How to Support Someone Who is Grieving

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

You are feeling helpless in the face of the loss your loved one is experiencing. You want to say or do the “right” thing and even more, you want to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing. You might have heard or read that you should just let the person know you’re there and just listen to them, but when you try to do these things, you are still left feeling uncomfortable and inadequate. And you’ve read that you should just do things for the grieving person so they don’t have to ask you…but what, exactly, are the things you should do? Drawing on my time working with grieving people and on my own experiences with grief, I’ve tried to outline some basic “do’s” and “don’ts” for supporting a loved one in grief. As always, my hope is that you’ll take what works for you: you’ll know.

The Don’t’s

 Avoid platitudes.

You might really believe that “everything happens for a reason,” or that the person who has died is “in a better place,” and maybe your grieving loved one does too, but platitudes like this one aren’t often the comfort we think they are in the face of grief.

When offered platitudes, the implication for the griever is that they’re wrong for grieving. If they could only see that their loved one’s death is explainable, they could stop grieving, and by continuing to grieve, they show a lack of faith or strength. What often happens when you share platitudes with your grieving loved one is that rather than helping, it causes them to turn inward with their grief: they hide it from you. They get the message that their grief is wrong and it makes you uncomfortable, so they keep it to themselves.

Stop trying to fix it

You can’t fix it. Stop trying. Yes, we want to feel useful and we want to ease our loved one’s suffering, but offering solutions to a solution-less problem isn’t the way. Accept that this can’t be fixed.

Don’t rush the griever

It’s been a year since your friend lost his husband and it feels like he still isn’t “back to himself.” Guess what? He won’t ever be “back to himself” because he has experienced a profound loss and it has changed him in an irrevocable way. For him it feels like days since the loss occurred. Time moves differently for the griever. It isn’t he who needs to get back to a version of himself that is recognizable to his friends and family: it’s you who has to accept this new person in front of you. I wonder what offering this unconditional acceptance to your friend will do for him and for your relationship.

Don’t Disappear

Grief is uncomfortable. The more tragic it is, the more uncomfortable it gets. There’s nothing quite like soul-shattering loss to leave us feeling useless and inadequate. And honestly, just being near grief can be traumatic. It can cause us to contemplate things we don’t want to contemplate: our own inevitable death, the death of our spouses, what we would do and how we would feel if our child was killed or died in an accident. And a common trauma response? Run. Avoid.

And if this is a close friend of yours who has experienced this traumatic loss, you have to find it within you to face it with them. You have to stand there. The good news is that you don’t have to fix it. We’ve already established that you can’t. You don’t even have to be there every day. Just don’t disappear. It’s also ok for you to get support for yourself during this time. In fact, if you can work through vicarious trauma during this time, you will find that this work will serve you in your own times of grief. Because that’s the thing: if you are lucky to live long enough, it will be you grieving one of these days. It will be you needing support.

Try not to tip-toe

Your loved one who’s grieving, while changed by loss, is still your loved one. And they won’t always want to talk about their loss. Some days, even early in their grieving, they may want to talk about your life or about current events or just to watch a movie or go to a bar. Follow their lead. Try not to treat them differently than you normally would. If you normally trade joking insults: let em’ hurl. And if they ask you about your life, share what’s really going on. They can tell when you’re holding back and all that says to them is, “I can’t even have my friendships anymore”: everything has been taken by this loss. And if your friend wants to talk about the person they lost: let them. Don’t be afraid to say the name of the person who died. Or to share your own memories of the person.

The Do’s

Get comfortable with grief

This might mean doing your own therapy work. This might mean facing your own mortality and considering some scary thoughts like: have I done enough in life? Do I have purpose in my life? Have I been a good friend, partner, child, sibling or parent? It might mean reading books about grief. It’ll also mean getting comfortable being with someone who is sad, sometimes angry, sometimes anxious, sometimes shattered and, sometimes doing “ok”. Instead of looking at them with pity from a far, you’ll be there next to them. And it’ll mean you’ll need to take extra care of yourself. Find time to laugh, find time to enjoy things, and find time to take breaks from grief. Your grieving friend will need to do these things too.

Just be there

If you only do one thing: just be there. Listen. Check-in once a week or so and let your friend know you’re thinking of them.

Be specific when offering to help

Rather than saying “let me know if you need anything,” play to your strengths and offer something specific. If you love cooking, text or call your friend and say “I want to cook a meal for you this week—what day would be best for me to drop that by?” Let them know it’s ok if they don’t want to see anyone, that you’ll leave it at the door if that works for them. Or if you are better with tasks, let them know you want to come by and mow the lawn and pull weeds.  If you know they hate taking care of bills and have lost the person that did that task and you are good at bookkeeping, offer to help them make sense of the bills. Offer to take the kids for the weekend. Be specific.

I hope it’s self-evident, but just in case it isn’t, I also want to note that all of these tips must be taken in the context of the relationship. If you don’t have a close relationship with this grieving person, but are a co-worker/acquaintance for example, maybe don’t offer to pick up their kids for the weekend and don’t text them every week to ask “how are you doing?”. But you could offer to bring things from work they might need or to take on extra work for your co-worker in their absence. 

Take care of yourself

I’m sure you’ve heard it before (like earlier in this post, for example), but when you’re on a plane they always tell you that in the case of emergency, you need to put your own oxygen mask on before helping anyone else. And the same is true for providing support to someone who’s grieving. If you aren’t taking care of yourself, pretty soon you’ll have nothing left to give anyone. Self-care doesn’t have to mean massages, manicures or dropping thousands on a man cave or big vacation (though it totally can mean that if you want it to). It can be as simple as saying no to things you don’t feel up for, taking a nap when you can and need too, drinking more water, or going for a walk by yourself. Listen to your body: if you feel tense and overwhelmed, it’s ok to take a break.

In closing: Thank you!

Thank you for wanting to learn how to be there for someone in your life who’s grieving!

I hope this post has offered some ideas for how you can best support your loved one. I’m a firm believer that we can do better as a culture to support grievers. Grief is the natural process by which we heal our hearts and minds after loss. And though grief may ebb and flow in intensity, it never disappears because the love never disappears. As long as we remember the one we lost and as long as we love them, we will always grieve. It is a great truth and a great tragedy that the more love we have and the longer we live, the more we will have to grieve. We can’t fix it or rush it or stop it or hide from it: we must let it in, talk about it, listen to it and only then, will grief stop being a place of isolation and despair where none may enter. There may be times of loneliness and despair, but the griever won’t feel the need to hide their grief.