How do you take care of a person who is grieving? Hospitality, I think, and attunement. Or: tea and listening.
When people we love die, we have so few sensory links to them. Their bodies aren’t in the world anymore. But senses can still link us to them, like when our hands not as empty when we hold their soft t-shirt. There are people who have lost loved ones who seal up some of the loved one’s clothes in ziploc bag to save the person’s scent. To stay tethered to the person they lost, so they’re not completely gone.
When a person is grieving, you nourish their senses. The work of grief is to return to life, to resist the temptation to follow the lost loved one. The early days of grief are like living with the shades: numb, no appetite. The world around you is either dull and meaningless or its piercing beauty is an affront, taking you to pieces.
With a grieving person, we build safety via the subtle markers of attentiveness. We ply them with food and drink. We listen for when their voices catch as they tell their stories. We watch for the tears welling up, the hand that goes limp, the face suddenly slack and vacant. We pay exquisite attention. For some people this display of devotion can be uncomfortable, so we modulate our approach, staying steady and grounded and unthreatening, but open.
The people around the grieving person, the nurturers, lay the feast and wait. They accompany the grieving person on walks, lending their senses to draw the mourner down into the ordinary day, softening their landing as they re-enter the world without their loved one. They steep the tea, layer the lasagna, lay the table, and then steep the tea a thousand more times. They slice up the fruit and put it on a plate, put the colourful and glistening fruit in front of the grieving person like a grandmother does for her grandbaby. They speak in low tones.
They try not to make it worse. This is where many people fail miserably. There are always people who make it worse, with their “at leasts” and their “reasons”, trying to make bright rational structures to distract the grieving person. They fold like paper. Really, the people who say the stupidest things either a) have not learned when to shut their mouths or b) open their mouths out of their own deep discomfort, either not knowing what to say, or being overwhelmed by their own inability to compute the other’s pain, and say something that tries to make the pain neat and tidy, which in the process dismisses and minimizes the real pain the grieving person is enduring. These people, with the stupid words, think they have to say something. That is the real stupidity.
Don’t say something. Or say very little. Sit or walk in quiet. Listen to their breathing or their words. Give them space to cry. Look at the sky together. If they need a hug, give a deep steady squeeze. Set the table. Slice the fruit. Steep the tea.