I do so agree with Polly Hudson’s piece about how the bereaved are addressed (My mum has died – and there is one kind of response I can’t stand, 26 August). After my teenage daughter was killed in a road traffic accident and I returned to work people would keep asking: “How are you?”. To which the only response could have been: “If you really want to know have you an hour or two to spare?”
The idea that walking down a corridor en route to the office kettle was the venue for any rational response was plainly idiotic. A more thoughtful colleague suggested that I wore a notice around my neck that read: “Terrible, actually, but thanks for asking.”
One colleague got it right when he said: “Good to see you back.” And that’s a line I’ve since used myself. It required no answer from me unless I’d wanted to say something, but acknowledged that there had been an event. The worst I had said to me was: “You’re never asked to bear more than you can carry.” Well, thanks for that.
Francis Masserick
Ballaugh, Isle of Man
Perhaps Polly Hudson is being a little harsh. Three months after my young son died I returned to work, still crippled by grief, but needing to ease back into “normal” life. A characteristically kind member of staff made the effort to come to my room, welcome me back and offer sympathy. She looked at my dead son’s photo on the desk and suggested I remove it to help me “get over it”. Rather than ridicule her crassness, I explained why that wouldn’t work. Nor were they bad people who avoided me, or didn’t know what to say; they were simply bewildered, not having been in the same dreadful situation. They could not – or dared not – imagine my suffering. They remain friends; losing a friend over this just adds to the sadness, and one day they might be in your shoes.
Surely the better response is to explain. That will help both of you (although to be told “it’s part of God’s plan” can be challenging).
Name and address supplied
I’m afraid I have been guilty with a couple of friends of not saying anything because of not knowing what to say. Even to this day I try to avoid them because I feel so awful that I didn’t get in touch to sympathise. I feel awful as I had no idea what to say at the time, and the usual platitudes about deepest sympathies and condolences feel as meaningless to me as it sounds like Polly Hudson finds them to receive.
It’s made more complicated by the fact that I only know about these things because of social media, otherwise I probably wouldn’t know about their loss. Responding on social media to somebody’s loss feels performative. And I’m not sure if that is worse than being nonperformative. Sending a card avoids the subject, but does the job.
It’s hard to know how to talk about death unless you’ve experienced it, but avoiding bringing it up is mortifying and embarrassing. We need to talk about grief more to make it easier all around.
Glyn Jones
Cardiff
I was reminded of my mum’s death and something a good friend said to me outside the church after the funeral mass. His mother had died a year earlier and he approached me with the full knowledge of what I needed to hear. He looked me in the eyes kindly, and gave me a firm hug as he said: “All that can be said is: it’s shit, shit, shit.”
Michael O’Rahilly
Dublin, Ireland
Polly Hudson’s article made me think about how extraordinarily difficult we find death – not only experiencing the death of someone we love, but knowing how to respond to another person’s grief.
Losing a parent is profoundly painful, whatever our age. But I wonder whether we sometimes expect too much of people trying to comfort us. There are enormous cultural, religious and personal differences in how we speak about death. What sounds like an empty platitude to one person may be a sincere expression of sympathy to another. “Passed away”, “resting”, “my condolences”, “be strong” – these words may feel inadequate, but perhaps that is because words themselves are inadequate.
Even silence or avoidance, painful as it can be, does not necessarily mean indifference. Some people simply don’t know what to say. Others may be frightened of saying the wrong thing, of making the grieving person cry, or perhaps of confronting their own fear of death and loss. Crossing the road to avoid someone who is grieving may seem terribly insensitive, but sometimes human awkwardness and fear can look remarkably like cruelty from the other side.
I have come to believe that when someone reaches out after a death, however clumsily, it is worth looking beyond the words to the intention behind them. Most people are simply trying their best to say: “I see your pain. I care.”
And perhaps there really is no perfect thing to say. When someone we love dies, no combination of words can make the loss smaller. Sometimes all we can offer one another is our presence, our imperfect words and our humanity.
Fatima Ali
Roselands, New South Wales, Australia
Polly Hudson writes about the difficulty people face when trying to find something to say to the bereaved. It is precisely because nothing anyone can say will meet the terrible circumstance that shiva traditions in Judaism – which has a far more extensive system of formulaic language than any Christian faith – prefer you say nothing at all. One enters the home of those sitting shiva to sit with them and to speak only if spoken to. Even though I am not religious, I find the tradition shows a deep understanding of our human inability to speak about death.
Tadzio Koelb
Forest, Belgium
