How Not to Say the Wrong Thing (Part 3)
I read this piece yesterday by a therapist named Tim Lawrence, and I thought of all the people in my life who struggled to say or do something helpful to me after my diagnosis, or who said nothing because they didn't know what to say. It is about grief, and grief is exactly the emotion that I felt at that time. I grieved for my lost health, for my happy life, for everything that I knew I would have to give up to cancer. Grief is scary, and though I was disappointed I understood why some people stayed away or stayed silent. I had failed to reach out to those in grief before, out of fear of saying the wrong thing. But now I know the truth about grief, and it goes like this: Our culture treats grief like a problem to be solved or an illness to be healed. We’ve done everything we can to avoid, ignore, or transform grief. So that now, when you’re faced with tragedy, you usually find that you’re no longer surrounded by people — you’re surrounded by platitudes. So what do we offer instead...