Grief

How to Love Someone Who is Grieving

February 24, 2014 by Jackie Ritz 24 Comments

It’s been almost four years since I lost my younger sister, Dinah. She passed away at the age of 27…much too young to leave this beautiful earth.

My sister felt this world was unbearable.

It collapsed on her.

She couldn’t breath. She couldn’t live.

If you don’t know what that feels like, then count your lucky stars. Many have been to that point. Few admit it. Some go through with it like my sister.

I don’t blame her anymore. I’m not mad at her for choosing to leave me, our family, the life that she had. I can’t say that I understand it. I guess I’ve just accepted it.

In a few days I’ll celebrate her 30th birthday. I might even make her a cake and let 30 balloons into the air. I’ll watch them as they float up and above. I’ll watch them as they move over the mountains and disappear into the sky. And as I squint to see how far they made it, I’ll thank God for the 27 years that I shared with my sister.

I’ve not only lost my sister, but I have been through a miscarriage, and I just recently lost my sister-in-law to breast cancer. Unfortunately, I know grief.

I know it’s hard to love someone who is grieving. You don’t what they want…what they need…their actions may confuse you. You’re scared to say something wrong and scared to say nothing at all.

It can be different for everyone, but, overall, I think humanity is very similar. We have basic needs and when someone that we love dies, we all need similar things.

Things You Can Do For Someone Who is Grieving:

1. Send Them a Hand Written Card

I still have every card that was sent me after my sister died. We tend to minimize things like this, but to the receiver it could mean so much. To know that someone is thinking about them and praying about them…well, it could get them through that moment, that hour, that day.

2. Bring them a Healthy Meal

A nutritious meal is so important when you are going through depression and loss. Your body is being abandoned, it’s an emotional mess, and the hormones are raging. A healthy meal can bring the spirits up and warm the soul. I love this free website Take Them a Meal. You can coordinate meals for someone and other people can sign up to bring meals too.

3. Clean Their House or Hire a Maid

Picking up the house and keeping things organized is not important to the person who has lost someone. Just washing a sink-ful of dishes could feel like an enormous task. If they have kids, laundry, and other household chores, then keeping a clean environment might be nearly impossible. Go over and help them or hire a maid to come for a few weeks or months.

4. Understand Their Perspective

When someone close passes away, it can, literally, change the way the world looks through their eyes. Understand this and empathize with it. Everything in life now compares to what they are going through. Be careful what you say and/or complain about around them. Everything seems incomparable to their circumstance.

5. Be There for Them (if needed)

But don’t be overbearing. Understand if they need space. Sometimes they want to talk about so-and-so’s life. Ask them about it. As someone who is grieving, their greatest fear may be the fainting memory of that person. Talk about their life and let them cry, laugh, scream in anger…whatever they need to do.

6. Be Selfless

My husband is a perfect testimony of this. He poured out his life for me during this dark season of my life. Not only was I grieving the loss of my sister, but I was a (2nd time) new mom. I had a newborn, a 2 year old, and I was overwhelmed. Life came crashing down on me and without my husband I am not sure how I would have survived. He cleaned, cooked, took care of the kids, took care of my family, and was a shoulder I cried on daily. He never did anything for himself. He was always there and I knew I could rely on his strength to pull me through.

7. Listen

Don’t offer advice. Don’t offer promises. Just sit there, grab their hand, and listen. Look them eyes. Don’t be afraid of their grief. Listen and love them.

8. Go Ahead and Invite Them

Don’t assume that they don’t want to be a part of anything going on or planned. Let them decide if they are up for a crowd or a party. Don’t leave them out…but don’t get hurt if they say no. I remember a few times I wish I would have been invited. I might not have gone, but the gesture to invite me would have made my day. It would have let me know that people are thinking about me.

9. Be Yourself

Don’t change yourself for your friend or loved one who is grieving. If you used to make them laugh till their peed themselves, then keep it up. If you used to be physical with them and give them lots of hugs…don’t stop. Be yourself around your friend…that is who they love!

Remember that grief has no timetable. It may take someone a month to get through the worst of it, but then it could take another person a year. Be sensitive to that.

If you want to offer more support, here are a few resources that I love:

Pruned: Blossoming Through Life’s Difficult Seasons (where to buy)
Rebuild From Depression: A Nutrient Guide (where to buy)
Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss (where to buy)

Where is the Church?

April 8, 2013 by Jackie Ritz 24 Comments

Disclaimer: sorry to everyone who follow me for my recipes. I am not strictly a recipe blog. I post random things on my mind and off topic all the time. If that is, solely, why you follow me, just skip on over this post!

I heard this song, Why by Rascal Flatts, for the first time today and just couldn’t believe how it, perfectly, expressed so many of my thoughts surrounding my sister. For those who don’t know, my sister, Dinah, took her own life about 1.5 years ago. It feels like yesterday. Her boyfriend was very tragically killed in an automobile accident by a drunk motorcyclist who ran a red light. The next day, my sister became overwhelmed with grief, confusion, and darkness. I know that if she was thinking straight and could have a “do-over”, she wouldn’t have done this. It leaves so many questions behind for the family. There never feels like there is comfort at all in her death. Fate didn’t take her. Sickness didn’t take her. She took herself and in doing so, she took everything.

The death of mega-church pastor Rick Warren’s son has ripped open my Dinah-wound. His son at 27 years old made the ultimate decision to take his own life after dealing with depression for many, many years. My heart aches for the family because I know the pain and depth of their sorrow. My sister was 27 years old too…almost done with college…and was the happiest I had seen her in a long time.

I love God and I have a great relationship with him. But I do not love the church. In fact, I have so much hurt over the church that there are some places I cannot even go. My question is…when is the church gonna put down their ridiculous mask’s and start doing something? The church has lost it’s practical side and has stopped extending Jesus’ hands and started extending promises of prayers. Prayers are great…but they don’t cut it. Jesus got his hands dirty and touched prostitutes and lepers and mentally ill and depressed people. Who are we reaching out and touching? Bible studies and care groups and home groups only reach out to each other. When are our hands going to open from our little circles of “groups” and reach out to the orphans, the prostitutes, the widows, the hopeless?

When someone is struggling with thoughts of suicide, promises of prayer and intercession are almost laughable! They need more than that. We have people sitting in the pews that are literally screaming for help and you can see it in there eyes! LOOK at them. Don’t look away…look at people in the eyes and you will see the pain. Where is the church? I don’t know the answers, but I do know that something needs to be done to reach out to the lost a little bit better. We need to show more love, instead of judgment. We need to extend grace, instead of gossiping about someone’s shortcomings.

My sister was shunned by her church and her workplace because she went through a divorce. What kind of love is that? I just can’t keep quiet about this lack of grace and love the church has taken on. When will we start to see people again, instead of their failures? When will we start to get dirty again, wrap ourselves in each other’s life mess, instead of avoiding people with too much drama? Why do we think that getting messing in love is any different than what Jesus did? Weren’t His words something like this…

“He who is without sin may cast the first stone.”

I need Jesus friends. I’ve wasted my time with fake friends who run when life gets dirty. What a waste of time! Life is about getting through the crap together.

We, desperately, need help in today’s world. Where is the church?

Why by Rascal Flatts (listen to it on youtube here)

It must’ve been in a place so dark you couldn’t feel the light
Reachin’ for you through that stormy cloud
Now here we are gathered in our little hometown
This can’t be the way you meant to draw a crowd

Oh, why? That’s what I keep askin’
Was there anything I could have said or done?
Oh, I had no clue you were masking
A troubled soul, God only knows what went wrong
And why you’d leave the stage in the middle of a song

Now in my mind I keep you frozen as a seventeen year old
Roundin’ third to score the winning run
You always played with passion no matter what the game
When you took the stage, you shined just like the sun
Oh, why? That’s what I keep askin
‘And was there anything I could have said or done?

Oh, I had no clue you were masking
A troubled soul, oh, God only knows what went wrong
And why you’d leave the stage in the middle of a song

Now the oak trees are swayin’ in the early autumn breeze
The golden sun is shining on my face
The tangled thoughts I hear a mockingbird sing
This old world really ain’t that bad a place

Oh, why? There’s no comprehending
And who am I to try to judge or explain?
Oh, but I do have one burning question
Who told you life wasn’t worth the fight?
They were wrong, they lied, and now you’re gone, and we cried
‘Cause it’s not like you to walk away in the middle of a song
Your beautiful song, your absolutely beautiful song

My sister. My beautiful Maid of Honor. Actually, it was my honor to have her as a sister.

Never Say These Things to a Grieving Person

October 29, 2012 by Jackie Ritz 29 Comments

Found this note written by Dinah a few months ago.

Before I lost my sister a year ago, I had no idea what to say to someone who was grieving the loss of a loved one. Honestly, I was clueless. I avoided them because I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. No one near me had ever died. My grandparents all died before I was old to enough to remember. I lived a perfect, happy life; free of death and mourning; free of anger or questions for God.

Then September 23, 2011 happened. The darkness that surrounded my family was enormous. Our house sounded like something off a horror movie. Random sounds of weeping, fists banging on walls in anger, and screams from the nightmare that we endured was something that I will never forget. I can’t describe the deep, dark pit that we were in for several weeks.

Confusion.

Self-pity.

Hate.

Where are you, God?

The emotions emerge as I write this.

It’s hard to be around someone who is grieving. You wouldn’t want their sad world to cloud your happy world, right?

“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.” – Ecclesiastes 7:2

How can we help? What can we say?

Here’s a list I put together that may help you if you encounter someone who lost of a friend or loved one. These are things you should NEVER say:

1. “Everything happens for a reason.”

This is my favorite one that I just want to sock ’em in the eye for. I mean, really? My sister died for a reason? What reason was that? Oh, it won’t be revealed yet? Blah. My sister’s life LIVING could happen for a reason. She was only 27 when she died, she could have done so much more…FOR A REASON!

Please don’t ever say this to someone. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t comfort. It only pisses ’em off.

2. “God has everything under control.”

You may or may not believe in God. I do; so when people said this to me, I wanted to look at them and say,

“Really? How is THIS under control? Come to my house at night and tell me if it sounds like everything is under control!”

3. “_________ is in a much better place.”

Are you God? Do you stand at judgement with the Book of Life and know where our souls are going? What if I don’t even believe in heaven? How does that comfort my aching soul?

What if ___________ didn’t even believe in Jesus Christ? You don’t know the destination of ANYONE’S soul.

Just avoid this all-together. It may make YOU feel better to think that __________ is in heaven, but it may not do anything for the grieving person. So keep it to yourself.

4. I know what you are going through.

Really? NO YOU DON’T. Who do you know that took their own life? What’s that you say? Your grandma died a year ago? Ummm, she lived a full life…you cannot compare that.

Truth is, even if you have been there, don’t say this. You, truly, don’t know what someone is going through; only they do. Saying this can evoke many angry emotions to the grieving person.

5. You’re a strong person. I know you will get through this.

I don’t want to be strong. I am NOT strong.

Don’t pressure someone to live up to this. In the despair and grief of losing someone so dear, you don’t want to be strong. You want to cry, weep, scream, and do all the things that people classify as weak. Let them do this. Let them grieve in whatever way they need to. Don’t pressure them to be anything that they don’t want to be.

6. It’s been a year. You really need to move on.

Don’t you think we know life has to move on? That’s THE MAIN thing we are grieving about. Life is moving on without my sister. She is stuck at 27 years old for the rest of MY life. I’ll never raise my kids with her kids. I’ll never grow old with her and see how her face wrinkles. We know this!

Just don’t say that. It hurts enough already knowing life is moving on without ________.

7. God is going to be glorified in all this.

How about if I slap you upside the head? Is God glorified in that too?

Usually when people say this they are referring to the death of the person. They say that ______ death is going to touch many people in the same circumstance.

Couldn’t their LIFE do the same thing? Couldn’t them being ALIVE touch many people? Please refrain from saying this, even if you really do believe it.

All these things evoke a response of anger, confusion, questions for the grieving person. Take it from me, it doesn’t absolutely no good to say any of these 7 things to someone who lost a friend or loved one.

There are much better things to say. Let me help you out:

1. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.

2. Words fall short but I’m here.

3. ________’s life was beautiful.

4. My deepest thoughts and prayers are with you.

5. I brought you a hot meal.

6. I’m here for you. Call me ANYTIME.

7. I’m here for you. Even if it’s to just sit next to you at your house so you’re not alone.

8. Tell me about ________’s life.

9. How are you doing? No, REALLY, how are you doing?

10. I brought you some groceries.

The grieving person is still a person. They don’t have cooties or a scarlet letter. They are you…they are me…they are one of us. They don’t want you to avoid talking about it. They don’t want you to think it’s a sore subject.

When someone would ask me, “How are you?…no really, how are you?” I knew they really cared. And sometimes it opened up a can of worms depending on how my emotions were on that day. Sometimes, I talked about Dinah. I shared stories from our past. I relived moments we shared together in time.

Moments like these bring healing.

Grief

How to Love Someone Who is Grieving