Tuesday, June 22, 2010

How to Help a Grieving Friend

Completely excerpted from a series of posts on MollyPiper.com.
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Not surprisingly, I’ve had lots of conversations with other families who have grieved a tragedy like ours and reflected on my own experience in the past few months.

For those of you just arriving on the scene, we were expecting our second child, a daughter, to arrive somewhere around September 25, 2007. We went into the hospital on Saturday morning, September 22nd, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been feeling the baby move as much as I would have expected. We arrived in the triage, were hooked up to monitors and ultrasounds and told that our baby was no longer living. We delivered her that day. We named her Felicity Margaret.

It’s been six months since she left us, and I’ve had good and bad experiences since. I thought I would try to relay some of the helpful things you can do to understand and help your friends who are grieving. Of course this is all from my own experience, and I certainly am not a grief expert in any authoritative way, I just know what I’ve gone through.

So if you think this would be helpful to you now or in the future, I hope you’ll read along, think, comment, pray, and act on behalf of your friends or family members who are grieving. You can be a profound blessing to people you may not feel like you understand.

Other posts in the series:
Just know that she's exhausted.
She's a scatterbrain.
There is no timetable.
She may explode (but probably not).
She can't grieve on command.
Ask her specific questions.
Avoid the flippant comfort of Hallmark answers.
Always on my mind.
Cleaning her house is next to godliness.

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