by jwundubbed 12 Replies latest social family
I sent a card. I told them that I was so sorry for their loss. There wasn't anything else to say that would be genuine so I found a poem by Edgar Allen Poe that seemed to fit well.
Thank you all so much for sharing your experiences and offering advice. It really has helped me a lot and I will probably come back to this thread again in the future. There is so much good information about what to do and what not to do in a really difficult human situation.
One of the few pieces of valuable advice I remember from a WatchTower (or some other publication) was that people want to talk about their loved ones, but it's the thing that people find uncomfortable to do.
So often the best thing you can do is let them know how much you empathize and that you are not trying to make anything better (you know you can't) but that you're going to be there whenever they want to tell the stories to you and keep them alive in their thoughts that way.
Something that meant a lot to us was a poem that someone wrote in a sympathy card . This man was a work colleague of my husband's , and was an ex soldier a man's man . He took the trouble to find this poem and hand write it out inside the card . It begins
" Do not stand at my grave and weep "
It moved us so much we had the first four lines on the headstone. There are lots of very good poems out there and that can be a way of showing empathy / giving comfort without using your own words .
Jan
