I Lost My Dad. These Are The 7 Words I Wish I’d Never Been Told At His Funeral.

In other words, my intention in telling these stories isn’t to scold, shame or gossip. Though some people seemed only to want the gory details, or to get the moment over with and move on, the vast majority braved this territory with me because they saw the devastation and cared to help me navigate it. They were worried about me, so they tried to do what I was struggling to: talk about it. And whatever complicated feelings I have about their choice of words, I’m thankful for that.

It’s also clear to me, as I look back on those thousand little moments, that many of them weren’t really about me. Those words emerged from other people’s experiences with loss. When they tell me I’m being strong for someone else, or that this will follow me for the rest of my life, or that a quicker death might have been easier, I can’t read that as anything but an attempt to express their own grief, their own trauma, their own remembered hurt. These are memories of someone else’s strength or lack of it; someone else’s life spent grieving; someone else’s too-slow slog toward the end. They’re attempts to tell a different story, and to extract some sense from it by making it useful to me.

Some told me this outright, shifting seamlessly from advice or condolences into stories about the deaths that touched them ― often, those of their own parents. Others left it unsaid, but the specificity of their advice, their comfort in the taboo world of grief and death, emanated undeniable experience.

“Give yourself a creative project,” an old writing teacher told me, during those hazy first months after he died. “Something that gets you out of the house, around other people.”

I think of grief as water: an oceanic swell of emotion and memory, demanding every inch of my soul and threatening to tear me open from within. Every crying spell, journal entry, and conversation is a turned-on faucet, a chance to alleviate that pressure a little bit at a time until I have enough space to breathe again. It’s too much to expel all at once, but also too much to hold inside indefinitely. And while I know that grief is custom, that every person’s trauma shapes it differently, I have to imagine that pressure is something many of us have felt.

Is it any wonder, then, that we leap on each other when death comes up? The chance to talk about someone else’s grief is also a chance to air some of your own, to release some of the pressure you still carry — and while that impulse doesn’t make us better confidants, it is human and it’s sometimes necessary.

It’s possible, I suppose, that someone somewhere has a solid answer to the question, “How do you talk to someone who’s grieving?” But that person certainly isn’t me. More than one person I love is currently dealing with a loss as enormous as mine was — parents, partners, children — and I’m not at all confident that I’m saying the right things. I know only that it’s essential to try. So I try to listen first, to ask gentle questions, to make no assumptions. But sometimes, I also bring too much of myself to the conversation. Part of me is still looking for chances to turn on the water.