>Jews have a tradition of Shiva (7 days where the bereaved stays home, and people visit them). The advice given in Shiva is don't talk, just listen.
This.
When one is grieving, let them set the agenda. Don't push them to do anything. Everyone processes grief differently, and we all need to come to the reality of our loss in our own way and our own time.
If you start making "suggestions" or trying to "help" someone process their grief without being invited to do so, all you're doing is adding to the stress of the situation, not alleviating it.
And this doesn't just apply to the grief of loss either. Sometimes (often), in times of stress, folks want/need to express themselves and often ask questions and express doubts.
That doesn't mean they actually want answers. Rather, they're expressing their thoughts and feelings and just need to do so without comment, judgement or suggestions as to how to "fix" the problem.
So just listen and give the grieving person what the specifically ask for. The most important thing is to actually be there.
That's a lesson that took me a long time to learn. I'm someone who tries to be empathetic and wants to "help" by creating a solution. But often it's not a solution that's needed or wanted, just an ear, a shoulder and no judgement.
Jews have a tradition of Shiva (7 days where the bereaved stays home, and people visit them). The advice given in Shiva is don't talk, just listen.
If they talk, then respond based on what they said. In particular if they are telling stories (sharing memories) about the deceased, then you should as well, if you have any. Don't talk too much (especially not about yourself), but sharing memories is good, if they are, or if they seem to want to hear more.
If they are silent, then you also stay silent, and just be there.
If they seem uncomfortable in the silence, but don't know how to talk, then share a memory of the deceased, but you should not talk too much. You are not there to entertain them, nor are you there to "take their mind off things".
Do NOT make them host you!!! They should not be cooking food for you, and bringing you a chair, or anything like that. You should do it for them. They should just be there, with people around them.
Also, don't overdo it. People want time with others, and they want time alone. With Shiva the mourners are recommended to set a schedule saying when they want visitors, so they can control how much time they want alone vs accompanied, and it also lowers the burden of hosting, since they don't have to always be ready for a visitor. (Some people do an hour a day, others 5 hours or more.)
> instead of asking "How’s it going?" ask "Anything I can do".
The author specifically recommends NOT to throw the ball in the aggrieved person's court.
> If you’re close enough to the survivors (or if they don’t seem like they have a lot of support), spend time with them. Don’t put the ball in their court. It’s a very rational feeling for grieving folks to say, “No one REALLY wants to be around someone in my state of mind — so I’ll spare them that.” You have to be pushy, which feels a bit unnatural when you’re trying to be respectful.
What I’ve learned reading many of the comments on threads and most of the article is really just to keep your mouth shut.
You can comfort people in loss without saying a word. Your consistent presence through the grieving is good enough.
There’s an entire thread where people anecdotally share what others did to help them, and then two comments later someone says that it would offend them or come across wrong.
The aim shouldn’t be about perfection, helping people to make yourself seem like a good person or even to do what you would want others to do for you. It should be to selflessly offer consistent comfort. If they wanna be alone they will let you know, it the need something they can ask.
When my friends father died I said nothing, I just sat next to him and cried. I just wanted him to know I saw his pain and he was not alone.
Learning to come along side others in their pain is messy, hard and very inconvenient. But it’s the most meaningful part of humanity we have.
(throwaway and limited detail as this is based on recent events in my family)
If you're not the one grieving, as others have said, giving "helpful advice" isn't helpful and it won't get followed anyway. Grief isn't something you can fix. Listen. I have several good listeners around me, including my wife, and a counsellor through work, and I'm really glad of that. Most people seem to consider "go to a counsellor" unhelpful advice, and won't, but they really should! And switch if you don't like the first one you go to (I've been lucky and haven't had to switch).
If you're the one grieving, everyone experiences it differently. If there is "someone to blame" the anger can eat away at people - restorative justice stuff can help. In our situation what happened was a geniune accident. Some family have accepted that (it was always my view) and some are just really angry. And I don't know what to do there.
Different events multipled by different people means many different possible responses! I've been told that people do go through Elizabeth Kubler-Rosses stages of grief, but in a completely random order.
Wierd stuff brings it back, you cry over things that make no sense at all. For me, gradually those feelings have lost their sharpness. I'm sad but not to the point of tears.
If you're the one who is grieving, you can give "helpful advice" that provides a sense of perspective, to yourself. For example, my understanding that this was probably a genuine accident, even before the police confirmed that. You'll still cry, it'll still be hard, you're a person not a robot.
I do wonder how modern western life make us less prepared for this sort of thing. The world for us westerns (pre COVID anyway) is so safe that outside expected deaths of people in their old age, experience of grief is uncommon. In e.g. Britain this change happened in the mid 18th century. Now, most people haven't experienced a younger person they know dying, so have no clue what it's like. And that brings on the unhelpfulness.
Please understand that something you think is helpful may not be. You should assume it isn't unless you have specific knowledge of the person involved.
In general, the bereaved don't need platitudes which cheapen their loss or try to fast-forward them through the grieving process. Don't presume to know what the deceased _or_ the bereaved feel or _should_ feel, and don't assume they share/d your beliefs.
Instead of 'comfort and a kind word', try 'comfort' until you are asked for more. Be present for those who are grieving. Offer to help in any way you can if you can, and help when called upon.
Just listening is profoundly useful. Often, they're not really listening to you anyway.
> It's so hard to understand that a person that was so important to you won't be there to hear everything you wanted to tell them.
I agree. I know this is going to sound creepy, but in certain African countries like Ghana there is a video made of the funeral just like they do for weddings. And when you miss whoever has passed away, you get to watch the video. It doesn't bring them back but you get to see the person.
>Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?
Spend as much time with them as you can, especially closer to the end. Make sure you go out to dinner with them if they are still able. Help when they need it. Tell them you love them. When it's over, it will leave a hole in you for the rest of your life, so spend the time while you can so you don't regret not doing that.
My dad died when I was recently out of college. He got colon cancer and died 3 months later. Watching him decline was hard. It still hurts 23 years later. I've had uncles and aunts and grandparents I was close with die in the past few years. My mom is declining fast, so I spend at least one day a week with her, and do all her chores that need doing. She'll probably need to move in with me soon, which I'm fine with, because there's only a few years at best left.
The one good thing about it, if I had to declare one, is nothing else in your life will ever be as bad as that. It really puts things into perspective. All your problems now will seem insignificant. I was lucky enough to have a really good childhood and really loving and supportive parents.
> One thing I learned from my in-laws' tragedy, was that the grief never goes away, but you will grow stronger in dealing with it.
Picture your life as a a big, clear ball. When the grief first happens, it's like a giant, dark ball suddenly fills up the entire ball. There's nothing else. Everything is pain. Everything is grief.
People think the dark ball is meant to shrink over time, but in my experience, that's not it at all. What happens instead is that, slowly but surely, the clear ball gets bigger.
Eventually, not every moment is grief. Not every moment is pain. It's still there. It's never smaller. It never actually even hurts less. But you grow around it.
Losing someone to death is like if a color suddenly disappeared from your whole world. Let's use yellow. You've encountered so much of your life with this yellow in it. The more closely things were associated with this person,the yellower they are--and the more wrong they look now that yellow is gone.
Over time, you get used to the way they look, but you never really forget how they looked back when they were yellow. They're not as beautiful now.
But then there are other things that you encounter that haven't ever been yellow, places that person never went or things they were never a part of. You can imagine how much more beautiful they would be if they did have yellow, but they don't look wrong to you without yellow. They just look how they look, and that's the way you expect them to be beautiful.
I don't know if these images are helpful to anyone else, but they've made a big difference to me on my own grief journey, and since today would have been my sister's birthday, I thought I'd share them.
This situation will create the need to grieve loss for many involved.
I wrote some notes on how to support someone who is grieving. This is from a book called "Being There for Someone in Grief." Some of the following are quotes and some are paraphrased.
Do your own work, relax your expectations, be more curious than afraid. If you can do that, you can be a powerful healing force. People don't need us to pull their attention away from their own process to listen to our stories. Instead, they need us to give them the things they cannot get themselves: a safe container, our non-intrusive attention, and our faith in their ability to traverse this road.
When you or someone else is angry, or sad, feel and acknowledge your emotions or their emotions. Sit with them.
To help someone heal from grief, we need to have an open heart and the courage to resist our instinct to rescue them. When someone you care about is grieving, you might be shaken as well. The drama of it catches you; you might feel anxious. It brings up past losses and fears of yourself or fears of the future. We want to take our own pain away, so we try to take their pain away. We want to help the other person feel better, which is understandable but not helpful.
Avoid giving advice, talking too much, not listening generously, trying to fix, making demands, disappearing. Do see the other person without acting on the urge to do something. Do give them unconditional compassion free of projection and criticism. Do allow them to do what they need to do. Do listen to them if they need to talk without interruptions, without asking questions, without telling your own story. Do trust them that they don't need to be rescued; they just need your quiet, steady faith in their resilience.
Being there for someone in grief is mostly about how to be with them. There's not that much you can "do," but what can you do? Beauty is soothing, so bring fresh flowers, offer to take them somewhere in nature for a walk, send them a beautiful card, bring them a candle, water their flowers, plant a tree in honor and take a photo of it, take them there to see it, tell them a beautiful story about the thing that was lost from your memory, leave them a message to tell them “I’m thinking of you”. When you’re together with them in person, you can just say something like "I'm sorry that you're hurting," and then just kind of be there and be a loving presence. This is about how to be with someone for the grief message of a loss of a person. But all the same principles apply in any situation of grief, and there will be a lot of people experiencing varying degrees of grief in the startup and AI ecosystems in the coming week.
Who is grieving? Grieving is generally about loss. That loss can be many different kinds of things. OpenAI former and current team members, board members, investors, customers, supporters, fans, detractors, EA people, e/acc people, there’s lots of people that experienced some kind of loss in the past few days, and many of those will be grieving, whether they realize it or not. And particularly, grief for current and former OpenAI employees.
What are other emotional regulation strategies? Swedish massage, going for a run, doing deep breathing with five seconds in, a zero-second hold, five seconds out, going to sleep or having a nap, closing your eyes and visualizing parts of your body like heavy blocks of concrete or like upside-down balloons, and then visualize those balloons emptying themselves out, or if it's concrete, first it's concrete and then it's kind of liquefied concrete. Consider grabbing some friends, go for a run or exercise class together. Then if you discuss, keep it to emotions, don’t discuss theories and opinions until the emotions have been aired. If you work at OpenAI or a similar org, encourage your team members to move together, regulate together.
> You don't "recover" from the loss of a loved one. ... You do learn to cope with it and find a new way to live with it.
This can be applicable not only to losing someone to death, but also to the end of any relationship, especially if you did not truly want it to end. It changes you, and you learn to cope.
The uplifting part in this is that you grow as an individual, and you are more hardened to handle difficult things in the future.
I've found that any complaints about small things in my life generally go unsaid. Before my Mom died of cancer I would have perhaps talked about, "I can't believe this happened on <favorite reality show> last week, <rant />," I now let a lot of unpleasant things wash over me, knowing that there are fewer truly important items in the world worth getting riled up over.
This advice makes a lot of sense to the affected person after the fact. But when someone's hurting, in that moment, the cannot relate to this advice. Human nature is immensely complex, and hence weird in that way.
OP and his wife have been struggling with the loss of their son, a part of them, for years now. By now they must've heard this advice to move on many times; but it just doesn't feel right to the person experiencing the grief and pain. The people around them, and our community here on HN, needs to provide them with small, actionable steps, so that they can slowly work up from where they are right now, without sacrificing anything or values that they hold dear to their hearts. Asking them to let go is most likely going to be counter-productive.
Sorry, but this is also not great advice. Source: lost both my parents to brain tumors.
> Whether you have experience of grief has no bearing at all on whether you can understand someone else's immediate experience of it.
That is absolutely untrue. There's a line in a Buddhist text that captures the experience well for me: "When two thieves meet they need no introduction: They recognize each other without question." People who had known loss, especially that of a parent, were often a balm to my soul because they could be present in the experience of loss with me.
Which I'm sure sounds vague to many HN readers, so imagine that you and a friend go to visit an art museum. You spend a couple of minutes contemplating the same painting, which you both find moving. As you turn to walk away, you exchange a look and know you don't need to say anything, because you both recognize you had the same experience.
> You aren't the main character in this movie. You're not even an extra. There is no movie and, in this circumstance, you do not matter.
As the article explains, people definitely cause problems by making the moment about them, so you're right about that. But where you're wrong is that the only alternative is to vanish. Often, that is also somebody making it about themself but in a quieter way. Their anxiety and failure to process death leads them to hide away. I took people behaving the way you describe as ones I couldn't trust to be present with me. The correct choice is to be sensitive to circumstances and the inner-ring person's needs and act accordingly. Which does not have a simple heuristic, but sometimes that's the best you can do.
> If there's anything I can do to help, please let me know.
Having heard that a fair bit, I mostly took it as a sign of people either not sincerely offering or not really thinking about the situation. Which was fine; not everybody understands grief yet. The best replies to this for me were people who also made specific offers based on what they thought I needed and what they were able to give.
> Ritual provides a container for grief, and in Bhutan that container is large and communal. After someone dies, there’s a 49-day mourning period that involves elaborate, carefully orchestrated rituals. “It is better than any antidepressant,” Tshewang Dendup, a Bhutanese actor, told me. The Bhutanese might appear detached during this time. They are not. They are grieving through ritual.
That actually sounds like a great idea. It's basically like AA's 12 steps, but for learning to cope with someone dying in your family.
In many (but not all) cases, if the grieving are willing to communicate at all, they want their cries of pain heard and listened to. They would rather that you cried with them instead of trying to tell them that there is light at the end of the tunnel or that there is a 'fix' for their 'problem' or that we must accept that life is hard and unfair and suck it up.
Good quality information in there, saying this after years of trying to overcome a lot of stuff and never really finding anything of value. This was interesting. Hope others find some help in it.
ps: I always assumed that grieving is supposed to be done with others, they buffer the loss, share it with you and make your future make sense because your pain is not unheard and thus your emotional self is somehow intact and allowed to be. Without this you may end up as a fake shell unable to find any form of true connection since you've been alienated at your deepest moments.
I've been going through grief, and silence is the most annoying thing I encountered lately. People are so afraid to talk about death and grief, they believe that if they say something about it, you'll turn into tears, but that's wrong most of the time. People just don't know how to deal with hard feelings to the extent they just do not say anything. And this is painful, since it vanishes last bits of a person from life.
There's nothing wrong with death, people's reaction what makes it sad. And it's in your hands to make it meaningful and help other people with it.
Do not ever be silent about death: talk, ask, listen, share a grief and never forget about it.
Half agree with your post, but I can see why you are downvoted.
To me, in grief, platitudes and comforting words seem like a useless distraction and annoyance, but I wouldn't then go on to suggest your way of being around the grieving is what everybody needs to be doing. He was being nice and wasn't hurting anybody doing it, and there isn't such a dearth of those posts that we need to attack them.
> “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
Saw that quote I think on HN a while ago.
Grief sucks. It's different than our other emotions. You can do all the right things and have everything going for you after, but it's still always there and never goes away. Something you truly how to live with and not be afraid to face or run from. This tragedy is different because in a way is ongoing. I found the post extremely inspirational. Best of luck on the new journey. Seems like they'll figure it out.
This.
When one is grieving, let them set the agenda. Don't push them to do anything. Everyone processes grief differently, and we all need to come to the reality of our loss in our own way and our own time.
If you start making "suggestions" or trying to "help" someone process their grief without being invited to do so, all you're doing is adding to the stress of the situation, not alleviating it.
And this doesn't just apply to the grief of loss either. Sometimes (often), in times of stress, folks want/need to express themselves and often ask questions and express doubts.
That doesn't mean they actually want answers. Rather, they're expressing their thoughts and feelings and just need to do so without comment, judgement or suggestions as to how to "fix" the problem.
So just listen and give the grieving person what the specifically ask for. The most important thing is to actually be there.
That's a lesson that took me a long time to learn. I'm someone who tries to be empathetic and wants to "help" by creating a solution. But often it's not a solution that's needed or wanted, just an ear, a shoulder and no judgement.
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