In 2001 I was sitting in a waiting room in a hospital with my daughter Divine when a woman who was a former parent of a former student looked for me and found me. I didn’t know her very well at the time, but she learned I had taken my daughter to the hospital that day, so she drove to that hospital, walked into the waiting room, and sat silently beside me. I don’t know how she found me. I will chalk it up to a miracle because this befote location pins and when 55 percent of the population, including me, did not own a cellphone. It was one of saddest, loneliest and most vulnerable moments I can remember. I was sitting in a waiting area feeding my four-year-old daughter through a medicine dropper because that was the only way I could get her to eat.
When she walked through the door, I asked, “How did you find me?” But what my heart really wanted to ask was, How did you know I needed to be found?
She couldn’t explain how she found me or what compelled her to come and look for us. It didn’t matter.
What matters is that she stayed with me until Divine and I were called into the doctor. It matters that I felt better having her seated next to me while my husband was home with our two other children and my mother and my siblings were on the other side of the country. What matters is that she never centered her own comfort by saying something she thought might distract us from what was happening. She didn’t try to make me feel better. She never said: “Everything is going to be okay.”
It wasn’t. And had she said this, I would have asked her to leave.
This morning I read a chart from Anne Sklaver Oenstein’s book “Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner’s Guide to Grief. In the right column of the chart she lists the top things people say to a grieving sibling, and in the left column, she lists what a sibling possibly hears when a particular thing is said.
On the top of her list: Everything happens for a reason
I remember being told “Everything happens for a reason” after Divine’s funeral. I also remember how much I wish that person had silently given me a hug instead.
For Sklaver Oenstein, when someone said, “Everything happens for a reason,” to her after her brother was killed in Afghanistan, she heard: “It’s for the best.”
What I wish people knew before they make an attempt to provide words of comfort is it isn’t their job to make grief make sense for you or make your sadness go away.
I also wish they knew it wasn’t their job to understand it or grant you a right to it. The most insensitive things can be said when someone doesn’t understand or accept how you could grieve. someone who was elderly, ill for a long time or someone they believe wasn’t a close connection. In the case of some strained relations, people grieve what they never had and with the loss, will never have.
Sklaver Oenstein adds when someone asks, “You two weren’t close were you?” What is heard is: You shouldn’t be so upset.
What about, “They would have wanted you to______”
or, “They’re in a better place now.”
These phrases do not center a person’s right to grieve or honor their need for compassionate space.
Often with the best intentions, someone can say the thing that makes you feel the opposite of comforted. I believe most of the time people truly want to make you feel better and don’t often realize their motives may be two-sided. They might be seeking to make themselves feel better in the moment as well. Sometimes there are no right words, but I do feel the wrong ones are the ones said without pause or rooted in seeking to center personal comfort instead of taking the time to think about the person and how some well-used phrases could hit differently for them.
Do we need new words for grief or more moments in silence?
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