On Being Grief Adjacent

We’ve all experienced it: someone you know loses someone they love. If you’re like many people, you’ve likely experienced that period of awkwardness when you don’t know what to say, knowing that the words you speak will likely not remove any of the grief she feels. And, if you’re like some, rather than deal with the difficulty of finding the new normal, you allow the relationship to cool — to dissolve — because you just don’t know what to say.

Maybe you’re the person who has lost someone and you’ve experienced this departure of friends who didn’t know what to do in your grief or for it.

When you are far enough removed from the person feeling the grief, but close enough to feel some of its effects, you’re grief adjacent.

As Anna Toane points out in her article: When You’re Grief Adjacent, “grief is messy and complicated and unpredictable.”

People generally want to fix stuff, but grief isn’t something that needs to be or even can be fixed. Grief is a complex chorus of emotions that rise and fall, sometimes crashing down on the grieving person in unpredictable waves. Grief often looks like overwhelming sadness or rage, but it can also look like bitter-sweet laughter; that laughter accompanied by tears of sorrow.

The only way to deal with grief is to go through it. Sometimes, it takes hold and requires professional intervention to process, but you can’t get through grief without grieving.

If you can’t (and shouldn’t) fix a grieving person, what do you do to help them?

Growing up, I had a good friend whose mom suffered from bipolar disorder. She attempted suicide a number of times during his younger years. When he was just seventeen, she ended her own life.

Funerals are generally hard, but are particularly anguishing when the death is tragic. There was so much sadness at her funeral. She was intensely loved by so many.

It has been many years since that funeral, but I still remember the most important thing (for me) that was said that day:

Don’t show up asking the family what you can do to help. When you do that, you’re asking them to make a plan for you to help them. Just show up and do something; anything.

That bit of counsel has stuck with me all these years. “Just show up and do something.”

That is the best way to be grief adjacent. Don’t fret over doing or saying the right thing. There’s a decent chance you won’t. Just be present.

Being present in a person’s life while they grieve helps build a unique and precious level of trust. It puts you in a position to be able to respond to needs as they arise.

The other side of that, of course, is being sensitive to when the grieving person really does need space. Be present, but don’t become a burden by overstaying your welcome.

It is a bit of a balancing act, but worth the effort. The more you work toward being grief adjacent with people, the better equipped you become to help them process their own grief. Unfortunately, there’s no way to learn it without experiencing it.

The next thing to do: anticipate needs. If you know someone who has lost their partner and also has small children, where appropriate, offer to take the kids on occasion. This gives the griever time to process emotion or just get things done that are more difficult to do with small children around. Getting so many things done with two adults in the house is difficult enough. When you’re forced into doing those things alone, any support will be greatly appreciated.

Giving advice is generally well-intended but most often misses the mark. That’s largely because what we are really trying to solve is our own discomfort with the person’s ongoing grief.

The next time you’re in the position of being adjacent to grief, remember to listen,, anticipate needs, and just be there. Those three things go a long way toward helping someone find space to process their own grief.

Thanks for reading!