By Howard Whitman
Most of us want
to be helpful when grief strikes a friend, but often we don’t know how. We may
end up doing nothing because we don’t know the right — and helpful — things to
say and do. Because that was my own experience recently, I resolved to gather
pointers which might be useful to others as well as myself.
Ministers,
priests, and rabbis deal with such situations every day. I went to scores of
them, of all faiths, in all parts of the country.
Here are some
specific suggestions they made:
1. Don’t try to
“buck them up.” This surprised me when the Rev. Arthur E.
Wilson of Providence, RI mentioned it. But the others concurred. It only makes
your friend feel worse when you say, “Come now, buck up. Don’t take it so
hard.”
A man who has
lost his wife must take it hard (if he loved her). “Bucking him up” sounds as
though you are minimizing his loss. But the honest attitude, “Yes, it’s tough,
and I sure know it is,” makes your friend feel free to express grief and
recover from it. The “don’t take it so hard” approach deprives him of the
natural emotion of grief.
2. Don’t try to
divert them. Rabbi Martin B. Ryback of Norwalk, Conn.,
pointed out that many people making condolence calls purposely veer away from
the subject. They make small talk about football, fishing, the weather —
anything but the reason for their visit.
The rabbi calls
this “trying to camouflage death.” The task of the mourner, difficult as it is,
is to face the fact of death, and go on from there. “It would be far better,”
Rabbi Ryback suggested, “to sit silently and say nothing than to make obvious
attempts to distract. The sorrowing friend sees through the effort to divert
him. When the visitor leaves, reality hits him all the harder.”
3. Don’t be
afraid to talk about the person who has passed away. Well-intentioned friends often shy away from mentioning the deceased. The
implication is that the whole thing is too terrible to mention.
“The helpful
thing,” advised Rabbi Henry E. Kagan of Mount Vernon, N.Y., “is to talk about
the person as you knew him in the fullness of life, to recreate a living
picture to replace the picture of death.”
Once Rabbi
Kagan called on a woman who had lost her brother. “I didn’t know your brother
too well,” he said. “Tell me about him.” The woman started talking and they
discussed her brother for an hour. Afterward she said, “I feel relieved now for
the first time since he died.”
4. Don’t be
afraid of causing tears. When a
good friend of mine lost a child I said something which made his eyes fill up.
“I put my foot in it,” I said, in relating the incident to the Rev. D. Russell
Hetsler of Brazil, Ind. “No, you didn’t,” he replied. “You helped your friend
to express grief in a normal, healthy way. That is far better than to stifle
grief when friends are present, only to have it descend more crushingly when
one is all alone.”
Fear of causing
tears, probably more than anything else, makes people stiff and ineffective.
Visiting a friend who has lost his wife, they may be about to mention a ride in
the country when they remember the man’s wife used to love rides in the
country. They don’t dare speak of peonies because they were her favorite
flower. So they freeze up.
“They really
are depriving their friend of probably the greatest help they could give him,”
Pastor Hetsler commented. “That is, to help him experience grief in a normal
way and get over it.” Medical and psychological studies back up the pastor’s
contention that expressing grief is good and repressing it is
bad. “If a comment of yours brings tears,” he concluded, “remember — they are
healthy tears.”
5. Let them
talk. “Sorrowing people need to talk,”
explained the Rev. Vern Swartsfager of San Francisco. “Friends worry about
their ability to say the right things. They ought to be worrying about their ability to listen.”
If the warmth of your presence can get your friend to start talking,
keep quiet and listen — even though he repeats the same things a dozen times.
He is not telling you news but expressing feelings that need repetition. Pastor
Swartsfager suggested a measuring stick for the success of your visit: “If your
friend said a hundred words to your one, you’ve helped a lot.”
6. Reassure —
don’t argue. “Everybody who loses a loved one has guilt
feelings — they may not be justified but they’re natural,” Rabbi Joseph R.
Narot of Miami pointed out. A husband feels he should have been more
considerate of his wife; a parent feels he should have spent more time with his
child; a wife feels she should have made fewer demands on her husband. The
yearning, “If only I had not done this, or done that — if only I had a chance
to do it now,” is a hallmark of grieving.
These feelings
must work their way out. You can give reassurance. Your friend must slowly come
to the realization that he or she was, in all probability, a pretty good
husband, wife, or parent.
7. Communicate
— don’t isolate. Too often a person who has lost a loved
one is overwhelmed with visitors for a week or so; then the house is empty.
Even good friends sometimes stay away, believing that people in sorrow “like to
be alone.”
“That’s the
‘silent treatment,’” remarked Father Thomas Bresnahan of Detroit. “There’s
nothing worse.” Our friend has not only lost his loved one — he has lost us
too.
It is in the
after-period, when all the letters of sympathy have been read and acknowledged
and people have swung back into daily routine, that friends are needed most.
Keep in touch,
Father Bresnahan urges. See your friends more often than you did before. See
him for any purpose — for lunch, for a drive in the country, for shopping, for
an evening visit. He has suffered a deep loss. Your job is to show him, by
implication, how much he still has left. Your being with him is a proof to him
that he still has resources.
8. Perform some
concrete act. The Rev. William B. Ayers of Wollaston, MA
told me of a sorrowing husband who lost all interest in food until a friend
brought over his favorite dish and simply left it there at suppertime. “That’s
a wonderful way to help, by a concrete deed which in itself may be small yet
carried the immense implication that you care,” Pastor Ayers declared.
We should make
it our business, when a friend is in sorrow, to do at least one practical,
tangible act of kindness. Here are some to choose from: run errands with your
car, take the children to school, bring in a meal, do the dishes, make
necessary phone calls, pick up mail at the office, help acknowledge condolence
notes, shop for the groceries.
9. Swing into
action. Action is the symbol of going on
living.
By swinging
into action with your friend, whether at his hobby or his work, you help build
a bridge into the future. Perhaps it means painting the garage with him, or
hoeing the garden
In St. Paul,
Minn., the Rev. J.T. Morrow told me of a man who had lost a son. The man’s
hobby had been refinishing furniture. When he called on him, Pastor Morrow
said, “Come on, let’s go down to the basement.” They sanded a table together.
When Pastor Morrow left, the man said, “This is the first time I’ve felt I
could go on living.”
Sorrowing
people, Pastor Morrow pointed out, tend to drop out of things. They’re a little
like the rider who has been thrown from a horse. If they are to ride again,
better get them back on the horse quickly.
10. “Get them
out of themselves,” advised Father James Keller, leader of the
Christophers. Once you have your friend doing things for himself, his grief is
nearly cured. Once you have him doing things for others, it is cured.
Grief runs a
natural course. It will pass. But if there is only a vacuum behind it,
self-pity will rush to fill it. To help your friend along the normal course of
recovery, guide him to a new interest.
Volunteer work
for charity, enrollment in a community group to help youngsters, committee work
at church or temple are ways of getting people “out of themselves.”
If you and I, when sorrow strikes
our friends, follow even a few of these pointers, we will be helpful.
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