this. If even I get it wrong sometimes, is there one right thing to say?
When my husband, Brock, was sick, I read all the books on grief and mourning I could find. At one point I picked up Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a multi-award-winning book about the grieving process.
In the first part, Didion surveys people about the responses they found helpful and unhelpful: Are the flower bouquets thoughtful, or just a painful reminder of immortality and a chore to compost? I didn’t make it past the first few chapters. I was annoyed that all her findings were contradictory. I wanted concrete, useful advice about how I could work through and survive my grief.
Then Brock got bed-bound sick, and then he died, and so many people reached out to us in such a variety of ways, all with loving intentions, and I had my big two-part epiphany:
- Every illness and death and grief experience is different.
- People want and need different things.
It appears Joan Didion was right.
This is why I’ve always found “I’m sorry for your loss” to be a pleasant, loving, safe thing to hear, while my friend had a negative reaction to those words. There is no single statement that works for everyone.
