What to say when you do not know what to say

The sentence everyone repeats, and what is behind it

You will have read that saying nothing is worse than saying the wrong thing. It is worth knowing that no study establishes it.

What exists is two things. Cruse, whose people do this work, says plainly that "most people are more likely to notice those who didn't say anything, than those who did", and calls silence a decision that "might just as easily hurt someone's feelings". That is practitioner guidance rather than a research finding, and the same page is honest that no phrase works for everyone.

The other thing is a study of families bereaved by the 2011 attack in Norway, by Dyregrov, Kristensen and Dyregrov, which found harm on both sides. Avoidance was described as extremely common: people crossed the street, changed the subject, did not stop to speak. Clumsy support was common too, and the report includes a father whose colleague suggested something good might come out of his child's murder.

So, the honest version is not that silence is worse. It is that both cost something, and that only one of them is a thing you can still change tonight.

Four drafts, none sent, and the fifth day starting.

The fear, answered by the people you are afraid of hurting

The most common reason people give for staying away is that they might make it worse. In that same Norwegian study, the people around the bereaved worried about "ripping open wounds".

The bereaved were asked about it. Their answer was unanimous: the wounds are already open, so that is impossible.

That is worth reading twice, because it dismantles the specific fear. You are imagining a person who is doing all right until your message arrives and reminds them. That person does not exist. They have not stopped thinking about it since it happened.

One bereaved father in the same study also admitted he had done it himself, before his own loss: "I have also chickened out, because I have been afraid of making things worse."

The four things people are actually afraid of

Making it worse. Covered above, and answered directly by the bereaved people who were asked.

Intruding. Bereaved parents in the study assumed younger friends stayed away because they "did not want to bother them in their grief". Nobody had asked. The assumption was doing the work in both directions at once.

Reminding them. See the wounds.

Having to handle your own reaction, or theirs. The study reports emotional overload and a fear of having to comfort somebody in public. This one is real and it is not measured, and it is a better reason to send a text than to say nothing.

What to do instead of finding the words

The words are not the only currency, and the organizations that work with bereaved people are specific about what else counts.

Cruse contrasts two sentences directly: "Let me know if I can do anything" against "How about I pick up the children from school on Thursday?" The first hands a decision to the person with the least capacity to make one. The second does not. Cruse goes further on another page, publishing a contributor's version of it: "make them food, collect the kids from school. Don't offer help ... just do the help, tell them you're getting the kids, leave them food."

Its guidance on the first weeks lists what is actually happening to them: registering the death, arranging a funeral, notifying people and organizations, other relatives, cooking, cleaning, keeping a house running, and understanding paperwork. Cruse calls it "a long to-do list" and notes that concentration is hard. Anything on that list is a thing you can take without needing a sentence.

A message that asks nothing back. Cruse quotes a bereaved person: "They didn't come over, they respected that I wanted to be alone. However, they sent me little messages. There was no need to reply, and that was nice."

Sue Ryder says people usually appreciate a thoughtful text, and that bereaved people have told it letters and cards are especially helpful. Neither organization ranks a card against a call against turning up. None of them outranks the others, so the one you will actually do is the one to pick.

If it has been weeks

The timing matters more than the wording, and it runs the opposite way to most people's instinct. Support fades after the funeral, which every organization here says in some form, and Sue Ryder is explicit that what somebody needs changes over days, weeks, months and years. That is the shape of it: a crowd, then a drop, then a long quiet.

A message in week six lands in the quiet. It is not late to the event. It is early to the part nobody else shows up for.

On whether to apologize for the delay, the honest answer is that nobody has studied it. The testimony is mixed and thin: one bereaved person said of a friend who took two months, "she didn't reach out for two months afterwards, which is fine." That is one person. What none of it supports is treating the delay as a reason to make the silence permanent.

Job's friends got seven days of this right before they said anything.

Seven days without a word

The oldest story about this in the Bible is a story about people who did it well and then ruined it by talking.

Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come on him, they each came from his own place: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite; and they made an appointment together to come to sympathize with him and to comfort him.

When they lifted up their eyes from a distance, and didn’t recognize him, they raised their voices, and wept; and they each tore his robe, and sprinkled dust on their heads toward the sky.

So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.

Job 2:11-13, in the World English Bible. Three men travel to a friend, see the state of him, and sit on the ground for a week without speaking.

What happens next is most of the book. They start explaining. They work out reasons, they suggest what he might have done to deserve it, and by the end God tells them they have spoken wrongly. The part everyone remembers as wise is the part where they said nothing.

That is not an instruction to stay silent, and it is worth being careful here: they showed up first. The silence was seven days of sitting on the ground next to him, not seven days of not texting.

The other line usually quoted at this is short:

Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep.

Romans 12:15. Paul is writing to a whole church about how its members treat one another, so it is addressed to a community rather than to one friend with a phone. It still says the thing: the job is to be alongside what somebody is feeling, not to move them out of it.

One thing to do tonight

Send four words that ask for nothing. "Thinking of you today." Then, separately, name one thing you will do and a day you will do it.

You do not need the right sentence. Nobody has one, the research is clear that nobody has one, and the person you are writing to is not grading it.

If you want a passage to send with it, Bible Nudge takes a sentence about what is going on and gives back one passage with the verses around it, rather than a list of fifty. Find a passage.

There is a fuller piece on what to say to someone who lost a loved one, and one on what to say to someone whose parent died if that is the one.

If you are the bereaved person here and what you are carrying is heavier than a page, tell somebody tonight. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, Find A Helpline lists services by country.