What do I say to someone who is grieving?

LOUISVILLE — Shelby Forsythia’s “Of Course I’m Here Right Now: Three Actually Helpful Things to Say to Someone Grieving,” which will be published March 31, has those three helpful things we can say right there in the book title: “of course,” “I’m here” and “right now.”

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Forsythia, a grief coach, author and podcast host, was the most recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Her 61-minute conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe can be heard here.

People want to know what they can say to someone who’s grieving, Forsythia said. As she researched her book, she found that “even grieving people themselves, having been through a loss, struggled to answer that question. They don’t necessarily know what to say or remember what was helpful, in part because they remember what hurt: ‘God needed another angel’ or ‘God doesn’t close a door without opening a window’ or ‘everything happens for a reason’ or ‘this will have meaning in your life down the road.’ People remember, especially when they’re in the darkest moment of their life, the things that added pain to the pile of what they are carrying as opposed to what actually helped.”

She hears from clients that there are people who say hurtful things, “and then there are people who disappear, and [they worry] ‘there’s not anyone else trying to show up for me in any kind of meaningful way.’” We “are all adjacent to somebody who’s grieving right now,” she said.

Forsythia said she had a crisis of faith after her mother died. “I wasn’t just grieving her — I was grieving my relationship with God,” she told the hosts. In her mind, she replayed the monologue from the film “Bruce Almighty” where God is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass. “I’m an ant on that anthill” and God’s “burning me alive is the level of pain that felt like,” she said. “My mom was somehow taken away by this angry man in the sky for some reason I don’t understand. I was just as angry at God as I was at the unfairness of it all.”

“I always tell people to tread very, very, very carefully when it comes to referencing God in grief — not just because you don’t want to foist your beliefs on somebody else, but because a lot of people are questioning, what is my relationship to God … or the meaning of ‘why the heck am I here after grief comes about?’”

The phrases “of course” and “I’m here” and “right now” grew out of “working with grieving people for more than 10 years and also being a grieving person myself for more than 12 years and noticing patterns develop over time,” Forsythia said. “These are three phrases that are nondenominational and nonreligious … that seem to work every time for different reasons.” Each is offered as a statement opposing a story grieving people often tell themselves:

• The first story is “I’m crazy,” she said. It can show us as “I’m so weird for feeling this way” or “if someone knew how I was really feeling I’d be committed to an institution or I’d be exiled from my friend or family group.”
• “I’m alone” is the second story grieving people often tell themselves. The person may feel physically alone or face emotional or mental loneliness. There can also be a spiritual aloneness: “I have been abandoned by God, or by what I believe holds up the universe,” is how Forsythia put it.
• “It’s going to be like this forever” is the third story. This is especially true for death-related losses, but it can also be true for the end of a relationship or the loss of a job or a dream.

“You can’t tell people the opposite: ‘You’re not crazy. You’re not alone. It won’t be like this forever,’” she said. “They won’t believe you because you are counteracting their lived experience.”

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She’s seen the “right now” phrase pop up frequently in chats during an online course she teaches on grief. “Right now, I don’t see how to raise my kids without my husband” and “Right now, I can’t see myself falling in love again after a breakup” and “Right now, I feel like since my cat died, my house is the loneliest place in the world.”

“It takes sentences that can feel permanent and adds context and time to them,” she said. There’s also “a little bit of faith folded in”: “That’s right now, but maybe one day, you’ll have that figured out and it will not feel like this forever.”

It’s a framework that we can use in our most intimate relationships, Forsythia said, but it’s also helpful for pastors, organization leaders and educators who might enter a sanctuary or a staff meeting and say, “Of course some people are going to be on edge and a little unfocused right now,” she said. “The world is on fire, and I have not forgotten that you all carry your own personal griefs in addition to everything going on in the world.

“Right now we’re in this moment and in this season. This is our project, and we will do the best we can with what we have.”

“Just to hear that in a meeting or in a sermon, people will say, ‘They said what I’m thinking and feeling. They set the table with grief and acknowledged it’s in the room’” before “getting to whatever it is” you were planning on bringing up or teaching or preaching, she said.

During an “elevator pitch” on the book that Forsythia offered near the end of the conversation, she noted “a magic and a sorcery that happens when you use [the three phrases] instead of ‘sorry for your loss’ or ‘my condolences’ or ‘God has a plan’ or ‘everything happens for a reason.’”

“It is truly the simplest framework with words alone that I have found thus far to companion people who are grieving,” she said. “The best thing about words is they are free. They’re the best grief support tool anyone has at their disposal.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.