minimizing grief with clichés
People say [unkind] things to relieve themselves of feelings of pain, anxiety, and loss, not to offer you any relief. It is, in fact, a denial of your humanity to say those things. Accepting it without response may keep the peace, but it won’t be your peace.
— The Dying Time, by Joan Furman & David McNabb
People say stupid and hurtful things to the dying and their loved ones, and they say stupid and hurtful things after someone dies. They minimize grief with clichés, platitudes, projections, excuses, misguided sympathy and unsolicited life advice.
I kept a list of stupid and hurtful things people said while our daughter was dying, and after she died. I don’t remember how I responded—grief makes everything foggy—but I know this much: I had no clever comebacks. No words sharp enough, or strong enough, to match the absurdity or insensitivity of what was said.
One well-meaning church lady came by with a pie. She sat down, looked at my dying daughter, and said with a gentle smile, “Honey, you’re really blessed to know you’re going to die ahead of time.”
Another day, I went to the prayer group I’d long attended and asked for prayer—for our daughter, for my family’s shared suffering. I must have exceeded the day’s quota of grief, because one of my prayer partners fixed me with a stern gaze and said, “You are full of doubt and unbelief.”
After the funeral, a family member said, with genuine worry, “I just hope you don’t have to lose any more children any time soon.”
Another tried to comfort me with, “At least you have more children.”
the bereaved as shadow-bearers
Over the years, I’ve noticed that people often make their worst relational mistakes in two moments: when someone is suffering deeply, and when someone is soaring. In grief, especially the unimaginable kind—like losing a child—they talk about themselves. They ask for advice when you’re barely functioning. They pick fights or make veiled threats while your child is dying—not because of your pain, but because of their own unease. It’s their anxiety, their helplessness, their disorientation in the face of raw suffering. Sometimes, it’s a lack of compassion. They want the ordeal to end—not for your sake, but for theirs. They want your child to stop dying, you to stop grieving, so the world can return to normal.
Such people are those, I think, who do no conscious work on their own dark materials; they don’t have to, because they throw their shadows outside of themselves, neatly sidestepping responsibility for this part of themselves. This is called projection.
The dying and bereaved become the shadow-bearers in these situations. And why not? The dying person is headed for darkness. Sleepwalkers want the dying and the grieving to carry their darkness for them. If you bear it all, they can return to their lives of comfort and distraction. But dying children—and the parents who suffer beside them—shatter the illusion that there is a way out. There is no escape.
grief: the sacred descent
And yet, paradoxically, in a situation where there is no escape—no cure, no fix, no way around the suffering—something else becomes possible. When parents remain present to their anguish, when they resist the urge to numb or flee, they may find themselves drawn into deeper contact with the Self. This confrontation with inescapable loss is, in many traditions, the beginning of individuation—the slow, painful emergence of a more whole and authentic soul. There is no comfort in it, but there is meaning. For the mourner who stays awake, who refuses to sleepwalk through the fire, this is the hope that remains: that the descent itself can be sacred.
Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz, a colleague of Carl Jung’s, explained it this way:
Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without a solution: The unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of it,” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally . . . the Self manifests.
In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
Marie-Louise von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales1
the impulse to silence suffering
I understand the impulse—the desperate need some people feel to silence suffering, to tidy it up, to push it out of sight. It’s a form of panic, a way to defend against what feels unendurable. But understanding that doesn’t make it easier to face when you’re the one in pain, and someone meets you not with kindness or presence, but with dismissal, cruelty, or sheer stupidity.
One of the clearest examples I’ve ever witnessed of what it looks like to remain completely insensible to another’s suffering happened just three days after my daughter’s funeral. An acquaintance from church stopped by to return a book she had borrowed. When I opened the door, she practically floated inside—smiling broadly, bright-eyed, and buoyant, as if she were arriving at a garden party. She brushed past me into the entryway, clearly pleased with herself for dropping in. Her cheerfulness was so out of sync with the moment that I briefly wondered if she somehow didn’t know. Maybe she hadn’t heard. Maybe she hadn’t been at the funeral. Everything was such a fog—I couldn’t be sure.
I reminded myself that she had lost her husband in a drowning accident six years earlier. She knew grief. Surely she couldn’t be this oblivious—unless she truly didn’t know.
“How ya doin’?!” she sang out, throwing her arms around me in a hug I hadn’t asked for. I stood stiffly, mute, wondering if I’d entered The Twilight Zone.
She pulled back, still smiling. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I blinked. “Um… did you know Olivia died last week?”
“Yup, sure did. How was it?”
How was it?
What did she mean—her death? The funeral? Our grief? The collapse of our world?
I just stared. I shrugged.
She chirped something cheerful and bustled back out the door.
That was the moment I understood: I was in this grief alone. I would have to walk through it as my own companion—just as I had been my daughter’s companion through the long dying. I had promised her I wouldn’t leave her, and now I had to make a similar promise to myself. To stay. To hold my own hand through this desolate landscape.
Because clearly, I was surrounded by people too distracted, too self-absorbed—or just too unformed—to offer even a simple condolence while returning a borrowed book, let alone the grace of a steadying presence.
And strangely, this was a good thing to discover.
reflections on losing my child
- Part 1: Of Love and Terror
- Part 2: Trauma
- Part 3: Waiting in Fear
- Part 4: Night Song
- Part 5: Walking Her Home
- Part 6: The First Year
- Part 7: Resolved to Heal
- Part 8: Tribulation is Treasure
featured art
taliriand, “stay blue forever,” 2022
Notes
- von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Shambhala, 1996, p. 4. ↩︎
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