What can I say to someone who is really grieving? How can I help them? I’d say we might need to define what grief is first. Grief according to Websters is ‘deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement’. I can tell you that I find that definition very lacking and not remotely close to what we have experienced. I have seen and heard a lot of different people try and describe Grief. I found most all of them good but lacking. A description I found that I really like is from the website 

The Loss Foundation | Grief-Comes-in-Waves

“As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float; stay alive. In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come a little further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall, or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. Now when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out. Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to, but you learn that you’ll survive them. After that, other waves will come, and you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves and lots of shipwrecks. The deeper the love, the greater the mourning.”

I would add that when those waves push you under, and they do a lot, you struggle to make your way back to the top thinking you are going to drown, and you break to the top just long enough to get a small gulp of air and down you go again. The weight of the waves and the water is so heavy and crushing and relentless. Sometimes you don’t struggle…you don’t care if you reach the top again. You don’t necessarily want to die, but you don’t really care if you live. Now image trying to survive this ordeal when people you trust and love are standing on the shore, safe and sound, never having been in a storm of this magnitude, telling you how you’re doing it all wrong; that you’re missing the point of it all.

The “Hurtful” may not affect everyone the way it did us. I can tell you that they have affected most of the people that I’ve talked with in multiple GriefShare groups, the same way.

You might ask what makes us think that we have the answers? We don’t. What we do have is a lot of experience in receiving lines. A line for our niece at 18. A line for our nephew at 20. Finally, a line for our son at 25. All we are trying to provide you with are things you might want to reconsider before saying to people who are grieving. Apply whatever amount of weight you want to our suggestions. Also please understand that not everyone who has lost someone is deeply grieving.