Listen deeply to the grief before responding

There are days that offer us lessons we never forget, as long as we are paying attention. One long, overfilled day several years ago was such a day. I paid a shiva call to a community member whose 6-year-old child had died. As I sat next to him in a rare moment of quiet during that excruciating week, he told me that a visitor earlier in the day had told him that she also had lost a child. She told him that her life was never the same, but that he could look at her and know that life would go on. As he shared the story with me, I saw that he was incredibly angry and hurt. When I asked him to explain his response, he did not try to contain his outrage. “How dare she tell me that my life will not be the same? And how dare she tell me that life will go on? What does she know about me and my loss? She barely knows me.”

That same day, I called my cousin, whose child had died earlier in the year after a long bout with cancer. When I asked my cousin how she was doing in this moment, she told me that she was feeling quite good. She had gone to the grocery store, no small feat in those difficult days, and had bumped into another mother from her children’s school. This parent said that she also had lost a child. According to my cousin, the mom told her that life was never the same, but here she was, still living, taking care of her family, and even finding moments of joy. My cousin told me that this short conversation had opened her heart to a feeling of hope she had not experienced in all the months since Sami had died. “Can you imagine that?” she wondered aloud. “And this woman barely knows me.”

There are days that teach us necessary lessons if we are paying attention. It was a hard day, that confusing and painful day of reaching out to others with the worst kind of traumatic loss. But I was paying attention.

Here is what I know for sure.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how we bring comfort to people who are grieving.

I read well-intentioned advice about how to speak with people who have experienced traumatic loss, and I think back to that day. Two people in similar circumstances experienced similar condolences in completely opposite ways. Why? Because we are all different, and so we experience loss differently.

People do not suddenly become the same because they have gone through similar losses — death of a child or divorce or chronic illness. To assume that we can offer support in the same way to all people leads to the kind of hurt I heard about from the man in whose shiva house I sat.

But it also just might lead to the kind of elevation and hope that I heard about from my cousin.

My advice regarding offering condolence or support is that there is no advice. What not to do is straightforward. Don’t preach, don’t share your own sorrows as if that is helpful, don’t tell people what they need to do. Don’t tell stories in a loud voice. Don’t do business with other visitors. Don’t stay too long. Don’t put yourself into the middle of conversations as an expert. Don’t come to a shiva house for lunch.

But what to do? This question is much more nuanced. We who seek to offer loving kindness must depend upon empathy, humility, and deep listening. Jewish tradition has it right when it teaches us to enter a shiva house and be quiet. We are meant to wait for the mourner to speak first and follow their lead. We must listen before we speak and never assume that what we offer is what the person before us needs.

And we must try.

Just because it is hard, we must not give up. Long after shiva, after 30 days, after the unveiling, after years, grief continues. We must continue to be present to people in our lives. If we make a false start, we back up and try again. We say that we are sorry that what we tried seems to have been the wrong thing. As a rabbi, I speak with family members and friends who worry because nothing they offer seems to help. In fact, often what they offer seems to infuriate or hurt their loved one. My advice is consistent: This is not about you. The grieving person is the only one who matters in this configuration.

There is no deadline for grief to be complete. People trying to be supportive say, “But he is still so depressed.” or “She isn’t moving forward.” They may be correct; the person might be depressed or stuck. But it is not our job to “fix” something. There will be a moment when someone will offer with an open-handed wisdom that the mourner might find support in therapy or prayer or travel or exercise. But that wisdom will not be motivated by the supportive person’s own discomfort. This is not about us.

Now we are at the beginning of a brand new year. We love the promise of a fresh start. We want to kindle hope in others and believe that good things will happen because of our desire to help. This year, I have been excited about my own fresh start. I am grateful, prayerful, and inspired to do good. But I am also thinking about all the people whose current circumstances cheat them out of the gift of beginning anew.

I hope that you will join me in thinking about people in the throes of chronic situations that steal away any promise of a good night of sleep, people whose loss is still so raw that tomorrow will bring no relief, people who struggle with depression that scoffs in the face of hope. I hope that I will be able to sit with their pain, sustain their sorrow, and be supportive in a way that may help.

This week, as I open my heart to a glorious new year, I pledge to offer support, condolence, and hope in small, humble ways. I will not always get it right. There is no ready answer. There is simply listening well, deeply, as carefully as I can, and offering in small gifts and gestures what each person needs.

It is hard work to stay steady, to open our hearts to grief.

When we ask, “How are you?” we hope desperately to hear “Great” or “Much better” or “I’m getting there.” Two years later or 10 years later, we don’t want to hear how deep the pain still goes. But that is what grief does. It does not let go.

The point is, those in pain do not have access to a fresh start. If we are the blessed ones who look forward to the new year with joy, then we must carry them too in our hearts. The new year is not about my t’shuva alone. Jewish repentance is about the entire community. We all stand before God — the whole, the broken, the lost, and the found. I pray you stand with us this year, bringing whatever is in your heart with you.