Some silences hold more truth than words ever could.
It’s so sad.
Is it?
I caught myself judging a friend for her performative grief — diving instantly into the socially acceptable displays around death and dying: mock sadness, circling the fresh kill, and picking at the bones of another’s sorrow to feed a need for the flavour of carrion.
I’m no expert on the subject, though dealing with my share of grief — like most people — I think my opinion is worth expressing.
She told me the story of one of the patients at the hospital where she worked — their state of being near-death from a terminal illness. It went on for days.
Finally, the patient died.
“It’s so sad,” she said, mouth downturned.
Her words landed on my private grief with a hollowness that only grief survivors recognise.
Then she wrote a poem and gave it to them — her way of communicating her sympathy for a grieving family.
She even went to the funeral.
Unasked.
To show her support.
For a stranger.
How she became so involved in a stranger’s journey with grief makes sense only when I look at her behaviour — it indicates a need to feed off the drama and emotion surrounding such events.
I know this because when staying in her home, we watched a Netflix series called Firefly Lane, where the main character contracted cancer and died (sorry if that’s a spoiler).
I chose not to watch the final scene. Instead, I left her house and went for a drive.
She called incessantly when she realised I’d left, demanding I call her back and let her know I was safe. When I returned to the bedroom, she knocked on the door, and I refused to answer or open it.
Her spiteful response the following day was:
“You won’t let people in; you don’t let people support you. You push people away.”
So?
I’ve seen death.
Lived its aftermath.
I didn’t need or want to watch it on television.
Nor do I see movies recommended by friends, like My Sister’s Keeper.
What possesses someone to recommend a movie about protracted illness and death to someone who obviously found bereavement one of the hardest events to endure?
Really?
Yes, people feel sad about death and dying.
But it is not the act of dying that is sad — it’s the aftermath of grief that rocks people to their foundations.
And she didn’t understand that.
My grief felt like soul scarring.
And it took a long time to heal — not because I feel more deeply than others, but because I was processing abandonment — again — while grieving over and over each time my youngest learned what it meant to live without his father.
We both survived that trauma. We are both thriving.
But today, I’m calling out the hollow sounds people make around death, around grief.
Please know that the most honest thing you can say to another whose grief is inconsolable, or too deep for you to hold in the moment, is:
“I don’t know what to say.”
Someone uttered those words to me.
Once.
They felt real.
No performance — they were heartfelt.
They landed as words from someone trying to make sense of the pain I was in, while gently holding the ache around me.
Their bravery, their honesty, was the first time I felt heard in my sorrow — and the beginning of sensing that maybe I wasn’t as alone as I felt.
These days, I don’t judge people for their lack of understanding, because I didn’t have any either until I went through my own version of grief.
But what I do judge is that visceral need to feel another’s pain and dress it up as empathy — to perform the dance without understanding its heartbeat.
It lands as fake.
It feels intrusive and ghoulish.
Anybody who has experienced grief will not thank you for it, because it creates distance, retreat — not connection.
Picking at flesh, dancing without heart, are the absence of connection, the absence of intimacy with another’s pain.
So, if you are brave enough, admit you don’t have the words.
Sit in the silence.
Feel their ache inside your soul.
And know your silence embraces their pain and speaks louder than any words.
Author’s note: written after reflecting on hay fever, mothering and processing the aftermath of hitting a kangaroo will driving. Seems some stuff sits patiently under my bedrock, waiting for a quiet moment so it can surface.
Photo Courtesy of milada-vigerova UNSPLASH
Christine Writer 