Lending a Hand During Grief

It's hard to witness someone's grief. We want to jump in and help and make the pain go away.  But it not possible.  We can’t fix grief, and sometimes that leaves us paralyzed without knowing what to do or what to say.

The worst thing to do is to do nothing, or say nothing.

At the very least we want to acknowledge the loss even if means saying “I don’t know what to say, but I am here for you.”

Don’t use empty cliché words such as “ They are in a better place”, or at least “They lived a good life”.  Yes they did, but now they are gone and the pain is unavoidable.

We don’t need to give advice, or to judge who is grieving how. We just need to be there for them.

Megan Divine in her book, “It’s OK That You’re Not OK” shares some suggestions for helping others in their  grief: 

• Grief belongs to the griever
• Stay present and state the truth
• Don’t try and fix the unfixable
• Anticipate their needs.
• Tackle projects together
• Run Interference
• Love…above all.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is just to BE.