Today I’m sharing a few tips from my personal experience about what was and was not helpful to hear after my dad died. Expecially in the first year of my grief, I experienced A LOT of the “do not do this” conversations and very few of the “please do this instead.” It makes me realize that in general, people just don’t know what to say or do when a friend is grieving. There’s no one right or perfect thing to say, but I would have loved to hear less of the first and more of the second.
What NOT to do for a grieving friend:
Bring up your own losses. Now is not the time to talk about your grandparents, pets, aunt, or friend who died. It’s not that these losses weren’t meaningful or sad for you. It’s that none of them have anything to do with this particular loss for this particular person.
I noticed that after my dad died, a lot of people who were around my dad’s age tried to relate to me by talking about losing their own parents. Often, they themselves had lost a parent recently. This unsettled me. It is ALWAYS hard to lose a parent, but there is absolutely a difference in the experiences of losing a parent in your sixties versus losing a parent in your thirties. (Mainly, you got THIRTY MORE YEARS with your person.) By that same token, me losing a parent in my thirties is different than what my friends who lost parents in their twenties, teens or childhood experienced. Attempting to compare two experiences is not helpful to anyone.
Likewise, friends who haven’t lost parents sometimes tried to relate to me by talking about their grandparents or pets or other relatives and I did not find this helpful either. Again, it’s not that these losses were not sad and meaningful. They just didn’t need to be brought up in the context of my own parental loss. Knowing that you lost your grandparents (or even knowing that I lost my own grandparents) does not help me process the loss of my dad.
What TO DO for a grieving friend:
Share a story about their person. There is nothing more valuable to me than hearing the rest of any sentence that starts with “I remember when your dad …” This helps to show that you respect the fact that I lost THIS PARTICULAR PERSON. Yes, we all lose people throughout our lifetimes. Yes, we all grieve. But right now, while your friend is mourning THIS person, they don’t need to hear about your history of loss or your perspective on grief. They need to talk about their person. Their heart is broken because THIS person is gone. Talking to your friend about their person takes nothing away from your own experience of losing your aunt Sally or your parakeet BoBo. Those losses are still valid. Those losses are also not relevant to the current moment. Bringing them up invites comparison. No good comes from grief comparison because guess what? The worst loss is always the one YOU experience.
If you didn’t know their person, ask. Try saying, “What was your dad like?” “What’s something about you that you got from your mom?” “What’s a favorite memory from childhood?”
INSTEAD OF: “I know just how you feel, when my aunt Sally died …”
TRY: “I’ll never forget the time your dad …”
In grief and with love,
KrissyMick
Photo Credit: Kristen Forbes