Grief, Grace & New Beginnings

After losing Jason, I learned something the hard way: sometimes the most painful part of grief isn’t the silence, it’s the noise.

The phrases became monotonous.
“He’s in a better place.”
“It’s God’s plan.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Time will heal.”

I know, deep down, that these words are spoken with good intentions. We reach for them because we don’t know what else to say. We want to fix the unfixable. We want to ease pain that makes us uncomfortable. So we grab the phrases we’ve heard before and hope they help.

But sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they make your blood boil.

Between the unsolicited advice, “You should be doing this” or “You need to stay busy” or “You have to be strong,” and being told how I should be grieving, it became exhausting. I was already trying to stay afloat, just trying to breathe through the weight of losing Jason. Carrying my grief was heavy enough. Carrying everyone else’s expectations of how I should carry it was crippling.

I remember standing at the funeral. Person after person walked up to me saying, “I don’t even know what to say.” And at one point, as politely as I could, I responded, “Then please don’t say anything at all.”

That wasn’t bitterness. It was survival.

When someone is grieving, we are often taught to be gracious. To make others comfortable. To understand where they are coming from. But here’s the hard truth: in the deepest moments of grief, it is incredibly difficult to protect someone else’s feelings while your own heart has been shattered. At what point do others pause to understand how the grieving person feels in that moment?

Why is it that when we should be protecting ourselves, we find ourselves protecting the person who isn’t grieving?

Being asked, “Are you okay?” after a tragic loss can feel like a slap in the face. Of course we aren’t okay. Why ask? When you ask, you’re often placing the grieving person in a position to either tell the raw truth, which most people aren’t prepared to hear, or to lie and say, “I’m fine,” just to make the moment easier for you.

I remember someone in GriefShare once sharing that when people asked how they were doing, they would respond, “Ask me again tomorrow.” I began using that. It became my polite way of saying, today is not a good day, but maybe tomorrow will be different.

Grief changes daily. Hourly. Sometimes minute by minute.

So how do you be there for someone when you have nothing to say?

You don’t say anything.

You sit beside them.
You hug them.
You put a hand on their shoulder.
You nod your head.
You let them cry without trying to stop the tears.
You let the silence breathe.

Your presence will always speak louder than rehearsed words.

If you truly don’t know what to say, it’s okay to admit that and then stop there. You don’t need to fill the quiet with clichés or solutions. Grief is not a problem to solve. It is a weight to carry, and sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is helping hold that weight without trying to rearrange it.

I’m sure there are many more things that were said to me during the hardest chapter of my life that I will revisit one day. But for now, I’ll leave you with this:

When you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything at all.

A hug, a gentle touch, or even a quiet presence will always go further than words ever could.

“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.”
— Book of Romans 12:15