Good Grief: Soundings, Part Two – Five Things Not to Say to the Grieving

January 25, 2012 By

When a person suffers the devastating loss of a loved one, you should — however well-intentioned you might be — keep your mouth shut.  Or at the very least, you should think long and hard before you say anything.  Here are some of the things I recently heard that did not help, and frankly were not true.

1)  “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.” Not a saying from God, rather it’s from the poorly-informed Job, who was later forced to revise his opinion.  As it happens, it was Satan who devastated Job’s life and family.

2)  “You’ll get over it soon.” Wrong.  I hope I never get over the loss of my daughter.  I don’t want to forget her love, her smile, her joys, her sorrows, and so many millions of other things that formed the sum total of her life.  I do not intend to get over it. I intend to get beyond it by the grace of God, but in no way forgetting what happened to her at the end of her life in this world.   There will always be a Christy-shaped hole in my heart.  Period.

3)  “Sorry about your lost loved one.” This is well meant, of course, but bad theology.  Christy is not lost.  I know right where to find her.  She is safe in the arms of Jesus.  One of our good Christian friends shared this experience with me from her charismatic prayer time, this week: “The Holy Spirit came upon the prayer so mightily.  My heart is not heavy, like it was before that prayer, and the witness the precious Holy Spirit gave us was that Christy truly has made it home.  I know she is home, but the prayer made it very real to us.”  Exactly right.  She has gone before us, but she is not a lost loved one wandering in oblivion.  She is a found loved one who has found her home in Christ.

4)  “Well, at least you still have your son.” I am indeed very thankful our son and our Russian daughter are alive and well, but I don’t believe in compensatory theology.  Having other children does not make the loss of Christy any less hard to bear.  Each life is different, unique, special, and one life does not compensate for the loss of another.  As John Donne says, “Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind.”  All the more so when it’s a member of my own family.

5)  “God will make up for this with a twofold blessing.” Again, I don’t think God is a practitioner of some sort of new math or compensatory calculus, running the universe.  God has not been a naughty boy taking away my sweet-pea named Christy, and he has nothing to make up for.   I certainly do believe God works everything together for good, for those who love him.

So I leave myself open to such working, trusting it will make me better, not bitter.

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  • Pastor A. Mason

    I too have had the loss of 4 pregnancies and well meaning people have said things that made me sick mentally. God had to rescue me by knitting and it brought me out of it. I went on to have a daughter and a son who are grown now and they know they are miracles and we told them all the time they were growing up how precious they are to us. I am so glad I never gave up. I tell people constantly to be careful what they say. The only one who ministered to me effectively was a hospital chaplain.

  • Benw333

    Love to Lenny Stadler in his recovery. As for comments about Job, read the commentaries, and look at the end of the book. The short answer is, the end of the book makes clear God’s love for and approach to Job. And remember 1 Cor. 10– God will not test you past your power to endure….. but God was not testing Job, the Devil was tempting Job to curse God and die, and a temptation and a test have two different purposes, the former to destroy one’s faith the latter to strengthen it.

  • Benw333

    Love to Lenny Stadler in his recovery. As for comments about Job, read the commentaries, and look at the end of the book. The short answer is, the end of the book makes clear God’s love for and approach to Job. And remember 1 Cor. 10– God will not test you past your power to endure….. but God was not testing Job, the Devil was tempting Job to curse God and die, and a temptation and a test have two different purposes, the former to destroy one’s faith the latter to strengthen it.

  • Rbray7

    Sometimes, when meeting another’s grief, it is better to say something than to say nothing. Saying something, whilst it might not be Shakespearean, nor hit the target square, at least confirms the humanity of the bereaved person. Often, that simple recognition of another’s hurt means more than ‘proper’ words can say.

    Our various societies have taught us to say certain things, such as ‘sorry for your loss.’ This is formulaic and widely accepted.

    Whilst the religious might feel, as I do, that the one ‘lost’ to us by death yet survives, the sense of loss, nevertheless, is profound, sometimes overwhelming.

    We ought not to withhold our sympathies from others because we might say something slightly wrong, for that would render most of us silent at the grief of others, when they stand most in need of our sympathy, love, and understanding.

    I will say that asking what you can do to help usually leads nowhere. The better path is to bake a cake or make a casserole and deliver it unannounced. That small recognition of their need is worth mountains of good intentions and “I would have helped if she had asked.”

    As one that has experienced the death of a dearly beloved spouse, I will say for myself, that the smallest whispered word of sympathy was of greater value than the most profound silence.

    Ronnie

  • Tim Moore

    Hi PastorSwish, my wife and have also had four miscarriages over the last few years and have found it a deeply challenging time where religious platitudes become exposed as being just that. I have written some poetry through our struggle through this time from a faith framework that I’d be happy to share if you’re interested. Shoot me an email at tim.moore.music@gmail.com if you’re keen. This stuff is such a tragedy that only people that have been through it can really ‘get’.

  • http://twitter.com/emeoliv Emerson de Oliveira

    Dear mr. Whiterington, You will be in our thoughts and prayers. From Brazil.

  • gene watson

    It seems strange that you would run to theological correctness about saying “your sorry about your loss” but then admit that it is a loss that you never get over…..having lost a 12 year old, I think it is fine to admit that it is a loss and for other people to say that…our time here on this earth is temporary, we Christians know that, that doesn’t mitigate the loss.

  • Benw333

    For those who missed my previous response, once more with feeling, there is a difference between saying ‘sorry for your loss’ where loss is predicated of me, and is appropriate, and saying sorry about your lost loved one, where lostness is predicated of Christy which is inappropriate. This is an important distinction, not nitpicking. I indeed am experiencing loss. Christy is not lost.

  • Schoolfieldb

    Excellent. Having also lost our daughter.
    Amy, to cancer recently I can totally identify. What comfort knowing We will see her again in heaven. She was 41. We miss her everyday.

  • gene watson

    my point is not so much the sematics of “lost one” or “your loss”, but that theology is not necessarily a component of grief and loss as far as our feelings go, and church people are good and denying one the right to grieve. There was no theological reason for Jesus to weep at Lazarus’ grave (I don’t believe he cried for any reason but for the feeling of the loss) – he was going to raise him from the dead and He is the answer…but as human beings we experience grief, as part of our life passes from us and we are never the same…..

  • AVS

    Dear Mr. Witherington,
    I hope you experience God’s peace in this difficult time!

    I do not have an English major and I’m not a native English speaker. I’m from Germany and German is my mother tongue. Yet I do think you are wrong in your assumption, that saying “Sorry about your lost loved one” necessarily means the deceased does not have eternal life. If someone meant exactly that it would, by the way, be a very rude and disturbing thing to say to someone grieving.
    Of course the words lost and loss are two different things – one being either an adjective or the past tense of to lose while the other is a noun.
    To lose a person or thing means that this person or thing is lost (adjective) or has been lost (past tense). The lost person or thing is a loss to family or owner.
    Your daughter is a loss to you because you have lost her. If one would want to express his empathy they could say “I’m sorry about your loss” or “I’m sorry about your lost loved one”. I admit that can be understood in two ways. Meaning either “I’m sorry about the loved one you have lost (and is now a loss to you)” or “I’m sorry about the loved one who is lost”. Lost by whom or to what? If you have lost your daughter then she is your loss or it could mean she is lost as in not having eternal life.
    I doubt that people saying “Sorry about your lost loved one” mean the latter and assuming just that does not seem right to me and wrongs those with good intentions.

    May God bless you and your family!

  • Benw333

    Guten Tag Brother Strunk: I don’t assume that those who talked to me about my ‘lost loved one’ thought she was eternally damned or something like. I think its just inappropriate ways of putting things. What it would normally suggest is ‘we don’t know where Christy is now’. I disagree— we do know. Ben W.

  • Benw333

    Hi Gene: Thanks for the clarification. I think you are right that feelings are what rule the day in such experiences, but I also think that we need to reflect theologically and ethically about such things. BW3

  • Benw333

    Hi Gene: Thanks for the clarification. I think you are right that feelings are what rule the day in such experiences, but I also think that we need to reflect theologically and ethically about such things. BW3

  • Laurie

    Another bad thing to say, If that happened to me, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.” That made me feel awful because I had to force myself to live. Would I have rather gone to bed – yes and I still do. After losing a child, just breathing is difficult. Getting up is another story.

  • Laurie

    Another bad thing to say, If that happened to me, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.” That made me feel awful because I had to force myself to live. Would I have rather gone to bed – yes and I still do. After losing a child, just breathing is difficult. Getting up is another story.

  • Cynthia C

    The best thing when I lost a loved one was the real friends who sat with me and spent time with me. The really great ones were the friends who had spent time with Leon and developed a friendship with him and so they could share stories of times they had shared and we could miss him together.

    Then there was a friend who said I could get over it after about a week and move on…P.S. I realized quickly that that person was not a friend….

    Sharing the grief was the most comforting for me.

  • CynthiaC

    These are times when silence can really be golden.A hug or just reaching out a hand means so much.

  • Wardgasque

    Dear Ben, Laurel and I were sorry to read about the death of your daughter (today). Moving from Academe into the pastorate, I do not get news concerning my academic friends as quickly as I once did. Thank you for sharing with us and many others your painful, yet hopeful, experience. May the Lord’s grace sustain you in your loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with you in this time of sorrow.

  • Benw333

    Hi Ward: Nice to hear from you. There is now an ebook about this whole harrowing experience—- entitled When a Daughter Dies by me and Ann, my wife. All proceeds to the scholarship fund we set up in Christy’s name. Ben W.

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