How to Support a Friend After a Suicide Loss (and the One Question Not to Ask)

Someone you care about has lost a person to suicide. You want to show up. You are not sure how, and you are afraid of making it worse.

That fear is reasonable. Suicide loss is different from other bereavements in ways that most of us were never taught, and the ordinary instincts we bring to grief, the ones that work well enough after a long illness, can land badly here. This post is for the friend, the sibling, the coworker, the neighbor. It is about what actually helps, what quietly wounds, and why one very common question should be retired from your vocabulary.

The Question That Lands as a Verdict

When I facilitated a support group for survivors of suicide loss, one of the questions survivors were asked that often hurt the most was: Did you see the signs?

It is almost always asked gently. The person asking is not trying to accuse anyone. But here is what the survivor may hear: did you miss something. You were close enough to know. And here is what the survivor thinks, sometimes out loud and sometimes only at 3 a.m.: if I had seen the signs, I would have done something.

That sentence is both true and unbearable. It is true because of course they would have. It is unbearable because it puts them on the witness stand of a case they have already been prosecuting against themselves for weeks.

Why People Ask It

Understanding why the question comes so naturally does not excuse it, but it can help you catch it before it leaves your mouth.

When someone dies by suicide, the people around the loss reach for a story that makes it make sense. A missed sign is a story. It converts something unbearable and unexplained into something that could have been caught, which means it could be prevented, which means it could not happen to me or to the people I love. The question is, at bottom, a bid for the questioner's own safety. It is the same reflex that makes grief drive people away, sharpened by a death that seems to have happened inside a mind where no one could reach it.

Neither the question nor the retreat is about the survivor. Both land on the survivor anyway.

What the Research Says About Showing Up

The evidence here is consistent. People bereaved by suicide receive less support from friends and family than people bereaved by other sudden deaths. Fewer people show up and the survivor notices. When researchers asked survivors which encounters helped and which hurt, two kinds made people feel most alone: avoidance, and intrusive curiosity about the circumstances of the death. Notice that those are opposites. Most people, afraid of prying, retreat into silence. The survivor experiences both as the same thing: being left alone with it.

What to Say Instead

You do not need a script for the whole relationship. You need a way to open the door that does not require the survivor to explain, defend, or reassure you. Here is the one I give to group members to pass along to their own friends, and you are welcome to use it exactly as written:

"I don't know the right thing to say, and I'm not going to ask you what happened. I'm just going to keep showing up. Can I bring dinner Thursday?"

Every clause is doing a job. The first sentence names your uncertainty so the survivor does not have to manage it for you. The second takes the interrogation off the table: no why, no signs, no circumstances, and it signals that you know those questions are not yours to ask. The third is a promise about time, which is what suicide loss survivors most often say they lack from the people around them. The fourth is concrete and closed-ended, so a yes costs them nothing and a no is easy.

Then do it. Then do it again in three weeks, when everyone else has gone quiet.

A few other things that reliably help:

Say the person's name. Survivors often find that the person who died becomes unmentionable, as if the manner of death has erased the life. Ask about them. Share a memory. Let the person remain a person.

Ask how they are and mean it as a real question. A surprising number of survivors report that after the funeral, no one asked again. "How are you doing with all of it?" is enough. Then stay for the answer.

Take something off their plate without being asked what. Mow the lawn. Handle the school pickup. Suicide loss often comes with logistics that other deaths do not, and decision-making is one of the first capacities grief takes.

Keep your questions about the death to yourself. If they want to tell you what happened, they will. If they do not, it is not yours to know. This includes the method, the note, the timeline, and anything that begins with "did you notice."

If You Already Asked

Maybe you are reading this and realizing you asked the question. Maybe you asked it weeks ago and have been vaguely uneasy since.

You can repair it and the repair is simple. "I asked you a question about signs a while back and I've been thinking about it. I'm sorry. That wasn't fair to you. I'm still here." That is all. Do not explain what you meant. Do not ask them to tell you it was fine.

Most survivors will forgive the question quickly. What they remember is whether you stayed.

What This Grief Needs From You Over Time

Suicide bereavement does not run on a schedule and the research is clear that survivors are at higher risk of getting “stuck” in it than people grieving other deaths. I often hear people say they are surprised that the second year feels in some ways harder than the first. The anniversary will be hard. The birthday will be hard. The ordinary Tuesday four months out, when the casseroles have stopped and the card is still on the counter, may be the hardest of all. Everyone shows up once. Almost no one shows up at week twelve.

If you can be the person who does, you will be doing more than you know. And if your friend is carrying the weight of the unanswerable question, the why that has no answer, it may help to know that there are specific supports for this particular kind of loss, including groups made up of people who have carried it themselves. You can gently mention that. You do not need to push.

A Final Word

You will not say the perfect thing. There is no perfect thing. What a survivor of suicide loss needs from you is not eloquence and it is certainly not a theory about what could have been prevented. It is presence, repeated over time, without conditions.

If someone you love is grieving a suicide and you are trying to figure out how to help, or if you are the one grieving and the people around you keep asking the wrong questions, I would be glad to talk. I offer a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No pressure, no commitment, just a conversation.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Grieving at Work: What to Do When the Bereavement Leave Runs Out

You went back on a Monday. Someone left a card on your desk. Two people said they were sorry. By ten in the morning you were in a meeting about Q3 targets nodding along and you realized you had not heard a single word anyone said.

This is the part of grief nobody we’re often unprepared for. Not the funeral. Not the first night alone in the house. The Tuesday a week after your loved one died when you are expected to be a functioning professional and you cannot remember your own password.

The Math Does Not Work

Bereavement leave, which on average is between three and five days, was never designed around what loss does to a person. It was designed around a funeral, a logistical event with a start time and an end time that has very little to do with the years of adjustment following it.

One thing worth knowing before you go back: bereavement leave is often not the only time available to you. Many employers permit accrued sick time or personal days to be used for grief, for memorial services, or for the legal and financial work that follows a death. Most people never ask because they assume the three days were the whole allotment. It is worth a direct question to HR before you burn through vacation you may want later, particularly for the first anniversary.

‍Why Work Is Uniquely Hard

‍There is a specific reason grief and employment collide so badly and it has nothing to do with how much you like your job.

Grief consumes an enormous amount of cognitive resource. Your brain is running a continuous background process reconciling the deep-seated knowledge that this person belongs here with the new information that they are gone. I have written elsewhere about why grief is so physically exhausting and the short version is that the fatigue is real and physiological.

What that looks like at a desk is specific and worth naming, because most people assume they are failing rather than functioning normally under load.

Tasks that used to take twenty minutes take an hour. Names, dates, and details of meetings you attended last week are simply gone. Small decisions carry the weight of large ones and choosing what to eat for lunch can feel genuinely difficult in a way that is embarrassing to admit. And the waves arrive without scheduling around your calendar. You can be entirely fine at nine and undone by two.

This is not a rare experience. In a survey of nearly 1,500 bereaved Americans conducted by the bereavement benefits company Empathy, 76 percent said their performance or standing at work had been harmed and 43 percent of full-time employees reported regular trouble concentrating.

Work asks for precisely the capacities grief takes first. It asks grieves to work for eight hours, on a schedule, in front of people.

And it asks for something else that grief makes almost impossible: consistency. Work has no category for someone who is competent in the morning and hollowed out by mid-afternoon. So most grieving people do the only available thing, which is to perform a stability they do not have.

The research bears this out. In a 2025 study of bereaved employees, nearly half reported feeling they needed to appear composed and professional, about a third felt they had to actively conceal expressions of grief, and about a third felt pressure to return to normal. That performance is exhausting on top of an exhaustion that was already total. That instinct to conceal isn't unique to bereavement leave. Plenty of grief goes unacknowledged even when no one has taken a single day off, including the grief carried by the people standing just outside the loss itself.

That instinct to conceal isn't unique to bereavement leave. Plenty of grief goes unacknowledged even when no one has taken a single day off, including the grief carried by the people standing just outside the loss itself.

The Card, and Then Nothing

‍Here is the pattern I hear most often and the research describes it with some precision.

The acknowledgment usually happens. In that same 2025 study, the large majority of bereaved employees reported that coworkers and direct supervisors recognized their loss. Someone signs a card. Someone says they are sorry. That part, most workplaces manage.

What almost never happens is anything after that. In the same study, only about a third of employees reported any check-in from their organization after they returned. Fewer than one in five were given a lighter workload. Fewer than one in ten received help with actual tasks. Recognition from HR or executive leadership was rare.

So the experience is not exactly that nobody says anything. It is that everyone says something once, in week one, and then the subject closes permanently while you are still four months from the worst of it. The card is on your desk. The casseroles have stopped. Nobody asks again.

And people do go quiet in the ordinary social sense too. The colleague who was warm at the funeral is awkward at the coffee machine two weeks later. Conversations reroute when you approach. What is worth understanding is that this is usually not indifference. Researchers looking at why colleagues withdraw find it is more often not knowing how to show care, feeling awkward, assuming the support would be unwanted, or simple discomfort with the emotion in the room.

Workplaces amplify all of this beyond ordinary social avoidance. There is already a professional norm against emotional display, and your grief hands people a socially sanctioned excuse to avoid something they were inclined to avoid anyway. I have written about why grief makes people disappear more generally, and everything in that post applies here with professional cover layered on top.

Understanding the mechanism does not undo the loneliness. You are still the person eating lunch alone while everyone talks around the thing that has reorganized your entire life. But it may spare you the additional work of searching your own behavior for what drove them off. Nothing did.

Work has a way of treating any loss it cannot see, a marriage ending, a job disappearing, a friendship fading, as less real than a death. That's part of a pattern worth naming.

What to Say, and Who to Say It To

‍You do not owe your workplace the full story and you do not owe everyone the same version. What helps is deciding in advance, because the moment of being asked is not a moment when you will be able to compose an answer.

This is the tiered response applied to a professional setting. Your close colleague may get the truth. The client on the Thursday call gets something brief and closed. Having the sentence ready matters more than which sentence you choose.

A few that my clients have found useful:

"I’m glad to be back, but I’m still navigating a difficult time. If I seem quiet or need to step away, please don’t take it personally."

"I’m struggling with focus right now. Could you send that request in an email so I can keep track of it?"

• Find one safe person. This does not appear in the research literature, but it is among the most useful things I recommend in practice. Pick one colleague or manager you trust and tell them plainly: if I am having a hard day, I may need ten minutes in a private room. That one conversation, held once, removes the need to explain yourself every subsequent time. It also means someone in the building knows what is going on with you which matters more on the bad days than you would expect.

• Tell people what you want from them because they will not guess. Given that most workplace silence comes from not knowing what to do rather than not caring, you have more influence here than it feels like you do. Something as plain as "you can say his name, it helps" or "I would rather you email me than come to my desk" gives a colleague a script they did not have. This is unfair. You are the one with the least energy and you are doing the work of teaching everyone else how to behave. It is still, in practice, the thing that most often breaks the silence.

• Ask for specific accommodations rather than general understanding. "I’m having a hard time" invites sympathy and produces nothing. "I need to move my recurring Monday morning meeting to Wednesday for the next two months" produces a changed calendar. Researchers who interviewed bereaved people about returning to work identified accommodation as one of four core elements of adequate support, alongside two-way communication, recognition of the loss, and emotional support. Accommodation is also the element that goes missing most often. Specific requests are easier to grant and far more likely to reduce the actual load.

Getting Through the Day

‍ Understanding why concentration has collapsed does not restore it. These are the practical measures that tend to help while your capacity is reduced.

• Work in twenty-minute blocks. Set a timer, work for twenty minutes, then take five minutes away from the screen. Sustained focus is not currently available to you and pretending otherwise mostly produces an hour of staring at the same paragraph. Short bursts with real breaks get more done than a long stretch of trying.

• Do not trust your memory. Write everything down. Checklists, calendar reminders, notes to yourself, whatever system you will actually use. The goal is to move as much as possible out of your head, because your head is occupied. This is not a failure of discipline. It is the appropriate response to a temporary and genuine reduction in working memory.

• Aim for B-grade work. For a few weeks, consistency matters more than excellence. Showing up and producing something adequate every day is a better outcome than three days of trying to hit your old standard and one day of collapse. If you are a perfectionist, this will be the hardest sentence in this post to accept, and it is the one I would most want you to take seriously.

• Know where the exits are. A car, a stairwell, a bathroom on a floor where nobody knows you. Somewhere you can go for five minutes without explaining. This sounds small and it is not. Knowing you have somewhere to go often prevents the need to go there.

• Consider whether work is a refuge and be honest about the answer. For some people work is the one place still running on the old rules, where competence is possible and nothing has changed. That can be genuinely restorative. It is a version of what I have described as dosing, stepping away from the grief on purpose and returning to it later. The distinction that matters is whether you are stepping away or running. If you are staying late every night because going home means facing an empty house, work has stopped being a break and become a place to hide.

If You Manage Someone Who Is Grieving

Your response matters more than you think. Research on workplace bereavement consistently finds that how an employer responds is associated with whether the employee stays, how engaged they are afterward, and how supported they felt through it. You have real influence here and most managers underestimate it.

• Acknowledge the loss. Do not step around it. "I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m glad you’re back" is sufficient. There is no eloquent version of this and reaching for one is how people end up saying nothing at all.‍

• Give flexibility where you can. Remote days, adjusted hours, a lighter load for the first few weeks. The evidence points toward a graduated return rather than a switch that flips back to full expectations on day one.

• Narrow their focus. This is the single most useful thing on this list and it costs nothing. Tell the person exactly which three tasks matter this week. A grieving employee looking at a full task list is not seeing a list, they are seeing evidence of how far behind they are. Deciding priorities for them, temporarily, removes a decision they currently cannot make well.

• Keep going after week six. The part that gets missed is not the initial acknowledgment. It is week twelve, and the anniversary, and the ordinary Tuesday four months out when everyone else has moved on. What bereaved employees consistently report needing is not eloquence but continuation. Someone who asks again after everyone else has stopped asking, who says the person’s name without flinching, and who lets the griever set the terms rather than deciding for them how much they want to talk about it.

‍There is nothing wise to say. There was never going to be. You are being asked to keep showing up, which is both simpler and harder than finding the right words.

‍When to Take It Seriously

Some difficulty at work is expected and will ease. What warrants closer attention is a pattern that is not improving after several months: making errors that are not like you, receiving feedback that surprises you, missing things you would never have missed, or dreading the workday in a way that has become its own weight. Grief and depression overlap significantly here and the workplace is often where the difference first becomes visible, because it is the place with objective measures.

If your work has changed in ways you can point to and it has not started to recover, that is worth talking to someone about. Not because you are failing at grief. Because the load you are carrying may be larger than what you can carry alone right now and there is real help for that.

A Final Word

You are not bad at your job. You are a person doing a demanding cognitive task while your brain runs the largest reorganization it will ever undertake. The gap between those two things is not a character problem. It is arithmetic.

Your worth is not measured by your output, and it never was. You are moving slower because something enormous has happened, and moving slower is the correct response to it.

Be as generous with yourself as you would be with a colleague in your position. And if you can, ask for what you actually need in words specific enough that someone could say yes to them.

If you are trying to work through a loss and finding the ordinary supports are not enough, I would be glad to talk. I offer a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No pressure and no commitment, just a conversation.

‍ ‍

Why Grief Makes People Disappear

There is a particular kind of loneliness that shows up not in the funeral home but months later when the calls stop coming and the friend who promised to always be there has quietly gone quiet. Most people who experience this assume something is wrong with how they’re grieving. Often the truth is stranger and less personal than that.

In 1973, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death, arguing that much of human behavior is organized around managing one fact most of us spend our lives trying not to look at directly: we are going to die and we know it. In the mid-1980s, the social psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski built Becker's idea into something researchers could actually test. They called it Terror Management Theory and it may be one of the most useful frameworks I know for understanding why grieving people so often find themselves left by the very people who claimed they would always be there.

What the Research Shows

Studies in this area consistently find something unsettling: when people are made aware of their own mortality, even briefly and outside conscious awareness, their behavior shifts in predictable ways. They cling harder to familiar beliefs. They favor people who resemble them and quietly distance themselves from people who don't. None of this is a conscious decision. It happens beneath the level most of us would ever notice in ourselves.

Researchers call the triggering moment mortality salience and one of the most consistent findings is that almost anything can produce it. Completing a will. Walking past a funeral home. And, reliably, encountering someone who is visibly bereaved.

A grieving person is not simply someone in pain. To the nervous system of everyone standing near them, a grieving person is evidence of mortality: living proof that the worst thing can happen to ordinary people, in ordinary ways, on an ordinary Tuesday. That evidence is hard to sit with for very long so people often don't. They look away. They find a reason to be elsewhere. The relationship goes quiet, not out of malice, but because staying close to that evidence is uncomfortable in a way most people don't have language for.

Why This Isn't a Justification

I want to be clear that none of this excuse the harm caused by disappearing on someone in grief. Understanding a behavior is not the same as forgiving its impact. If you have been the person left standing alone while your community found reasons to be elsewhere, the explanation for why it happened doesn't undo the loneliness it created. You are allowed to need people who then failed to show up.

What understanding the mechanism does offer is something different. It can take the sting out of a question so many grieving people quietly carry, some version of what is wrong with me or my grief? In most cases, the honest answer is nothing. Your grief simply asked something of the people around you that their own nervous systems weren't equipped to give without a fight.

Why Some Losses Trigger It Harder

This effect isn't uniform. Losses that feel structurally close to a person's own life tend to trigger more avoidance than losses that feel distant. A peer's spouse dying suddenly is harder for others to sit with than a stranger's death on the news because the similarity, same age, same kind of marriage, same kind of ordinary day, makes the reminder of one's own mortality much harder to file away as something that happens to other kinds of people.

What This Means for You

If you're the one grieving, this isn't a reason to excuse anyone's absence, but it may be a reason to stop searching your own behavior for the imagined flaw that drove people away. And if you're the one standing at the edge of someone else's loss, feeling the pull to busy yourself elsewhere, it may be worth naming that pull for what it is: not a judgment about the person grieving, but a reflex in you. This pattern shows up with particular force in professional settings, where grief carries its own set of unwritten workplace rules. Naming it is often enough to override it. Sometimes the most important thing you can offer a grieving person is simply staying even when every instinct is telling you to look away.

If what you've read here resonates, you don't have to keep navigating this alone. I offer a free 15-minute consultation so we can talk about what you're carrying and whether grief therapy might help. There's no pressure and no commitment, just a conversation. Schedule here.

The "How Are You?" Trap: Navigating the Social Squeeze

As a grief therapist, I’ve learned that one of the most challenging experiences for people experiencing grief is when a well-meaning friend or acquaintance ask, “So, how are you doing?”

I tend to describe such situations as the “How Are You?” Trap.

It’s a trap because it presents an impossible choice. On one hand, the truth is heavy—you might be barely holding it together, or perhaps you haven’t slept in three days. On the other hand, the social contract suggests you should say, "I’m fine," and move on.

Why This Simple Question Feels So Heavy

When you are grieving, your "social battery" is often running on a 5% charge. Providing a real answer requires an emotional vulnerability you may not have the energy for. Conversely, giving the "polite" answer can feel like inauthentic and a denial of your pain. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance—you are performing "okayness" while your internal world is in ruins.

Strategies for the Social Squeeze

If you find yourself stuck in this loop, remember that you are not obligated to be an open book for everyone you encounter. Here are some ways we can handle the "trap":

• The Tiered Response: Categorize people into "Inner Circle" and "Outer Circle." For the Outer Circle (colleagues, casual neighbors), it is perfectly okay to use a polite shield: "I’m taking it one day at a time, thanks for asking."

• The Pivot: Acknowledge the question briefly, then reclaim the conversation. "It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, but I’m hanging in there. How is your family?"

• The Radical Truth: With your Inner Circle, give yourself permission to be "not fine." A simple, "Actually, today is a really hard day," can invite the specific support you actually need.

Grief is a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t owe the world a performance of "healing." Protect your energy, choose your confidants wisely, and remember it is perfectly okay to save your true heart for the people who have earned the right to see it.

The Hidden Sting of Silver Linings: Why Sympathy Can Fall Short in Grief

Following the death of a loved one, we must navigate the raw, often chaotic landscape of loss. In these tender spaces, well-meaning friends and family often reach for comfort, and frequently, they offer what I call "silver lining sympathy." It’s the desire to make things better, to find the bright side, and to offer reassurances like, "At least they're not suffering anymore," or "they are in a better place." While these statements may come from a place of love (or perhaps the person’s own discomfort with death), they often inadvertently leave the grieving person feeling even more isolated and misunderstood.

Brené Brown, in her powerful explorations of vulnerability, distinguishes beautifully between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy, she explains, often involves feeling for someone from a distance, frequently accompanied by a desire to fix or minimize their pain. Empathy, on the other hand, is about feeling with someone, stepping into their shoes, and acknowledging their pain without judgment or an agenda to change it.

When we offer silver lining sympathy, we are, in essence, trying to pull someone out of their grief rather than sitting with them in it. Imagine someone has lost a child, and a friend says, "At least you have your other children." While factually true, this statement completely bypasses the profound, unique pain of losing that child. It implies that their current sorrow is somehow invalid or should be lessened by other blessings. Grief doesn't work that way. It's not a linear equation where one positive cancels out a negative.

The grieving heart needs to be seen, heard, and validated in its present pain, not redirected to future possibilities or past good fortune. It needs someone to say, "This is incredibly hard, and I'm so sorry you're going through this," or simply, "I'm here." It needs presence, not platitudes.

As difficult as it can be to witness someone’s suffering, true support often means resisting the urge to fix it. Instead, we can offer the powerful gift of empathetic presence. It’s about being a container for their sorrow, holding space for their anger, confusion, and despair without feeling the need to sprinkle it with silver linings. In doing so, we help them feel less alone in their darkest hours, which is, perhaps, the most profound comfort of all.

See My Grief

I have written about how our death adverse society may isolate someone who is grieving. This isolation can be especially acute when our loss is not one that is openly acknowledged or socially supported. In those case, we may experience what is known as “disenfranchised grief,” a term coined by grief expert Kenneth J. Doka to describe grief for a loss that society does not grant the same validity or legitimacy as other, more recognized losses (such as the death of a spouse or parent). Because the bereaved person's grief is deemed insignificant or inappropriate by others, they often lack the crucial social support necessary for healthy mourning. This invalidation forces the person to grieve in isolation or silence, which can significantly complicate the grief journey, leading to feelings of isolation, anger, and confusion.

The lack of recognition can stem from the relationship being unrecognized (e.g., an affair), the loss itself being unrecognized (e.g., miscarriage), the griever being considered incapable of grief (e.g., a young child or a person with a cognitive disability), or the way the person died being stigmatized (e.g., suicide or an overdose). The lack of validation inherent in disenfranchised grief can prevent the individual from engaging in necessary grieving rituals and openly expressing their pain. The expectation to "just get over it" or to hide the true source of their distress makes it difficult to process the emotions associated with the loss. A common example is the grief experienced by a co-worker or an ex-spouse after a person's death; since the relationship is not considered "primary family," their sorrow is often overlooked in favor of the immediate next-of-kin, despite the deep bond and history that may have existed. For the co-worker, they may feel unseen once the initial condolences fade and the workday resumes as though nothing happened."

We often see disenfranchised grief following a death by suicide. For survivors of suicide loss (often called "suicide bereaved"), their grief is often compounded and complicated by a powerful surrounding stigma that minimizes or invalidates their right to mourn openly. This societal judgment, often rooted in historical or religious beliefs that cast the act of suicide as immoral or sinful, can cause the bereaved to feel intense shame, guilt, and isolation. They may hide the true cause of death to avoid judgment, leading to a profound lack of the necessary social support that typically helps individuals process a major loss.

How do we support someone who may be experiencing disenfranchised grief? The single most important thing you can do is acknowledge that their loss is real and their feelings are legitimate, regardless of how society views the situation. Acknowledge and use specific language: Instead of generic "I'm sorry for your loss," use language that recognizes the specific relationship or circumstance. It is also critical to avoid minimizing statements (often used following a miscarriage or stillborn death). Steer clear of trite phrases or comparisons. Your goal is to meet them where they are.  Avoid: "At least you can try again," or "It was just an ex, you'll meet someone new." And, finally, check In consistently: Reach out days, weeks, and months later.

The Challenge of the Uncomfortable Friend/Family Member

We live in a death adverse society. Most people die in hospitals or facilities away from the home and the community. We treat death as a taboo subject preferring silence or euphemisms such as “passed away” to avoid the stark language of “death” and “dying.” Often people who are grieving feel pressure to “move on” or “get over” their grief.

One of the tragic consequences is that you may feel isolated following the death of a loved one because your friends and family seem to disappear. There are several reasons for this. They may be uncomfortable with their or your emotions. They may find it difficult to be around you especially when you share emotions such as sadness, anger, and guilt. Often people will avoid the subject of death because they worry about upsetting you. Others feel the need to be a “fixer” and and say things like: “Everything happens for a reason” (they don’t), “try to be positive” (i.e., don’t feel or show emotions that make me feel uncomfortable), “it’s time to move on” (I’m uncomfortable with your grief).

For those of us grieving, it falls to us to educate friends and family members about our grief journey. Some of the things we can do include: (1) Letting people know how they can help (be specific); (2) assuring people that it’s okay to talk about your loss and to ask how you’re feeling (if it is); (3) saying when you want company and when you want to be alone; and (4) telling people know there’s no expiration date on grief.