5 Things We Should Never Say to Someone Who Has Lost a Loved One to a Fatal Disease | "You Will Never Ever Get Over It"

Grief is a reminder of the love that is no more. When we lose a loved one to a fatal disease, the pain of watching them surrender to an illness is insurmountable.

Not many people know how to help a person who is suffering from this kind of grief. It is not easy to comfort a grieving person with words or a gentle touch. Moreover, half-baked advice can even belittle one's sorrow and further isolate the grieving person.

Although healing is an internal journey, we all need a helping hand in such tough times. For this reason, a writer shared her experience of losing her father to cancer and the words that one should never say to a grieving person on HuffPost. We can all take notes.

1. It will take 2 years before you feel normal again:

We should not try to put a timeline on someone's grief as the time taken to recover differs from person to person. The writer said, "the people I spoke to were so filled with the awkwardness about death, or with eagerness to fix it for me, that the exchanges turned prescriptive or unbearably presumptuous."

2.  I know exactly what you are going through:

Evert person's experiences and feelings are different and we cannot comprehend the entirety of anyone's grief. She wrote, "Many just floated past me, landing without impact on the enormous pile of condolences, but others became lodged under my skin. I know exactly what you’re going through was one."

3. You will never, ever get over it:

This phrase might be used to communicate that one understands the depth of someone's grief but it could also be insensitive to their healing. As the writer said, "The intention might have been to comfort me, but the phrasing doomed me. In the world of those words — You never get over something this big — I was broken, irreversibly, by something I’d had no hope of controlling."

4. You are so young:

Age has nothing to do with the challenges life throws at us. On this, she wrote, "'I understand that I’m young,' I wrote in my journal a few weeks later. I understand that it’s tempting to try to outline it all for me. But something in it feels so counterintuitive to what my dad wanted. The last piece of advice he gave me was to live a good life and make him proud."

5. Another kind of death would be better:

She wrote, “ 'A car accident would have been over in a second', said a friend of a friend, over drinks in a dark apartment. 'You wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this.'" The writer added, "You’re still losing someone you love. No amount of warning is time enough to say goodbye. No amount of suddenness lessens the magnitude of the pressure."

Grief takes time to heal and till then we can lend our ears or a shoulder to cry on, to the grieving person.

References:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/death-grief-words-dont-say-funeral_n_63c6e8a1e4b0d6724fd142bd

Cover Image Source: Getty Images | FatCamera