Holly Cole sings a song called just "Cry," or, in the longer version, "Cry (If You Want To)." You can find it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TJkxf4qPRI. If you want to go into grief counselling, listen to that song. And study it.
No, I'm not saying that grief counselling is that easy, but a lot of the basics are there. For example, right off the top it starts:
Cry if you want to
I won't tell you not to
That's called validation. In a kind of negative way, maybe, but validation. When someone has suffered a loss, grief is normal. Crying is normal. We don't like it, of course. We are pack animals. If any member of the pack is injured, in any way, that weakens the pack as a whole, and raises our level of risk as individuals. So, even when the injury is grief, we don't like it, and automatically try to reduce it, and, for a lot of us, our first response is just "don't cry." But that, of course, is just treating the symptom, rather than the underlying cause.
So, lets go back to Hippocrates. "First, do no harm." Telling someone not to cry is, basically, telling them that they *haven't* suffered an injury, and invalidates their grief. Which can lead to all kinds of other problems. So, let 'em "cry if they want to."
Those lines, in the song, are immediately followed by:
I won't try to cheer you up
We often feel that it's a good idea to distract the bereaved from their grief. When you have suffered a loss, you are going to grieve. If you don't grieve now, you are going to grieve later. When my sister died (she was twelve, I was fifteen) in November, my parents decided that it would be a good idea for the family to drive to California for a kind of vacation, so that we wouldn't be going through Christmas without my sister. The trip was interesting, but, of course, that just made it hard the *next* year when we went through Christmas without my sister.
It is possible that the bereaved gets stuck in grief, and does need distraction, in order to move on. But grief takes it's own time. It's always nice to do nice things for people, and it's important for the bereaved to continue to engage in various normal and even pleasant activities. But you don't need to force them to cheer up.
Later in the song there are the lines:
I won't make fun of you
I won't tell any one
I won't analyze what you do or you should have done
There are a couple of points here, in addition to the validation implied in "I won't make fun of you." If a griever decides to tell you how they are feeling, they may feel that that expression is for you alone. People feel differently about privacy, and that is particularly true of grief. I'm doing this on a blog. I know of other bereaved who are so concerned about privacy that they are concerned about the search functions, available on every news site, and even more generally, that will allow people to find out the bare facts of their story. When I mentioned that I was doing this blog to a grief counsellor, her immediate reaction was to *ask permission* to read it. That person is a professional. Many people would simply assume that I'm doing this on a blog, blogs are accessible, therefore it's OK to go read it. But a real counsellor knows that a) grieving people don't always have the best judgment, and b) some people don't realize how public and accessible the Internet actually is. (Just because *you* don't know how to find it doesn't mean it can't be found: security by obscurity is, and always has been, a myth and a delusion.)
Then there's what "should" have been done. We want to help. We want to fix. And the easiest way to "help" (or so it often appears to us) is to advise. There are two problems with this. The first is that giving advice implies that we are smarter or more knowledgeable than the bereaved. Which is a slightly more convoluted way of invalidating them. They did somethig wrong. This is actually their fault. The second point is that the advice doesn't help fix something that is already done. Not helpful.
Towards the end, the song says:
Well it's empty and it's ugly and it's terribly sad
I can't feel what you feel but I know it feels bad
I know that it's real and it makes you so mad
You could cry.
Once again, grief is real. It may not be a visible or physical injury, but it is damage just the same. Grievers need to feel it and possibly express it.
And:
I'll just be here if you want me
To be
Near you
Sometimes the brereaved do need company, and nothing more.
From Job 2: 11-13:
Now when Job's three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home--Eliaphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their vocies and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
If Job's friends had stopped there, then we wouldn't have the phrase "Job's comforters." But no, they had to go on and try to give advice, and they fully deserve Job's nice turn in sarcasm when he answers them, "I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all. Have windy words no limit? Or what provokes you that you keep on talking."
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