#127: What do you say when there's nothing to say?
The courage to console imperfectly.
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"Don't cry."
Two words that capture everything wrong with how we're taught to console… and yet, when my friend Takis said them to me across our corner lunch table in 2017, I knew what he actually meant: “I can't bear to see you hurting this much.”
In the bleak early months after Mike’s death, Takis and my favorite faux French bistro in suburban Virginia transformed from a place of shared laughter to a one-sided effort to keep me afloat. Our regular haunt — where we'd watch with glee as waiters simultaneously poured our soup from tureens, ask for second baguettes, and pretend to resist dessert — had become a place where tears regularly dripped into my untouched French onion soup.
Most of my memories from the “acute phase” of grief are blurry, but one moment remains crystal clear: the burning eyes and clenched throat as I tried to stuff down a sob after pointing out that my children no longer had a father. Takis silently nodded. As I began to lose it, he reached over and laid his hand lightly on my forearm.
"Oh, Deagle, don't cry."
His correction came lightning fast:
"I'm sorry, I don't mean that. Go ahead and cry. Cry all you want. I'm right here."
This is what real consolation looks like — showing up imperfectly, but not letting it stop you from showing up anyway.
It looks like Denise haunting local used bookshops to buy me dog-eared memoirs, knowing that reading stories of people who had navigated loss helped my brain see a path forward.
It looks like Julie sending me goofy cards to make me momentarily laugh, including one emblazoned with THEN ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE.
It looks like Luanne texting me on Christmas morning to check in, and remind me why it was important to still be here.
Did these acts of consolation make me forget my husband was dead, emerge out of my grief immediately and permanently, or even just stop crying for a bit? Um, well… no. But in their silly, small, and subtle ways, they showed me that I wasn’t alone.
That I was worth the awkwardness of trying to comfort a person for whom there is no easy fix.
My friends didn't let "I don't know what to say" or "I might make things worse" or "I'll give her some time" stop them from acting. They risked it.
I wouldn't be where I am today if they hadn't.
So why are we so good at coming up with excuses rather than sending a damn sympathy card?
I have three unscientific theories:
Loss reveals our unfiltered humanity — and it's messy.
When you sit with someone in deep grief, you might witness rage, despair, or numbness that feels overwhelming. Our instinct is to look away when confronted with raw pain, like my colleague who literally backed out of the elevator when she saw my red-rimmed eyes. It's not cruelty, it's self-preservation confusing a grieving woman for a werewolf.
We make it about ourselves.
When our calls go unreturned or our lasagna sits uneaten, we wonder, "Did I do something wrong?" But grief doesn’t follow society’s rules for social interactions, gratitude, or the appropriate time to eat dinner. My friend Linda got it. She would bring me a latte and just leave it on the front porch… Period. She expected neither an audience nor an accolade, she simply wanted to make the gesture, “I’m out here, thinking of you, caring for you.”
We've set an impossible bar for success.
We secretly believe good consolation should make the pain vanish, when really all we can do is help our friend turn their face toward the sun for a moment. Not to banish darkness, but to remind them light still exists somewhere in the universe.
The truth is, we don't need to be perfect consolers.
We just need to show up.
Our job isn't to fix or solve. We're simply accompanying someone while they're caterpillar soup — that strange in-between where they've dissolved into unrecognizable goo inside their chrysalis, but are not yet ready to emerge transformed. Our role is to circle the cocoon, keeping it safe from further harm, minimizing stressors and distractors, and being patient with whatever timeline our beloved goo requires.
In other words, set your expectations lower — both of what you’ll have to offer and how they’ll react — and you'll free yourself to just give whatever you’ve got, rather than overthink yourself out of it.
Because let’s all agree: nobody knows exactly what to say.
Scripts aren't what we need anyway. They're hollow and empty, general and vague. And they distract us from the main point of consolation: to help the griever feel less terribly terribly alone.
During the last days of my corporate job, I was on a Zoom call with dozens of people.
I shared some encouraging words with a barely perceptible wobble, then punched the red exit button and put my face in my hands.
The first tears were still pooled in my eyes when I heard the bleating ring of an incoming video call. It was my friend Bill.
If others had called in that same moment, I might not have answered. That wouldn't have made them or me bad — we all have different relationships with different people. I accepted Bill's call because something in me knew he was exactly what I needed.
"Sue?" he asked. "How are you doing?"
But he didn't really expect an answer. He had simply heard the wobble and called, ready for whatever he might find. We sat there, him in Colorado, me in Virginia, as I just cried and he held the space in companionable silence.
Eventually, my tears ran out, and I croaked, "That was hard."
"Yep, I know," he said.
And that was all I needed to turn my face toward the sun again.
Consolation isn't about having the perfect words. It's about being willing to sit in the soup with someone, knowing neither of you has a recipe for how this all turns out.
In it together,
P.S. You can read my practical guide to consoling here…
And my emotional guide to consoling here.
Yes yes yes!! Very well said, Sue! Even though I've been through these same dark days, I find myself frozen in the face of the next grieving person. I feel like I ought to "know," to be the expert and do exactly what they need. Everyone is different and needs different things, though, and so I overthink myself into paralysis. And then I beat myself up about it. So thanks thanks thanks for this reminder. It's not the great things; it's the simple, human things.
One of the best things I’ve read on helping others experiencing grief.