Someone you love is hurting.
Maybe they lost a child. Maybe they lost a spouse, a parent, a sibling – someone who was woven so deeply into the fabric of their everyday life that they do not know yet who they are without them.
Or maybe the loss does not have a funeral. Maybe it is a marriage that fell apart. A prodigal child who walked away. A diagnosis that changed everything. A dream that quietly died while nobody was watching. A friendship that ended without explanation. A career that collapsed. A pregnancy that never made it.
Some grief has a funeral. Some grief has a Tuesday.
It comes when everyone else has moved on and you are still standing in the rubble of something that used to be your life. It comes for things that do not have sympathy cards – and those are sometimes the loneliest griefs of all because nobody names them, nobody shows up, and nobody knows what to say. Sometimes we stuff our grief deep inside of us, because we don’t feel safe sharing it with anyone else.
I have been on both sides of this. I lost my niece, Madison Joy, at thirty-give days old. I lost my daughter, Lucy Grace, to stillbirth. My family has also walked through grief connected death, to lost jobs, and to the kind of mistakes that change everything. And I have had the honor to walking alongside others through their own.
And I have also sat in the quieter kinds – the ones that nobody sees coming, the ones that do not come with instructions.
So I want to give you something useful today. Not a script. Not a formula. Just the honest truth about what helps and what does not – from someone who has lived more than one kind of loss.
The grief nobody names
Before we get to the phrases, I want to pause and say something that does not get said enough.
Not all grief is grief over death.
Some of the deepest grief I have ever witnessed — in my own life and in the lives of women around me — has been over things that are still technically alive. A child who is estranged. A marriage that is ending. A friendship that betrayed you. A season of infertility. A vision for your life that is not going to happen the way you planned.
These losses are real. The grief is real. And yet so often the people carrying them feel they have no right to grieve — because nobody died, because things could be worse, because at least you still have your health or your job or your faith or your kids.
Can I say this clearly? You have the right to grieve anything you have lost.
Grief is not a competition. It does not require a death certificate to be legitimate. It is simply the cost of having loved something — a person, a dream, a version of your life — and finding it gone.
If that is where you are today, this post is for you too.
What not to say – and why it lands the way it does
“They went to sleep.” “They passed away.” “We lost them.”
These phrases feel softer. Gentler. Like they protect the grieving person from the sharpness of the word died.
But euphemisms create distance from the truth — and grieving people are already living the truth. They do not need it softened. They need it named.
For children especially, these phrases cause real confusion. A child told someone went to sleep may be afraid to go to sleep themselves. A child told you lost someone may wonder why you have not gone to look for them.
Use the words died and death. Gently. Honestly. They are not cruel words. They are true words. And truth held with love is the most merciful thing you can offer.
“They are in a better place.”
This one is true. I believe it completely. Madison Joy is with Jesus. Lucy Grace is with Jesus.
But on its own, without anything else, this phrase can feel like it is asking the grieving person to skip straight to the good ending. Like the hope cancels out the devastation.
It does not.
If you want to use this phrase, pair it with permission: “They are safe with Jesus — and it is completely okay to miss them.” That small addition changes everything. It holds the hope and the grief at the same time — and that is exactly where most grieving people actually live.
“God needed another angel.”
This comes from a tender place. The people who said it to me meant it with love.
But it is not theologically accurate. People do not become angels when they die. And for a grieving person — or a grieving child — this phrase can quietly plant a seed of anger toward God. He took them because He needed them. That is a hard thing to sit with when you needed them too.
Keep the focus on the truth instead: they are with Jesus, known and loved and held. That is enough — and it is the right kind of enough.
“Be strong.” “Don’t cry.” “You need to be brave.”
We say these things because we want the people we love to be okay. And sometimes we say them because we do not know how to sit with someone in the not-okay.
But grief needs room. It needs to be felt, not managed. Telling someone to be strong — even with the most loving intent — teaches them that their sadness is something to push through rather than something to move through.
What helps instead: “It is okay to cry. I am here. You do not have to hold it together right now.”
That is it. Permission and presence. It is the whole thing.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
This one was said to me more than once after losing Lucy Grace. And every time I heard it, something in me went quiet and closed.
I do not believe that God authored my daughter’s death as a plot point in a plan. I believe He is sovereign over a broken world and that He can redeem anything — including the worst things. Those are not the same.
For a grieving person, this phrase raises more questions than it answers. What is the reason? Could I have prevented it? Did God choose this?
Better to sit in the mystery honestly: “I don’t know why this happened. But I know God loves you. And I am not going anywhere.”
“At least…”
At least you have other children. At least you had time together. At least you know what happened. At least it was not worse.
Every version of this phrase does the same thing — it asks the grieving person to measure their loss against something else and find it smaller. To be grateful rather than devastated.
Grief does not work that way. A grieving person is not comforted by the knowledge that things could be worse. They are standing in the ruins of what is. Meet them there.
“I know exactly how you feel.”
You probably do not. Even if you have experienced a similar loss — even if you have walked through something that looks identical from the outside — grief is deeply personal. The relationship, the circumstances, the history, the faith journey — all of it shapes the experience in ways no one else can fully know.
What you can say instead: “I don’t know exactly what this feels like for you. But I want to. Tell me about them.”
That question — tell me about them — is one of the most generous things you can offer a grieving person. It says: the person you lost mattered. I want to know who they were. Their name is not a wound I am afraid to touch.
The grief nobody shows up for
Here is what I want to say to the person sitting in the quieter kind of loss.
The marriage that is ending. The child who walked away. The dream that died slowly over years. The friendship that fell apart without warning. The diagnosis that changed the whole plan. The season of waiting that never resolved the way you prayed.
Nobody brings casseroles for these. Nobody says I am so sorry for your loss. The world keeps moving and you are standing still. You’re not even sure you are allowed to call this grief. You are.
Some of these I have lived myself. Others I know from standing beside someone I love while they carried something I could not carry for them.
The absence of a funeral does not make the loss less real. The absence of a death certificate does not mean your heart is not broken. And the absence of sympathy cards does not mean you are not allowed to need someone to sit with you in it.
If you are in that kind of grief today — the kind that does not have a name or a ritual or a casserole — I want you to know that you are seen here. This space is for you too.
We do not suffer well.
Not most of us. Not naturally.
When grief arrives — in whatever form it takes — our first instinct is to understand it. To explain it. To find the reason, the lesson, the silver lining. To fix it for the people we love or to fix it in ourselves. To get to the other side of it as quickly as possible so we can go back to being okay.
And so we say everything happens for a reason because we cannot bear to sit in the mystery. We say be strong because we do not know how to be present with pain. We say at least because we are trying to build a ladder out of the hole before the person has even had a chance to look around and understand where they are.
We are not bad people for doing this. We are people who were never taught how to suffer.
But there is another way.
What if grief — all of it, every kind — was not a problem to be solved but an invitation to trust? Not to understand why. Not to find the reason. Not to get to the other side. But to go through it with your hand in the hand of a God who has been to the other side of death and come back.
That is what the peace that passes understanding actually is. It is not the absence of pain. It is not the explanation you were looking for. It is the presence of God in the middle of something that does not make sense — and the slow, quiet discovery that He is enough. That He was always enough. That even this — even the worst thing — cannot separate you from His love.
That is not something you arrive at quickly. It is not something anyone can hand you in a phrase at a funeral.
It is something you find on your knees. In the dark. When the casseroles have stopped coming and the world has moved on and you are still in the middle of it.
And it is there — I promise you it is there — that God does His deepest work.
Not in spite of the grief. Through it.
So what do you actually say?
You say less than you think you need to.
You show up. You bring food. You sit on the couch and you do not try to fix it. You say their name — or the name of what was lost — out loud, because the thing grieving people fear most is not that someone will bring it up. It is that everyone will forget.
Say I am so sorry. Say I loved them too. Say tell me about them. Say I am here and I am not going anywhere. Say their name.
And then stay.
That is what our pastor and his wife did for us after we lost Lucy Grace. They showed up at our door one evening with ice cream. They stayed ten minutes. They did not explain it or fix it or find the silver lining. They just showed up.
It was everything.
A note for parents talking to grieving children
If you are a parent walking a child through any kind of loss — the death of someone they loved, a family change, something that shifted their world — the same principles apply.
Children need honest, concrete language. They need permission to feel what they feel. They need to know that the missing is not something wrong with them. They need you to say the name — of the person, of the loss, of whatever it is that is gone.
If you are looking for a resource to help you have those conversations about death specifically, I wrote a children’s book for exactly that moment. Mommy, Is Madison Sleeping? is a faith-based picture book for families navigating the death of a loved one with young children. It is for any loss — a grandparent, a sibling, a parent, a friend.
Because grief is not something to overcome. It is a love that has not stopped.
And God is not finished with your story.
If this post helped you, share it with someone who is walking alongside a friend in grief. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do it learn how to show up well.
If you are in a season of waiting or grief right now, the Old to New Journals were designed for exactly this.
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