Words of Comfort and Sympathy for Friends in Grief

It’s difficult to watch friends struggle with the death of a loved one. You want to express your sympathy and regret, but how? What words can you say or write to bring them comfort? And what if you bring their pain back to the surface? (In reality, the pain is already there, bringing it to the surface doesn’t make it hurt any more.) What if you make them feel even worse than they already do? (In reality, that’s really hard to do.)

For the most part, just being there for your friend is a good start. Asking how they are, beyond the first month or so, is a meaningful gesture. Here are a few other things you can say or do to help:

 

The Best Words of Comfort

The best words of comfort you can give is to tell or write to your friends about your memories of their loved one. They will treasure your memories more than you can know.

Help others to share too

Even better than sharing your own memories is to collaborate with others others so that everyone who knew this person can share their favorite stories and photographs, then have them all printed and bound into a memorial tribute book that makes a unique sympathy gift for the family.

One way this can be done is using online collaborative photo book software such as the Mixbook photo memory book system, allowing you to create photo books without having to know anything about printing and publication.

Share what you’ve learned

If you feel the information in this site is valuable (see the Remembering a Loved One section for the main content), share it with your friends to let them know you are thinking about them using the links at the bottom of each page.

Remember this:

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
~ Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

For further guidance, here are a few other resources on the web that can help you know what to say:

Related books:

The Art of Condolence, by Leonard M. Zunin and Hilary Stanton Zunin


Time and again we stumble for words and actions that will reflect our feelings of compassion and our desire to be of comfort. Based on the authors’ extensive research, their workshops, and their professional experience, and filled with personal stories and anecdotes, this heartfelt, practical, and easily accessible resource covers the three most common areas of concern: “What can I write?” “What can I say?” and “What can I do?”

The authors address such issues as:

  • Special circumstances — sudden death, suicide, the death of a parent or child
  • How to compose a letter of condolence — including a variety of sample letters
  • How to be of service — from ideas for thoughtful gifts, to assisting with business affairs and funeral arrangements, to suggested ways of helping in the aftermath
  • When more help is needed — the benefits of grief therapy and support groups, with a listing of recommended reading and other resources

 

Don’t Ask for the Dead Man’s Golf Clubs, by Lynn Kelly


Coping with death is never easy. It comes at all the wrong times, to all the wrong people. Even the deaths of those who say they are ready to go are very hard on family and loved ones. As friends of the bereaved, what can you do and say to bring some measure of comfort?

Drawing on her own experience of being widowed at a young age, and combining it with the words of survivors who have lost mothers and children, husbands, grandparents and siblings, Lynn Kelly offers a simple but profound little book of advice. Don’t Ask for the Dead Man’s Gold Clubs–so called because in fact people will ask–is an invaluable guide to troubling times. There are four sections: What to Do Now, What to Do Over Time, What Not to Do, and the particularly difficult situations of Suicide, Stillbirth, and Miscarriage. The advice is practical, heartfelt, direct, insightful.

 

 

Quotes

I have only slipped away into the next room, I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used.... Play, smile, think of me.... All is well. — Henry Scott Holland

Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy. — Eskimo Legend

What the heart has once known, it shall never forget. — Author unknown

Photographs are precious memories . . . the visual evidence of place and time and relationships . . . ritual talismans for the treasure chest of the heart. — Robert Fulghum, in From Beginning to End

Grieve not, nor speak of me with tears, but laugh and talk of me as if I were beside you there. — Isla Paschal Richardson

To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die. — Thomas Campbell

While both joy and sorrow are fleeting, and often intertwined, love has the power to overcome both. And love can last forever. — Deb Fulton, in "The Power of Love" from A Second Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul

Give sorrow words;
the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart
and bids it break. — William Shakespeare, in Macbeth, Act IV, Scene III

If I am to wear this mourning cloak, let it be made of the fabric of love, woven by the fine thread of memory. — Molly Fumia, in Safe Passage

In love longing
I listen to the monk's bell.
I will never forget you
even for an interval
Short as those between the bell notes. — Izumi Shikibu

Recall as often as you wish; a happy memory never wears out. — Libbie Fudim

Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. — Elie Wiesel, in All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Remembering the past makes hoping for the future possible. — Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D., Center for Loss

In one of the stars, I shall be living.
In one of them, I shall be laughing.
And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery, from The Little Prince

The heart hath its own memory, like the mind. And in it are enshrined
the precious keepsakes, into which is wrought the giver's loving thought. — H.W. Longfellow

Let the joy of your loved one's life begin to take the place of the hurt and anger of the death. — Darcie D. Sims, Grief Inc.

Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. — Rossiter W. Raymond

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. — Georges Duhamel

When a once painful reminder evokes a gentle laugh, when we recognize the joy of the present in an image from the past, we have arrived at an important moment. Those memories are being transformed, unmistakably, into messages of hope. — Molly Fumia, in Safe Passage

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