"Sorry for your loss" and what to say instead

Nobody has ever been offended by "sorry for your loss". It is polite, it is safe, and on the day of a funeral you will hear it eighty times.

That is the problem with it. By the eightieth time it has stopped being a sentence. It has become a sound people make, the way you say "you too" to a waiter who tells you to enjoy your meal.

You do not need to be more eloquent. You need to be more specific.

Say their name

The single biggest improvement to anything you say is to use the name of the person who died.

"Sorry for your loss" becomes "I am so sorry about Margaret." It takes one extra word and it changes the whole thing, because now you are talking about a particular person rather than a category of event.

People worry that saying the name will upset the family. The opposite is true. Within a month of a death, most people have stopped saying the name in front of them, and the silence around it is one of the loneliest parts. Bereaved people say this constantly, and almost nobody believes it until they have been there.

Say what you remember

The best thing you can hand someone in the first weeks is a piece of the person they did not already have.

• ● "I keep thinking about how Margaret used to answer the phone. Nobody else said hello like that."
• ● "He gave me a lift to the hospital in 2019 and would not take petrol money. I never forgot it."
• ● "She was the only person on that street who knew all the children's names."

None of those are polished. All of them are worth more than a beautiful sentence about grief in general.

Do not ask how they are

It puts them to work. Now they have to decide whether to give you the real answer, which takes an hour and might make them cry in a car park, or the polite one, which costs them something to say.

Better: "I have been thinking about you this week." Nothing to answer, nothing to manage. If they want to tell you how they are, you have left the door open.

Offers that actually help

"Let me know if there is anything I can do" transfers the work to the person with the least capacity to do it. They will not call you. They do not know what they need, and asking is its own small humiliation.

Offer the specific thing instead, and make it easy to refuse:

• ● "I am doing a shop on Thursday, what can I put in it for you?"
• ● "I will walk the dog at six on Saturday unless you tell me not to."
• ● "I am coming round with dinner on Tuesday. I will leave it on the step if you would rather not see anyone."

That last part matters more than people realise. Grief makes hosting unbearable, and knowing they do not have to make tea and be a person is often what makes the answer yes.

What to say much later

The messages stop at about week three. The casseroles stop. Everyone goes back to work, and the family is left in a house where the noise has changed.

A message in month four is worth ten in week one. "It is four months today. I still think about him" is one of the kindest things you can send, because it says the thing they are most afraid of is not happening: he is not being forgotten.

The same is true on birthdays and anniversaries. You are not reminding them. They have been aware of the date since it was three weeks away. You are telling them they are not the only one who knows.

And if you get it wrong

You will sometimes say the clumsy thing. Everyone does. Grieving people are, in our experience, remarkably forgiving of clumsy and much less forgiving of absent.

The people who make it worse are not the ones who fumble a sentence. They are the ones who cross the road because they do not know what to say.

Kitty — Kitty writes and edits the Carn journal.