Listener’s Advice on Offering Sympathies

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. A while back, we had a call from Nancy in Rhode Island. She was objecting to the term passed away, particularly in news reports. You remember this, Grant?

It was passed away for dying, right?

Yeah, yeah. She preferred the term died. She felt like saying passed away sort of sugar-coated reality and was particularly inappropriate if you talked about somebody who died a tragic death, for example.

And we received a lot of response to this on our Facebook page. There’s a really interesting discussion going on there.

But I wanted to share in particular this email that we received from Tricia Mendoza. She lives in Chula Vista, California, which is just south of San Diego.

And she writes, the discussion took me back to the death of our very young son, Martine, who died after a four-year struggle with liver disease in 2004.

When our son died, people were quick to say, I’m sorry for your loss. All I could think of was tough New York detectives on Law and Order, and it wasn’t comforting.

I kept wanting to yell back, Martine wasn’t a couch or a wallet. He was our son.

In my own grief, I learned a valuable lesson that I hope you’ll pass on. When offering sympathies, always use the person’s first name when consoling the friend or family member.

If you don’t know the person’s name or it has escaped you in the moment, say your husband, your brother, your dear friend. Don’t be afraid to say died.

Your caller was correct. Passed away minimizes it, and it’s not gentle but jarring. When you’re in pain from the death of a family member that went before your time, you just need a little empathy.

I’ve had several friends lose children since our son’s death, and I immediately prepare them for all the things people are going to unknowingly say to them that will slice through their hearts.

While my words prepare them and they have told me later that they were thankful, it will be even better still if more people can just say what is so and share that one small moment of another’s grief.

Yeah, I agree with everything that you read there, everything that she had to say. It’s been 25 years since my brother died, and I can remember very clearly feeling like a lot of people were trying to help and somehow making it worse.

I’m saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. If you’ve got thoughts on what to say when someone dies, what’s the language that you use? What’s the language that you’d like to hear? What could have been said better?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or email us at words@waywordradio.org.