Bad news
I don’t feel like I can write particulars, since this isn’t my own tragedy, but a friend of mine just lost someone very close to her today and I’m afraid of slipping into platitudes. Grieving people don’t want to hear about how it was God’s plan or that it’s better this way. They want to rail at the unfairness of it all, to feel like Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden. Oddly enough, having been on both sides – comforted and comfortee – it’s easy to remember what it’s like to experience deep grief, and easier still to say those senseless things that never bring anyone comfort. Even though there is no happiness without sadness, how in the hell is telling that to a grieving person going to help?
Strangely I think that one of the best grief scenes I’ve seen came from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, where the father loses his son and is so numb that at the funeral all he can do is count how many times people tell him “He’s with the angels now” or other such nonsense.