Going beyond grief: All the things you should not say to the bereaved

In a scene from the iconic British comedy series ‘The IT Crowd’, Roy — a socially inept techie — searches for the right thing to say to the bereaved wife at his boss’s funeral. “Just say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ and move on,” his colleague advises. Emboldened by the crisp script, Roy walks up to the mournful woman and whispers: “I’m sorry for your loss. Move on.”
Real life doesn’t have canned laughter or we would be drowning in its surround sound right now, given the number of people pulling a Roy in the face of Covid’s dark hand, as the virus continues to cram graveyards and renders speechless even those fluent in the art of breaking bad news.
Humanity’s eternal lack of vocabulary around loss is being increasingly laid bare by a bevy of solemn social media posts which — like signboards inside restaurants — bear lessons in etiquette that are assumed to be common sense until they aren’t.
“Do not keep calling us and expect us to give minute by minute details of the medical history or incidents which happened prior to or during hospitalisation as well as reasons for the death,” reads the second bullet point in a six-point recent blog by a Chennai-based mental health professional who lost her husband to Covid-19 and was shocked “when someone claimed that he was more depressed because he knew my husband since school, so he has more rights to be depressed than me and my children.”
Besides asking people to avoid statements such as “you should have given him the vaccine earlier,” and what breathing exercises the kids should do, the mental health professional reiterates in the blog: “Don’t use our grief to promote business. I was shocked on seeing a post in a professional circle that claimed that I was helped by that person to secure injection for my husband.”
This doesn’t shock Dolly Sharma (name changed), a Bangalore-based college professor and mother of two teen girls who has “grown up” in the last one year after losing the life partner who mollycoddled her for 22 years before Covid took him in April last year. Fresh in the wake of the demise, a family friend from Sharma’s native Jamshedpur, said to her: “This is the right time to convert (to another religion).” “Someone had converted her without her knowledge when she had lost her husband a few years ago. She wanted me to do the same,” says 48-year-old Sharma, adding that there were many who not only took “undue advantage” of her situation but also “bonded with friends over my incident.”
“One friend compared her situation to mine. She told people that her husband has only lost his job to Covid, while I had...” says Sharma.
Besides the showers of advice, even well-intentioned platitudes such as “they are in a better place”— while acceptable in the case of death from prolonged illness — sting like verbal darts in the context of Covid. “You are a strong woman,” callers kept telling Thane-based Rajani Jagtap when she lost her husband, Shridhar, to Covid in June last year.
“It was irritating to hear. Because what you’re feeling is not strong but vulnerable. You just want to put your head on someone’s shoulders and cry,” says Jagtap, who was also startled to find a morose queue of compounders and ward boys waiting with folded hands outside her office when she resumed work last year. “I felt like a museum piece,” recalls Jagtap, who had asked the staffers to get back to work. “There is no standard operating procedure for grief,” well-known radio jockey Rohini Ramanathan said in a poignant podcast in which she recounted navigating life after the sudden demise of her husband in Singapore in January 2017. Besides a wedding “that turned into a funeral” because of the sheer number of people who came forward to condole her, Ramanathan recalled shaking off questions ranging from “You didn’t cry at funeral” to “How much did the thing (funeral arrangements) cost? Was it electric or non-electric?”
Similar queries had ambushed a Borivli-based lab technician, who lost both her parents within two days of each other to Covid last year. The parents were staying with her aunt, who had tested positive first. “There were people who asked me: ‘Why was your aunt admitted first and then your father and lastly, your mother?’ Do they think I would in any way discriminate between my very own parents?” asks the technician. “In fact, they had even finished their course,” says the bitter technician, who finds the idea of condolences “hypocritical”.
But then, is there even a right way to condole? “You don’t have to say anything profound,” answers a social media post by Sindhoor Pangal, a bereaved wife whose loss is still raw. ‘In fact, it is really not about what you say. It’s about listening, being willing to witness pain and not look away. It is about answering the call knowing very well there will be an hour of sobbing.” For Sharma, resilience came from second-hand empathy. She had heard that her college principal, a woman, had told someone about Sharma: “She’s a lady, she will bounce back.”