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Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've learned to say is that I don't know your grief, but I do know great big grief up close, and there's just a difference between people who know and people who don't.

I don't even know my brother's grief, even though we lost the same sister, because I can't ever know his relationship with her from the inside.

Among the most toxic phrases to use with anyone who's grieving is, "I know how you feel."

No. You do not. You CANNOT. It is profoundly insulting and diminishing to claim you do.

But if you do know great big grief up close, and how to make space for it to do what it needs to do by showing up, sitting awkwardly in the silence, and just. not. leaving, you can really touch someone's soul.

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> No. You do not. You CANNOT. It is profoundly insulting and diminishing to claim you do.

Or maybe instead assume that someone is trying to comfort and empathize with you by relating? Not everyone says the perfect thing at the perfect time, so cut people some slack who are genuinely trying to help.

It is not incumbent upon the person who is grieving to take care of the sensitivities of the well-meaning people who don't know when to keep their mouths shut.

I'm commenting on an internet forum, devoid of any direct, personal grief being expressed, for the sake of telling people that this thing they want to say because they think it will help actually has the opposite effect.

If you actually love a grieving person AT ALL, don't say this to them. Don't.

It's up there with "All things happen for a reason," or, "God always has a plan," on the list of things that, in the abstract, sound like they should make someone feel better, but in the actual moment, make the grieving person want to strangle you and tell you to get your insensitive self the heck away from them.

If you want to make yourself feel better by spouting off some meaningless throw-pillow platitude, fine. Admit that that's what you're doing, but then question whether this is actually the right time and place and person to take care of your needs.

But if you ACTUALLY want to help the grieving person, just strike this empty garbage from your plans.

Both of you are right. It's not incumbent on someone grieving to be gracious, and yet choosing grace is better than choosing to react with anger or hurt.

If you think you get to choose in moments like this, you've had no experience with overwhelming grief.

You get to breathe. Usually. If you remind yourself, or someone reminds you.

You do not get to be magnanimous about the insensitivity of people who can't even bear looking at your pain and think there's something they can say that will make it go away.

You're making the point that someone else's experience can't possibly match yours: that's why they shouldn't claim to understand what you're going through.

The reverse is also true. Don't assume so casually that your experience is the only valid one.

One of the characteristics of grief is that it is a reaction which is not chosen, it is events over powering a persons regulatory abilities.

You're not wrong, and the attempts are appreciated, but grief just hurts. so. fucking. much. It is, even among friends who also lost the same person, so isolating and lonely, that there is no solace, no comfort, only guilt and shame, anger and hurt. With time there's space for more than those four things but in the moment (which may last years); in that moment, there's no space for anything else but grief.

> Among the most toxic phrases to use with anyone who's grieving is, "I know how you feel." No. You do not. You CANNOT. It is profoundly insulting and diminishing to claim you do.

I find this perspective arrogant, rude, and counterproductive. Other people have experienced profound grief as well. They are communicating, possibly inelegantly, it’s possible to get through the grief (what better gift can someone offer than hope?) and they are making themselves available if you need support. And ultimately, they are expressing condolences and sympathy.

Grief should be shared. Grief does not make you special. Confronting grief alone is a recipe for depression and madness.

Say you know grief, then. That's actually true. You know how YOU experienced grief.

What you do not know and cannot possibly know is how another person is feeling, how they're experiencing their own grief.

I post this for all the well-meaning people who are out there insulting and hurting people they love because they don't actually know any better.

Stop saying you know how they feel. It's one of the most hurtful things you can say, and it's outright false.

> I post this for all the well-meaning people who are out there insulting and hurting people they love because they don't actually know any better.

No, you've decided to take it as an insult. You demand grace from them and give none in return. It's more a reflection on you than it is on them.

The depth of your ignorance of pain here is something I envy.

I hope you never encounter the blinding pain of sudden, devastating grief, and you never have to find out just how impossible it is to try to rise above anything in that moment, to choose anything in that moment.

You're not even sure your heart is going to remember how to beat because the world as you thought you understood it has just come to a screeching halt. The prospect that the next moment has the audacity to happen, and the one after that--that there's still a world at all now that this person isn't in it--doesn't even make sense.

And somebody on the internet is still going to tell you they know how you feel and you shouldn't choose to take their ignorant platitudes as insensitive.

It tells me everything I need to know that you still think it might be the right course to say this to someone anyway.

> And somebody on the internet is still going to tell you they know how you feel and you shouldn't choose to take their ignorant platitudes as insensitive.

But you know what that somebody on the internet has and has not felt, right?

Once you know, you never stop knowing.

I can't explain it to you.

But yes. There is a profound difference between people who know and people who don't, and it's only people who don't who think the difference might be missable.

I can't say what someone has felt, but I can be absolutely certain what someone hasn't.

> There is a profound difference between people who know and people who don't

There may be somebody on the internet who knows then.

> It's one of the most hurtful things you can say,

I respect that is how you feel, yet at the same time I cal tell you that when I experienced great loss I found comfort in the same sort of words. Your mileage may vary.

Personally, I would rather focus on the intention of the person than in their exact choice of words. They are telling me, in their own way, that they feel for me and that they are right besides me trying to bring me a speck of comfort in what they know are very trying times.

That is what matters to me and I'm not going to start splitting hairs over how they express it.

Listening to American Gods. One of the interludes puts it well. Paraphrasing: everyone is unique, everyone is the same. You are both right. However, I do think grief is more similar than not. The tragic specific circumstances will always vary, but it is always the same. It is a loss. A hole. Some people are not prepared, can’t be prepared. They sink into the narrowness of their unique experience and can’t or won’t permit themselves perspective. It is /their/ grief, dammit. Saying you understand takes something away from their grieving experience. Sneaks perspective in. Hints at the commonality of deep grief and loss.

I know folks are disagreeing with you a bit in this thread, but I just wanted to say that I 100% agree with you. 17 year-old me could have written the same words after the loss of my mom. I know loss. I will never know your loss. To me, that acknowledgment is a show of respect.

It's exactly this. As I said, I don't even know my brother's grief and we lost the same sister.

Nobody else knows the things about her that made me laugh, the little memories I have, the things about her that only I ever experienced in the way I experienced them. We shared things no one else can ever know.

I know for a fact that other people have experienced gigantic, devastating loss. Other people do know grief. Some of them know grief even more severe than mine. I encourage them to say so to grieving people, because it is important that people know they aren't alone.

But not one person who has ever lived or can ever live has lost my relationship with my sister but me. Saying otherwise reduces her to just "a person who died," not this person who had this life and this relationship, who has now died.

And that's what's so radically insulting about it. Don't do that to a grieving person. If people matter individually at all, then the grief of the people who loved them is fundamentally unknowable by anybody else.

I think anyone who has entered into the depths of their own grief knows this.

I don't expect to be able to convince the whole internet.

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