001 Helpful in loss: Making space for a story

If you are part of this readership, you are the kind of person who asks, “What’s one way I can be helpful when someone’s lost a loved one?”

It’s often less formal:

“Jon. Help! My friend’s mom just died, and I don’t know what to say!”

There are, of course, a million ways to be helpful. However, there’s a gap between a million possible ways, and one actual practical next step. In these Friday issues, I’m going to talk about a different practical step each week.

I’d love for you to respond by email or by commenting.

Eventually, I’m guessing that these Friday reports will become something else; chapters, presentations, videos. But for now, view them as explorations.

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Making space for a story

• “Tell me about your uncle? What do you remember most?”

• “Can I tell you about how much your dad helped our family?”

• “Being there when she died must have been hard. What happened?”

When I asked 150 people what they wished people had said or done after a loved one died, about a quarter talked about stories.

Human beings are built for story, so that wasn’t surprising. But I realized that they, or you, were talking about making space for three particular kinds of stories.

What making space for stories looks like is this: One person telling a story about the person or the event, and the other person simply receiving the story, without interrupting, explaining, defending, or responding with their own story.

There are at least three story spaces people wanted:

They wanted someone to ask them for stories about their loved one.

They wanted someone to tell them stories about their loved one.

They wanted someone to ask them about what happened. And then listen without offering commentary.

Let’s unpack those three kinds of stories, and then we’ll talk about why they matter.

Ask me about my loved one. 

Mourners wanted someone to ask them about their loved one. It’s the kind of thing that happens in a eulogy, of course. But inviting a person to tell stories over coffee is a way to help a mourner honor the life of a person and identify what matters and what doesn’t matter.

This kind of telling stories about a loved one happens often when I’m sitting with a family in a hospital room. In the quiet of death, sometimes, conversation happens.

Out there, in the hallway, the conversations and activity dedicated to life continue. In here, a son tells me how stubborn his mom was, all the way to taking three days to die. And then he tells me stories from her life that prove his case. "I hope I have some of that," he says. 

In another room, one person will say, “Remember that time he threw a shoe at the bear?” And I’ll hear the story with details added by several people.

Another person will say, “My mom was the bravest person I ever knew.” And I’ll hear stories about childhood, about jobs, about illness.

I make space for those stories by simply being quiet. I might ask an open-ended question, like, "What was she like?"

But then I wait, sometimes almost up to the point of being uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for me, that is. For him, he's looking at the hand of his mom. And the stories take some time. 

Sometimes this storytelling is to a nurse and a chaplain, so that those of us who provide care will know that this isn’t all of the person. Sometimes, it’s so a minister will have information for a funeral service. Sometimes it’s so the kids will know more about this person they only saw as an old person. Sometimes it simply because we relish the retelling of stories.

In the survey, one respondent said, “Ask me about our brother and our relationship.” Another said they wanted someone to “listen while I talked about her.”

We want to be able to bear witness to their life, to tell what they meant to us. It's a way of keeping them alive for a little longer. 

Tell me your stories about my loved one.

A second kind of stories people want are stories about their loved one. 

We don't know all the life of the person. We're looking for validation. We're looking for evidence that they mattered to other people.

If it’s our child, we want to know that they were turning out okay.

• “Your son was so amazing,” someone told a survey respondent.

• Someone else wanted people “to talk about Dan. Things he had done or said of a positive nature.”

If it’s our parent, we want to know that they cared about us.

• “Your dad talked about you all the time.”

• “The people who knew my mom best told me what a good person she was and how hard working she was.”

• “A person who knew my father shared her memory with me of something my father did decades ago that was a help to her family.”

• I once told a friend that I’d never met his dad, but from what I’d heard of him, I was sure that he would be proud of how my friend worked as part of our team.

Sometimes this process of filling in missing pieces takes decades, of course. A friend's dad worked on classified research. She knew he held some patents, but he couldn't talk about them. He couldn't talk about what he did, what he worked on, how he worked. 

Eventually, there was an induction to a hall of fame. And she got to hear stories from his former coworkers, now elderly themselves. 

Let me talk about what happened.

The third kind of story to make space for is the story of what happened.

I’m just starting to understand the value of this.

I’ve heard people talking about what happened on the day their loved one died. I hear it often after the death. We talk about those things.

But then, in the survey responses, several people talked about their desire to be asked about the story. And in responses and in emails, people told me stories of the death of their parent or their child.

And I’m beginning to realize that people tell me those stories because 1) no one has ever listened to them talk about it, 2) it helps them begin making sense of what happened, 3) it helps them know that they did what they could.

That’s true for me.

One of our daughters died in 1989, from complications of Trisomy 18, a genetic disorder. We knew it was going to happen. For the five weeks of her life we anticipated it, but in the early morning when she stopped breathing in my arms, there was still a sense of “Should I have done something?”

Tiny chest compressions. Tiny puffs of air. Anything.

I knew, in my head, that this death is what would happen.

I felt, in my heart, that I could have helped at that moment.

And I never talked with anyone about it.

Nancy was with me in the middle those moments, of course, and we held Kathryn close, and then each other. We walked together through the next decades.

But I have never known who to talk to about that moment, who would have let me talk, who would have waited quietly, who would have said, “That must have been hard.” And would have said nothing else.

Sometime in the last seven years, as I’ve watched breathing stop many times, as I’ve waited for the heart beats to stop, I finally realized that there was nothing that could have been done.

And I finally put the story on the outside of my head where I could make sense of it.

Sometimes we need to tell our story, not for what anyone can do, but because the telling helps us order what happened. Expression helps us make sense.

Why is this something people long for?

I don’t have all the research support at this point, but my observational experience suggests several reasons.

First, in order to hear their story, you have to be quiet. And suddenly, they have a listening ear and face allowing them to talk about their deep grief, about their confusion, about a person they cared about. There aren’t many places people are offered the space to speak.

Second, the process of storytelling helps us form the little anecdotes into stories and then narratives that shape how we remember our loved one.

Third, the process of storytelling helps us make sense of our experience. By speaking to another person (or by writing it out), we discover what we might not have realized before about this person and about our relationship. (This is related to the idea of expressive writing.)

Fourth, as we listen to the stories other people tell us, we learn that others think our loved one matters, too.

Fifth, as we listen, we fill in pieces about their life that we didn’t know before.

Sixth, our loved one is allowed to get the respect we think they should have.

But in that moment, they don’t want to hear your story.

It’s tempting to talk about your loss, your grief, your survival. We’re used to offering worse stories to help people feel better.

We may not want to have to absorb their pain, their stories. So we say, “Oh, I know how you feel. When my dad (or my pet, or my friend’s mom’s sister) died, we were all just confused.”

Who cares?

Your grief, your loss, your story, is for another place. In this moment, when you’ve expressed your condolences, when you are sitting across the table, when the coffee is cooling, ask them to tell you about their sibling, and then listen.

As one person wrote in the survey, “Listen to me processing my grief without judgment or bromides.”

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There’s more to this story of stories, of course.

I’ll be writing about how story-telling is more complicated than what is here.

For example, as I point out in This Is Hard, “Not everyone who dies is a nice person.”

And not everyone asks for stories.

And when the loss is at the very beginning of a life, the stories are all in the future.

And many other things are helpful, and we’ll talk about those in the coming weeks.

But for now, this should help you if you have to offer support to someone this weekend:  

Make space for a story.

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Additional resources:

Creating space for someone to talk about a loved one.

How to write a grief card

31 ways to offer support

“This is Hard”: What I Say When Loved Ones Die