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Comment by euroderf | Hacker News Reader

When someone's spouse has died, a very helpful thing to do is to cook and package and deliver meals that the surviving spouse can simply place in the fridge and warm up as needed. When you are grieving, to actually prepare a meal is a terribly, terribly difficult thing to do.

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A really bad platitude can be "let me know if I can help, somehow!" and then leaving it at that.

Well, your friend/acquaintance may not know how you can best help. Yes, if it's a widower who lost a home-maker wife, he may need help fixing meals or cleaning house or doing laundry. Vice versa for a woman who's lost her husband.

But if you don't fill them in on how you can help and the things you are good at doing they will not know how or when to ask you. And then you will not end up helping.

Be concrete and specific when you offer help. You could make a list of three things to do. Then present your list as a menu of choices. Or "D", something different.

Be concrete about your boundaries and schedules. Don't let them get carried away with using your services. Tell them you can give them a ride once a week to essential errands, for example. It is sometimes most helpful if there are multiple people pitching in.

Really, long-term, if I were in need, I'd want to go to a professional agency for most things. A professional meal-prep service, housekeeping agency, home care agency that sends licensed and bonded pros. My volunteering friends and neighbors are well-intentioned, but this can be fraught with difficulty if they are not good, or not-so-well-intentioned after all.

Many people will swoop in to take advantage of people who are perceived to be vulnerable, grieving, and willing to accept help. That's why some of us are skeptical.

The best thing I've found is to ask what they need help with, then do that thing for them. One time when we just brought food (by traditional and assumption, without thinking too hard about it), it ended up being more frustrating for the people receiving it then intended.

The nice thing about that is that you don't have to ask how you can help, you can just help. I knew a guy who would go to a grieving household and clean their shoes.

I think you'd have to be awfully closely associated with that household for that to work. As a widower I have to say that I really would not have wanted an outsider suddenly appearing and deciding what I needed help with when my wife died.

Perhaps it would work if there were very clear signs that the bereaved were unable to cope.

You even have to be careful with bringing meals. When we lost a family member and all kinds of food started showing up, it was very sweet of people. But it became just one more hassle to deal with at a time when we already had too much to deal with.

I feel as though you’ve skipped over the entire article, here you complain about people helping for an article titled “Let people help!”

But "help" has to be what will actually help, otherwise it's not actually help. That is, help has to be what the receiver considers help, not what the giver considers help.

"Let me help you in the way I want to help, not in the way you actually need" is either short-sightedness or selfishness. But it's not actually helpful.

Friends in need are the friends indeed

But the friends who think of what we need

They hardly talk at all, they just do it

-Chris Smither

Same advise exactly for a newborn. It was incredibly helpful for us, and now we love doing it for others.

I find it fitting the approach for new life and death can be the same.

I don't have my own kids, but my experience with people with kids is that they're often desperate for social interaction, they feel limited in their ability to go out of the house, and they really don't want the extra work from having guests over.

So I try to act accordingly — help cook and tidy up the kitchen afterwards, help bathe the kids and/or put them to bed where appropriate, or just sit on the couch fiddling with my mobile when not interfering is the best course of action. Just slot into their routine and provide an extra pair of hands. For people you're comfortable with, socialising happens around these things just fine.

> I don't have my own kids, but my experience with people with kids is that they're often desperate for social interaction, they feel limited in their ability to go out of the house, and they really don't want the extra work from having guests over.

It depends on the age of the kids and situation, but visiting people can be helpful if done carefully.

From reading (likely too much) internet commentary about having babies I assumed I'd be completely exhausted and worn out from constantly giving the baby attention for the first few months. Then I discovered that newborns sleep literally 3/4 of the day.

The hard part is the disrupted sleep schedule when their newborn stomachs are small and they need to eat every few hours. It can be really hard to adjust for people who have lived their lives with 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep all the time.

Funnily enough, having lived with middle of the night insomnia and disrupted sleep my life I wasn't really bothered by the newborn feeding schedule (via pumped milk in bottles, my wife did the real work during the day).

The value of socializing for us, which I didn't expect at all, was to fill the boredom. We were lucky enough to both be able to take a lot of time off work at the same time, which combined with the newborn sleeping 2/3 to 3/4 of the day left us feeling unplugged from the world.

Everyone is different, though. I've had friends who just didn't want to see anyone or have other people in their house for the first few months, so we respected that. I know some people who got tired of endless visitors trying to help, while others lamented not having enough help. It can be tough to feel it out so try to be especially intune with subtle social signals and look for hints to take.

Ask before. Because random food packages would definitely not helped me.

The other people thinking they know better then ypu and that you having kids mean you dont deserve agency anymore was the worst thing about having baby.

Maybe because I'm on kid #6, but what is the hard part again? They sleep most the day, giving you an opportunity to sleep and cook.

I remember kid #1, we didn't remember to burp and he was fussy, but after that, its been fine.

it very much depends on how prepared the parents are. if you or your partner grew up with a lot of siblings you have plenty of examples from your own childhood to draw on that make things easier.

i didn't have that, so i struggled, especially in the beginning, not because it felt hard, but simply because i didn't know what to do. the mechanics are easy to learn, feeding, changing, sleep, etc, but beyond that i simply had no examples to draw on. but i was able to compensate that with continuously being aware that this is what i wanted. i chose this adventure, and i was not going to despair over making that choice, nor would i regret it.

but we were also lucky, and our kids were not fussy and slept well. they got plenty of breastfeeding because nobody told my wife when or how to stop and she didn't complain, so she stopped when the kids were ready on their own.

That’s an impressive run.

The mother and child’s health are likely a factor in this, surely? Depending on how the delivery went, there may be a period of recovery. Combined with disrupted sleep and newborn feeding, the combination can be rough.

Good point, they were all super easy births. They had high bilirubin levels, but I looked up that I could put blue light on them, and it cures it. So I brought a LED light strip and placed my kid next to a window.

We also had sleep shifts. Giving each of us 3 hours of solid sleep was like 2 REM cycles. Only needed to do ~2 per night and we were mostly normal.

If I remember right, a little jaundice gives them a nice looking skin colour and makes them drowsy.

100% not good medical advice.

We never got close to sorting the sleep routine. Well done.

> They sleep most the day, giving you an opportunity to sleep and cook.

I got some douchebag babies, because they were breastfeeding every 2-3 hours for a long time. Probably every 2 hours for the first few months, so that doesn’t allow for quality sleep cycles. It also takes a while to put them to sleep, so the total period of free time could be as little as 15 to 30 minutes.

The first one needed time to learn how to breastfeed (and the mom to learn also).

And also, physical recovery from tears in the flesh and other complications such as hemorrhoids and hormone fluctuations.

Yes, very common in Turkish culture. My dad passed away a month ago. Everyone who came over to offer condolences brought pastries, cakes, various home-made foods. And roasted chestnuts, which are sold by street vendors in Turkey in the winter.

I thought about why that is, and came to the same conclusion as you: when you are grieving you just need to be able to go through the motions, and not stressing about what foods to make is really helpful.

It's true. And technically many of them can afford takeout when it's too hard. But there's something healing about someone, whether family or friends, actually doing the act of helping in this way. It's a sort of transfer of love from one heart into another, which heals the broken one. The more of a sacrifice it costs the one giving help, the more healing efficacy it seems to have, even if the amount is unknown to the person receiving help. It's almost magical.

Thank you for saying this. Some other comments here seem otherworldly.

I might be a bit weird about this but… the chances of somebody making something that I want to eat is pretty small. I don’t like eating food from a non-commercial kitchen that I haven’t seen.

If you want to feed me, give me a DoorDash or Uber gift card.

Yes, that is weird. It's rather normal for the average person to not be so restrictive.

That is unusual. I’ve encountered a couple people like this. They also refuse get-togethers in people’s homes and potlucks. One said he would be willing to come to a potluck if he could inspect everyone’s kitchens first; he wasn’t joking! It’s a blend of germaphobia and social distrust, I suppose.

That said, if someone was grieving and they couldn’t handle more than receiving delivered takeout, I’d happily send it, just as I’d accommodate another dietary preference when preparing a real meal.

I think it comes from some bad experiences at church potlucks and school bake sales when I was a kid. Combine that with watching people cook who taste with the stirring spoon and then stick it back in the pot and I’d rather not eat your homemade goods.

I also had some bad experiences eating at my grandmothers (she was a terrible cook). I think her experiences in the Great Depression meant no food would go to waste. I ate so many years-past expiration foods when I was a kid. Have you ever had really intense food poisoning? Ugh…

I understand. Our upbringing and formative experiences make for powerful programming. My favorite family recipe is my brother's least favorite because he ate it the day he got an intense stomach bug when he was in grade school. Even though he's more objective about food now, he still finds the idea of me liking it revolting. :)

The person needs to never see a commercial kitchen from the inside, lest they starve

One of my neighbors has seen the inside of commercial kitchens, they simply never eat out. Everything is home cooked.

From the article: “One of the neighbors actually cooked for me for four years — dinners — and her husband delivered the dinners to me."

I winced at that. 4 years.

For 4 years tho?

That's a pretty heavy debt.

same here, i had to check the transcription was right, maybe she mixed up the words?

Let them help!

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