Here's what the grieving people in your life want you to know
How to support a grieving person, without making it worse
Almost three years ago, we said goodbye to our second daughter, Ember. A year to the day later, my mother died. My family has felt great grief, as well as the rage, disappointment, and isolation that often comes with it. Supporting grieving people matters, yet most of us don’t learn how to do it.
The holidays are brutal for the bereaved. And the bereaved are all around. You should assume that everyone you meet is grieving, and act accordingly.
After a couple years spent among grieving people, here’s what I’ve learned.
Grief and love are the same thing
Grief is love.
It’s what love leaves behind when the body dies, or the person leaves.
To ask someone to stop grieving is to ask them to stop loving. It is impossible, and it is ghastly to demand that a person try.
To disenfranchise someone’s grief is to disenfranchise their love. Remember this in every interaction with a bereaved person.
The hardest times may not be in the immediate aftermath
My mom, who died two years ago, used to always repeat the same advice:
Show up after the funeral, and one year later.
In the first few days following a loss, friends and family are reeling, too. They may rally around the family. But as time wears on, the pain of the loss dulls for a person’s community. They may forget to reach out.
Reach out after the funeral. Reach out in the days and weeks and months and years later, when the person’s safety net of support may be thinning.
Things are probably a lot worse than they seem
We live in a society that abhors intense emotional expressions, especially of grief. So most grieving people do all they can to mask. Then they go home and sob, or fight with their spouse, or worse.
Assume things are worse than they seem, and act accordingly.
Grief is full of secondary losses
Most people lose friends when they lose a loved one. Their community may judge their grief, may not show up for them, may say unkind and insensitive things. This is just the beginning of the secondary losses, though. Grief often means:
losing a job or opportunities at work
losing financial resources
taking on more debt
losing a home
a lost sense of self
If you have the power to mitigate these secondary losses, please try to do so.
Support the support person
After a traumatic loss, most people think about the person most affected—the mother of a dead child, the husband of a dead wife. But what about their support person? The child’s father, the husband’s daughter, and others are also suffering from the loss. They have an added burden of caring for the person closest to the loss.
When we lost our daughter, I spent many nights crying myself to sleep on the kitchen floor. My husband felt helpless. And while I had many offers of support from friends, his support was quieter and more muted. That’s a tough burden to deal with when your wife has checked out of being a wife and you’re dealing with immense grief of your own.
Caring for the support person shores up their resources so they can care for the person closest to the loss.
Don’t forget about them.
Practical help can be life-changing
What happens if you’re staying in bed all day crying?
You don’t feed yourself.
Your house gets trashed.
Your pets go wild and destroy things.
You don’t have comfortable clothes to wear.
And the longer this goes on, the more daunting it feels to face.
Scrubbing a person’s toilet is a deeply intimate and caring act. So is doing their laundry. Find ways to make a person’s home and life more comfortable. Clean their house. Pull up weeds in their garden. Take their dog for a walk.
You don’t have to know what to say when you do these acts of deep love.
Grief isn’t always nice
Grief doesn’t always look like a person sitting around crying. And it certainly does not often look like a person being inspired to do more and better by the life of their loved one.
Grief can look like profound rage (often very justified).
It can look like guilt and self-loathing.
It can look like confusion over the relationship.
And very often, it looks like marital conflict.
Be prepared to show up with love and without judgment even when the person does not behave like the passive, grieving angel you hope they were.
Make room for the ugliness of grief. It’s the only way that ugliness will ever fade.
If you don’t know what else to give, give money
Grief is expensive. There will be funerals and memorial services to pay for. There will be the horror of unpaid medical expenses. There will be time spent away from work. A bereaved person may need therapy. They may need someone to clean the house for them, to make meals for them, to deliver food to them.
All grieving people deserve time and space to grieve, and the thing that most determines how much time and space a person has to process their loss is money.
One of the great tragedies of grief is that it can propel a person into poverty. On top of losing a spouse or child, they may lose their home, their ability to seek medical care, their dreams.
Many bystanders have the power to stop this.
If you have money, write a check.
If you have lots of money, write the biggest check you possibly can. It will help far more than anything else you can do.
Talking about the loss won’t remind them of it
Bereaved people do not forget their loved ones.
Please acknowledge their loss.
Euphemisms can be hurtful. They know “what happened.” You don’t have to refer to it that way.
As time goes by, people tend to forget the loss. Especially for bereaved parents, this can be agony. No one wants to believe their loved one will be forgotten, that their life didn’t matter, and that their memory will die.
Say their name.
Acknowledge the loss.
Tell stories of the loved one.
Make clear that their life mattered, and continues to matter.
There is no expiration date for grief, and holidays and anniversaries are especially hard
Grief does not follow a linear trajectory. Scientific evidence does not support the five stage model of grief, or the idea that grief is something to work through and resolve.
Grief is disenfranchised love. And real love never dies. A person may grow and heal, but they will always miss their loved one.
Know that anniversaries and holidays are often very hard. Mark these dates. Offer support and love.
Grieving people remember who abandoned them
The rage I feel toward people who never mentioned my daughter when she died is like nothing I have ever felt before. Grieving people remember those who abandon them. You should expect that if you walk away, the other person may not forgive you. Your relationship will be fundamentally changed.
Apologize and make amends. Try not to make it about you.
No, it’s not time to get over it yet
Still. It’s still not time. People cannot resolve to get over their grief.
No. Really.
Don’t demand emotional labor
A common dynamic when a person grieves is that the people in their life inadvertently demand emotional labor.
They apologize for not being there and then expect reassurance.
They want a thank-you for the meal they sent.
They’re mad at the other person for not reaching out.
Intense grief demands every ounce of energy a human being has, and is emotionally exhausting. Do everything you can not to demand emotional labor. End every email and text with a reminder that it’s fine not to respond. Be the easy friend.
Know that grief is often a more difficult burden for loving, giving people
Some of the most loving people I know have the most difficult time with their grief. That’s because they need to grieve, but they also want to support others. They feel guilty. They commit to too much. They return to work or volunteering too early. They bottle up their feelings.
Be on the lookout for caretakers who are grieving. They suffer as much as anyone else, but they may feel obligated to hide their suffering.
Be the calm in the storm. Be the one they can be normal with, the one they can share their suffering with, the one they don’t have to help and support.
People with strong support networks have a higher risk of grieving alone
When a person has a large network of people who love them, each individual person in that network may assume that someone else is doing the heavy lifting. And then no one does it. Don’t assume that a well-liked person with a large group of friends or a big family doesn’t need help.
There is no such thing as too much help. It’s never enough.
Society abandons and hates grieving people
I’ve spent the last three years hanging out in groups for bereaved parents. In the early days after we lost Ember, I thought something was wrong with me, because so many people had been shockingly cruel to us. I figured maybe I was particularly unlikeable, or the way I was grieving was socially unacceptable.
What I quickly learned is that this is a near-universal experience among bereaved parents. Not only do people not step in to help; they actively do things to harm the bereaved. And over and over again, I’ve seen grieving people assume it’s because of something they did. This, of course, intensifies their suffering.
Our culture is profoundly uncomfortable with grief. And the most bereaved among us—those who have buried spouses or children—are painful reminders of the horror life can deliver. Rejecting grieving people, blaming them, even abusing them allows people to pretend it can’t happen to them.
In any situation in which it is possible for a grieving person to be mistreated, you should assume that’s what’s happening. Assume HR is not approving your colleague’s request for bereavement, that the bereaved professor is being pressured to return or get fired, that your beloved but grieving doctor is at risk of losing their job.
When you can, intervene.
There is meaning in grief, but it’s up to the grieving person to find it
Grief connects us to others in strange and profound ways. It helps us realize the depths of love, and its power to live on, potentially forever.
There is meaning in grief. The meaning is up to the griever. No grieving person wants to be told this happened for a reason, or will make them stronger. A universe that kills children to teach their parents lessons is a profoundly cruel place.
Don’t demand that people wrap their grief up in an appealing story. Let them find the meaning they choose. If they share the meaning they’ve found, listen and validate.
If you are annoyed by someone else’s grief, you are the problem
Every time I post about grief, someone comes along to tell me that they have a family member who is grieving in a way they perceive to be unreasonable. Listen. People are allowed to grieve. People have no choice but to grieve. A person does not grieve to annoy you or control you. They grieve because they are fucking sad. Punishing them, diagnosing them, labeling them, stigmatizing them…these are all behaviors that intensify their suffering.
If you are annoyed by someone else’s grief, the problem is you. Sit with your annoyance and ask yourself why you have chosen to think and behave this way. Ask yourself why you have an empathy deficit.
Do better.
Sooner or later, grief comes for all of us
Grief is the inevitable result of love.
Spend some time thinking about your closest relationships with your spouse, your children, your parents. One member of each dyad will outlive the other. Every lifelong relationship ends in profound grief.
Grief is everywhere.
Sooner or later, it comes for us all.
If you live a life enriched with deep and varied love, it will come hardest for you.
The loss of a loved one is the loss of an entire world.
We will all lose entire worlds many times throughout our lives. We will all suffer immensely.
Remember this when you think about how to treat the grieving.
Remember that you may be the next one to grieve.
Be kind. You will never regret being too kind.
As a reminder, my family is fundraising for families in need in honor of our daughter this holiday season. Each week, we’re introducing a new family, so it’s time for this week’s family.
This family consists of a sweet single mother, a survivor of domestic violence who has five children. They are currently living in a hotel. Please give generously to her Cashapp so they do not end up homeless this holiday season: $keishageoy. If you do not have cashapp, or do not know how to give, please email me at zawn.villines@gmail.com and I will help.
The children and their mother also have wishlists that allow you to directly buy for them. Find those lists here:
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/Q5DSNPZJ5YP5
And please consider continuing to give to sweet Cecilia, whose story I shared last week: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-botello-fernandez-family-as-sophie-heals
Finally, I’m collecting data for a new survey on household inequality. If you are currently in an unequal relationship, or your most recent relationship was unequal, please consider taking the survey. Sharing will also help get me a wider more diverse data set.
I agree with every word you’ve written here. What an incredible gift to the grieving, and all who support them. Thank you.
I am new to your writing and deeply appreciate it all. I am so sorry for the loss of your daughter and as a fellow bereaved parent, this is essential instruction for all of us existing in relationship and community w other humans.