Distant Steeple. © Patty Fitts.
All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia is reported to have judged a contest once that was designed to honor the most caring child. The winner was a little four year old girl living next door to a grieving widower who had only recently lost his wife. One day, the child noticed that her elderly neighbor was sitting in a chair on his front porch, crying. Immediately, she ran across his yard, climbed up onto his lap, and then proceeded to just sit there with him until the man’s tears had stopped. When the girl’s mother asked her afterward what she had said to the man, the wise young girl replied: “Nothing, I only helped him cry.”
There is a tendency in most people to be a fixer. When we see someone in pain, we want to “make it better.” Mothers see the tears in the eyes of their child and they try to make them feel better. Everyone one of us does this at one time or another.
One fact of life is that there are some kinds of pain that no one can fix. That is the hardest lesson to understand when working with the bereaved. Grief is a journey that needs a companion, not a fixer.
I was once asked to do the invocation at a memorial service at a children’s hospital. As I drove to the service I searched for the words that would bring some measure of comfort to those who had lost children in the past year. When it was finally time for me to speak, I opened my prayer with these words: “No matter how eloquently spoken, or sincerely intended, words tend to trivialize our pain.”
Nothing can “fix” a broken heart. With time and work, healing will come. By offering nothing more than comfort and emotional support, the little girl did exactly the right thing.
© John C. Fitts. All Rights Reserved. Words Tend to Trivialize Our Pain previously appeared as The Most Caring Child in Grace Drops, Volume One (2003). Reprinted with permission from the author.
Learn more about the featured painting: Distant Steeple. © Patty Fitts. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission. www.pattyfitts.com
The post Grace Drops: Words Tend to Trivialize Our Pain appeared first on Mesothelioma Help.
