While under stay-at-home orders, I have been catching up on one of my favorite TV shows, CBS Sunday Morning. Growing up, my Sunday morning ritual was sitting on my parents’ bed cutting coupons with my mom while we watched. I’ve carried that over into my adult life (without the coupons). It’s a great respite – interesting, cultural, a break from everything political. Even the stories on issues or political figures aren’t inflammatory, and Steve Hartman’s segments almost always make me tear up as he shows us the best of America (why, Steve Hartman, why?).
One of the segments I watched yesterday was about how people don’t know how to respond to someone else’s grief. It is one of the most awkward situations for two reasons. First, grieving a lost loved one is one of the most personal and unique experiences it is possible to have. As news travels to friends and acquaintances, the rawness of it is exposed to every level of your social circle, from those you don’t mind knowing because they are close to you to the person who works three departments over and you couldn’t pick out of a crowd. Not only is that difficult for the person who lost someone, but those who hear about it. What do you say? What message would comfort the grieving person? Is it appropriate that you say anything? If you are in the group of people who hears about it from a company-wide blast email, even if you know the person, will speaking up help the person as they try to put one foot in front of the other?
Second, no one wants to confront their own mortality. Realization of mortality for the first time is responsible for triggering countless (not all) what-used-to-be-called-midlife-crises, whether the person going through it realizes the cause or not. Even as close and as often as I have been to death (with that one car crash in 2003, I count at least four times), I still can’t sit down and think about it rationally. There was a long period of time when I would have a panic attack every time I tried. In the car on the way home mostly. So I stopped trying. For me, it’s the loss of consciousness, the loss of self that sends me down the rabbit hole of doom. Whatever fuels an individual’s fear of death heightens the awkwardness around death to an almost unbearable level.
As readers in this space know, losing my mother was a seminal moment in my life that has shaped me in both good ways and bad. I had lost people close to me before, including a classmate when I was in middle school. And I have lost people since. But it was that time, when I was trying to hold my dad steady and keep track of my brother, when I got a card that carried exactly the right message. I am paraphrasing, but essentially it said, “There is nothing I can say to make you feel better, but when you are ready just tell me what you need.”
For a brief moment, the hurricane my life had become stilled as I absorbed the message. Then I tucked it away in my psyche for when I would need it (and I did need it) and jumped back into the immediate. Ever since then, when it has been appropriate for me to offer support to a grieving friend, that is what I say. Because it’s true, not trite, and it is the right thing to offer in any difficult situation.
Whatever words you offer in situations involving a death don’t erase the awkwardness of being an observer of someone’s most intimate emotional trauma. But that’s not their purpose. The purpose of offered comfort is to make the grieving one feel supported, and that the involuntary falling through their emotions might eventually steady and stop, and maybe life will eventually resume.
Though I regret how I learned, I am not sorry that I did learn the words that could comfort someone. But I only know because someone else taught me.