If you know me in real life, relax, I’m not talking about my friend. I’m answering a question from a reader, and knocking on wood (particle board counts!) as I write. And yes, this is a real question and really pops into my DMs and my emails with so much frequency that any normal person would be crushed under the emotional weight of it all.
My friend’s husband just died. What do I do????
A normal person would be crushed under the weight of this information (a dead husband?!), and the weight of the responsibility that comes with attempting to answer it (what should you do?!).
But we are not normal people. We are people who have Been Through Something, people who know that Bad Things Happen, and usually to Good (or Goodish) People, and that the bastards we know will live happily, and for far too long.
But before we were like this, we were like anyone else who has yet to feel the cold hand of death graze the back of our necks as he tucks the tag into our shirt (he is considerate, The Reaper).
And every time he returns to take someone (again, always a good-to-goodish person), it stuns us, returns us back to that version of ourselves who believed that bad things happened to Other People, and that we and the people we love would never be Other People.
What I’m saying is: I don’t know what you should do when your friend’s husband dies.
And I don’t know what you should do because I (probably) don’t know your friend, and I (probably) didn’t know her husband.
I don’t know what she likes or doesn’t like, if she is comforted or traumatized by the idea of God (maybe a smidge of both?).
I don’t know what your capacity or capabilities are, emotional or physical or otherwise.
What I know is this:
When we think that our words or deeds can fix the unfixable, we are setting ourselves up to create more pain for the person we want to help.
When we say “let me know if there’s anything you need” we are giving that person a whole new task: to identify their needs, try to match it to our skillset, and reach out to us with a request. That’s a lot to put on a person who is already in duress, and guess what? You might not be able to do the thing they need done and then they’ll feel bad and you’ll feel even worse!
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