We Have Forgotten How to Sit With Grief

One thing that always puzzles me is people's inability to have uncomfortable conversations. Not even difficult conversations, just uncomfortable ones.

We can talk for hours about vacations, work, sports, politics, or the latest headlines. But the moment someone says, “Today is hard,” the room gets quiet, eyes shift, smiles become forced, someone changes the subject, someone offers a quick cliché....someone else disappears altogether.

Why?

I’ve experienced this firsthand since losing Briggs.

Even saying his name can make people visibly uncomfortable. There are moments when I mention him and it’s as if the conversation freezes. I know people aren’t trying to be unkind. I don’t believe most people intend to make grieving parents feel alone.

I think they’re just afraid. Afraid they’ll say the wrong thing, afraid they’ll make me cry, afraid they’ll somehow make my grief worse.

But here’s the truth that every grieving person already knows: You cannot make grief worse by acknowledging it. It is already there. What often hurts isn’t that people say the wrong thing. It’s that they say nothing at all.

I’ve wondered if this is part of the culture we’ve created. We’ve become so focused on protecting our own peace that we’ve forgotten how to enter someone else’s pain. We avoid discomfort whenever possible. We scroll past hard stories. We look for quick fixes. We convince ourselves that if we don’t know exactly what to say, it’s better not to say anything.

But love has never required perfect words, it has always required presence.

The older I’ve become, the more I believe that one of the greatest acts of love is the willingness to stay in a conversation that has no solution.

Grief doesn’t need fixing. It needs witnessing.

When someone says, “I miss my child today,” they aren’t asking you to solve anything. They aren’t expecting you to remove the pain. They’re inviting you into it for just a moment. That invitation is sacred.

Yet so many people instinctively look for the nearest exit because sitting with another person’s pain also requires confronting their own fears. Grief reminds us that life is fragile, that loss is inevitable, and that the people we love most are not guaranteed tomorrow.

Those are uncomfortable truths. But avoiding them doesn’t make them less true.

One of the loneliest parts of grief isn’t simply missing the person you lost. It’s realizing how few people are willing to remain in that space with you. The loneliness comes when others move on while your love remains. When they stop saying your child’s name because they think it will remind you, (or don't want to remember themselves), not realizing you have never stopped thinking about them for a single day.

I don’t expect everyone to understand child loss. Before Briggs, I couldn’t have understood it either. But understanding isn’t the requirement, empathy is.

You don’t have to know what it feels like to lose a child to sit beside someone who has. You don’t need the perfect words, you don’t need answers. You simply need the willingness to stay.

Maybe instead of saying, “I don’t know what to say,” we could learn to say, “Help me understand.”

Instead of avoiding someone’s grief, we could become students of it. Instead of fearing tears, we could recognize them as evidence of love. Instead of pretending the person who died no longer exists, we could remember them by name.

Briggs is still my son. Saying his name doesn’t reopen a wound. It reminds me that someone else remembers him too.

Perhaps that’s what our world is missing. Not more advice, not more positivity, not more carefully crafted responses.

Just people who are willing to look a hurting person in the eyes and say, “I know today is hard. I’m here.”

Maybe we don’t need to become experts in grief. Maybe we simply need to become better at staying.