Tag Archives: grief support

What Not to Say to Someone Who is Grieving (And What Actually Helps)

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.

Join the Old to New Creations community and receive new posts, honest stories, and faith resources directly in your inbox.

Six Months After Loss: What Nobody Talks About and What Finally Helped

2 Replies

Nobody warns you about six months. Okay, maybe there are warnings, but I was not prepared.

They show up in the early days — the casseroles, the cards, the phone calls, the people who sit beside you and cry with you and make sure you are not alone. And that is a gift. A real and necessary gift. We were a part of an amazing Church, in relationship with people that loved and cared for one another so well. We rejoiced with one another. We cried with one another.

But six months later — when the casseroles have stopped coming and the world has largely moved on and everyone around you seems to have quietly concluded that you are probably fine by now —

That is when it got hard for me in a different way.

Not the sharp, immediate grief of the hospital room. Not the raw, tender grief of the early weeks. But something slower and heavier and harder to name. Something that had been quietly building underneath the surface while I was busy trying to hold it together.

And somewhere around six months after losing Lucy Grace —

I hit bottom.

But before I tell you about that — I want to tell you about a night that happened somewhere in that season that I have never forgotten.

Our pastor and his wife showed up at our door.

These were not strangers — they were people who had been in that hospital room with us. Who had held Lucy Grace. Who had cried with us over her small, still body. Who had shown up in the most sacred and devastating moment of our lives and stayed.

And now here they were at our front door.

With ice cream.

No agenda. No prepared words. No fix. Just ten minutes and two people who wanted us to know —

You are not forgotten.

The world had kept moving. Life had kept happening all around us the way it always does — indifferent to the fact that we were still in the middle of something that felt unsurvivable. And in the middle of all of that ordinary world-keeping-moving —

They showed up with ice cream.

I cannot tell you why that particular moment has stayed with me the way it has. Maybe because it was so simple. Maybe because it cost them so little and meant so much. Maybe because it arrived in a season when I most needed proof that someone still remembered — that Lucy Grace still mattered — that we had not been quietly filed away under tragedy we are moving past now.

Ten minutes.

That is all it was.

And it was everything.

What Grief Bottom Looks Like

I want to be careful here because grief bottom looks different for everyone. I am not going to tell you that mine looked dramatic or sudden — because it didn’t. It looked more like a slow accumulation. Like a cup that had been filling drop by drop for months and finally ran over.

What I knew was this —

I was not okay.

Not in the way that everyone occasionally says they are not okay and means they are having a hard week. I mean genuinely, deeply, something-needs-to-change not okay.

The emotions and fears I was carrying had become too heavy to manage on my own. And what I began to recognize — slowly and uncomfortably — was that not all of them were new.

Grief has a way of doing this. When it is powerful enough — and the loss of a child is about as powerful as grief gets — it strips away the coping mechanisms you have quietly built over a lifetime. The inner lies you had always managed to keep at bay suddenly have a clear and open path to the surface. The fears you thought you had dealt with turn out to have only been set aside.

And there they all were.

Old and new together. Loud in a way they had never been allowed to be before.

The Lie You Don’t Know You’re Believing

I want to pause here and say something that I think is important —

We all battle lies.

Not just people who have experienced loss. Not just people in crisis. All of us — every single one — carry stories we have told ourselves about who we are, what we deserve, what God thinks of us, and whether we are enough. Stories that were planted early and reinforced quietly over years until they feel less like lies and more like just… the truth.

Grief doesn’t create those lies.

But it removes the armor we use to fight them.

I recently found a Bible study by Jennie Allen called The Lie You Don’t Know You Believe — and the title alone stopped me in my tracks. Because that is exactly what it felt like in that season. Not lies I had consciously chosen to believe. Lies I didn’t even know were there until grief made them impossible to ignore.

This is the scheme of the enemy. He does not need us to consciously embrace darkness — he just needs us to be too exhausted and too overwhelmed to keep the lights on.

Grief can do that.

Which is exactly why that season — as hard as it was — was also one of the most important invitations of my life.

It’s Okay to Not Be Okay — But Let’s Take Steps to Get Better

I want to say something directly to anyone reading this who is in their own version of grief bottom right now —

It is okay to not be okay.

Please hear that. Six months after loss — or a year after, or three years after — the world’s timeline for your healing is not God’s timeline. There is no finish line you should have crossed by now. There is no point at which still grieving becomes a character flaw.

You are allowed to still be in it.

But — and I say this with all the love and honesty I have —

Not okay is not a place to stay forever.

Not because grief has an expiration date. But because you were not made to carry this alone. And there are people and resources and tools that God has placed in this world specifically for the moments when the weight becomes too much to manage by yourself.

I wrote about the power of presence over words – and the nurse who taught me that – here.

For me that looked like counseling — and I want to remove any shame from that word right now. Seeking help is not weakness. It is not a lack of faith. It is not an admission that God is not enough.

It is wisdom.

It is the recognition that God often does His healing work through people — through trained, compassionate, skilled people who have been given tools to help us find our way through the things we cannot find our way through alone.

There are many forms that help can take —

Professional counseling with someone trained in grief and trauma. A grief support group where you are surrounded by people who understand from the inside. A church community that creates space for the hard conversations. A trusted friend or mentor who will sit with you in the honest places without trying to fix you. A Bible study that names the lies you have been carrying and replaces them with truth.

You do not have to choose just one. You do not have to have it all figured out before you reach out. You just have to take one step toward help — and trust that God will meet you there.

The Long and Nonlinear Road

I want to be honest with you about something —

Healing did not happen quickly for me.

The counseling helped. The community helped. The tools I was given helped. But the deeper work — the lies, the fears, the patterns that grief had exposed, the renewing my mind — that took time. More time than I expected. More time than felt comfortable.

Nearly five years.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment — not to discourage you, but to give you permission.

Five years of God quietly, faithfully, persistently doing something in me that I could not always see or feel or measure. Five years of choosing — imperfectly, inconsistently, one day at a time — to trust Him with the broken pieces. Five years of acting my way toward faith even when the feelings weren’t there yet. (I wrote about the harder prayer and what defiant joy looks like in the middle of grief here).

And then one day — not dramatically, not with a trumpet fanfare — I realized something had shifted.

I had accepted my imperfections.

Not resigned myself to them. Not given up on growth. But genuinely accepted that I am a person God loves and has a purpose for — exactly as I am, in the middle of the story, with all the unfinished edges still showing.

I had let go of control.

Not perfectly. Not permanently. But in a real and lasting way that had not been possible before. The need to manage outcomes, to hold everything together, to protect myself from the next unsurvivable thing — I laid it down. Not because the fear disappeared but because I finally trusted that God’s hands were more capable than mine.

And I was free.

Not from grief — the missing is still there and always will be.

But free from the lies that had been using grief as a doorway.

Free from the weight of carrying things I was never meant to carry.

Free to be who God created me to be — shaped by the loss but not defined by it. Devastated but not destroyed.

The spiritual formation practices that eventually gave me solid footing again are the ones I wrote about here.

God Was There the Whole Time

Here is what I know looking back —

God was not more present in the hospital room than He was in the grief bottom.

He was not closer to me in the sacred moments than in the shameful ones. Not more available in the bold prayers than in the seasons when I had no prayers left at all.

He was there.

In the counseling office. In the grief group. In the Bible study that named the lies. In the five slow years of one step at a time.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18

Close to the brokenhearted.

Not close to the ones who have it together. Not close to the ones who are praising Him with confidence and clarity and unwavering faith.

Close to the brokenhearted.

That is where He was. That is where He is. That is where He will always be.

If You Are in the Bottom Right Now

You are not alone.

You are not too far gone. You are not beyond help. You are not a burden to the people who love you. And you are not a disappointment to God.

You are a person in the middle of something hard — and that is exactly where He does some of His most profound and lasting work.

Take one step today.

Make one phone call. Send one text. Look up one grief counselor or one support group or one Bible study. Tell one person the honest truth about where you are.

Just one step.

And trust that the same God who met me in a hospital room at 2am — and in a counseling office six months later — and in the slow quiet years of healing that followed —

Will meet you exactly where you are.

“He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.” — Philippians 1:6

If this post found you in your own grief bottom today — please reach out. Leave a comment, send a message, or find a trusted person in your life and tell them the truth about where you are. You were not made to carry this alone. I also wrote about how we learned to create intentional space for grief that keeps coming back — you can read that here.

And if this resonated with you — share it. You never know whose six months this might find.

Old to New Creations with Jessica Mitchell

Because God is not finished with your story.