When someone close to us is bereaved, it’s really hard to know what to say. We often fall back on cliches, out of ignorance and lack of practice. When my husband’s son died suddenly, after the paramedics had called a halt to resuscitation attempts and the police had arrived because it was an unexpected death, a neighbour volunteered the pithy aphorism, “he’s an angel in heaven now.’ It had just been a matter of hours since the toddler had been a vibrant little boy. We can only begin to imagine how his mother and father were reeling with the terrifying shock and awfulness of it all. The idea of an angel in heaven was both utterly incomprehensible at this moment and totally at odds with their belief system. There was NOTHING comforting about this intended reassurance. It was so jarring that it has been recalled with anger years afterwards. It’s a common experience for the bereaved, in the throes of devastation, to be stunned by the insensitivity directed towards them.
Of course, the neighbour had not meant to add to the already searing pain. She would have been shocked by the child’s death too, as would all the neighbours who gathered on that fateful morning. Her knee jerk response, hastily smoothing over the terror to pretend it’s all sunshine and light, is borne of the fear of pain lurking unresolved in the recesses of her own heart. We are incapable of holding space for another’s torment when we are wrestling to keep our own demons quiet.
I encountered this when my young daughter and I returned to our Iona hostel for the night and discovered the baby hare we had admired on our way out, dead by the gate. My daughter was distraught. This was her first encounter with death. I noticed how other guests responded to her. One spoke in a falsely high voice, ‘Oh you don’t need to cry about him, he’s already bouncing around in heaven.’ Her laughter was disconcerting. Another gently acknowledged my daughter’s tears. ‘It’s natural to feel upset,’ she had said and just listened attentively to my five year old’s description of her feelings. I pondered on these responses for a long time afterwards - one so discordant and emotionally disconnected and the other tender and holding. For many young people, it is only the former response to loss that they encounter so they learn that pain has no place in the outside world, it must be kept under wraps in the hidden chambers of the heart.
The first thing we can do, and we can begin immediately, is to tend our own grief so that our heart is a garden where a bereaved friend can rest with their pain. If our heart is wrapped in barbed wire to keep our own grief in check, we are incapable of being truly present to someone who is hurting. We may have pain that stretches back into our childhood’s hidden there, buried deep under job losses, separation, rape, still birth, disfigurement, divorce, disappointment - we all carry a heavy burden of losses that no one on the outside of our lives could begin to guess at. This is tender work. Gently, gently.
We can also practice speaking in a way that is kinder so we don’t come out with something outrageously inept. There is no ‘right’ thing to say. Nothing is right about the situation for the bereaved but it is truer to say, ‘I can not imagine how heartbroken you feel…’ rather than ‘I know how you feel…’ How can one possibly know how another feels? None of us do even if we have shared a similar grief experience.
These suggestions from Ullie Kaye are helpful here:
The silence is important but before we can accompany a bereaved friend in silence, we must be able to sit with ourselves in silence. It has taken me decades to find this for myself. As a young nurse working on an HIV unit for families, I was part of the team caring for a mother and her young son both with AIDS. We had expected the child to outlive his mother, but death has its own agenda and took the child first. His mother wailed and cried from the depths of her soul. She clung to me and shook. I was at a loss how to meet her needs and frightened by the intensity of her pain. I paged the chaplain about a hundred times before he eventually showed up on the ward. I didn’t have the inner resources to be present to this deep well of longing. Now, with maturity and experience, I would trust my inner wisdom to respond to her, maybe rocking her, crying with her, being an anchor for her in the tempestuous storm that had hold of her. I have touched the bottom of my own pain and know something of the rawness of sorrowing. I could never know what she is going through but I can remember how it has felt for me in the storm of my grief.
Suffering is part of the human condition. If we want to live with freedom in our hearts, it is wise to confront the pain of loss so when we’re faced with a bereaved friend, we have a heart ready to hold them and a garden of blooms with which to fragrance our words.
If you want support to digest your grief, book a free session with me to find out how the Grief Recovery Method can transform the garden of your heart.
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