Thirteen years old. You aren’t old enough to drive a car. But this is the age where the seeds of freedom are being planted. You aren’t old enough to understand abstract thinking but are slowly moving there. Everything is black and white – kind of. Emotions are high, all over the map. Everything in your teenage mind is a crisis. Nothing is small. Music is new and highly suspect. Unless it resonates with your overreactive emotions.

Then the unthinkable happens – your thirteen-year-old dies. Right before high school. Before college. No kids. No chance to drive a car. Opportunities forever silenced because of a tragedy you, dear parent, had no control over.  

No parent should have to bury their child, regardless of how old their child is. It’s not natural. Or fair. Nothing in this world is fair or equitable, even though that’s what we want to believe.

Once upon a time, there was this thinking about stages of grief. Clinicians thought of it in terms of steps you would work through as if working through them was a linear process. Instead, years of experience and research taught us differently. The reality is grief is messy and unkempt. With more and more people experiencing grief in Western culture, we are beginning to see that grief is anything but linear. You will go through each stage when and if you are ready, sometimes barreling through one stage and then stagnating in the next. More often, you will travel through multiple stages at the same time. But no one, not even a counselor or psychologist, tells you when and if you are finished grieving.

Finishing. It makes it feel like an end-game thing, like the death of your loved one. It’s not. But this is the best term we have to articulate it.

So, how do you know when you are ready to move on? If someone had an answer for that, they’d be a billionaire! Everyone would purchase the solution for $49.95, and no one else would suffer. We’re not built for that. We have to process and work through grief like any other emotion. And most of us are bad stewards of our emotions. We let them get the better of us – sometimes. That’s why there are people more intelligent than us who teach about emotional intelligence – because we all need help processing our stuff.

Then you have dumb people who do not have a relationship with you, saying ignorant things like:

“You are still grieving.”

“Just get over it.”

“He is better off not suffering anymore.”

“Be grateful that she’s in a better place.”

You wouldn’t say to a stranger, “Hey, your dress looks ridiculous.” You probably wouldn’t say that to someone you had a new friendship with. Yet people articulate themselves with poor word choices, thinking they have a corner on the market regarding grief. They believe themselves to be an expert on the subject, with zero experience of a child’s death.

On the other hand, if you had a fantastic relationship with the ridiculous dress woman, you might say to her, “Jamie, how about we look for something else to wear? Let’s wear that dress tomorrow.” And you can get away with that because you know Jamie isn’t thinking about wardrobe choices in her grief. You know that because you’ve sat with her through it. Your relationship with Jamie gives you credibility, unlike the stranger. You can say it without hurting her feelings. Chances are, after that interaction, she’ll be grateful for you saying so! But without a relationship, can you really speak into what she’s wearing? Pay attention to your relationships. Because you don’t get to say anything if you do not have a relationship with that person, like Jamie.

Instead of saying a word, send a text message. Write to that person a note saying how much you feel for them. Go out of your way to sit with them and interact with them. Don’t talk about the person who died. Let them dictate the conversation. Or let them be quiet and just sit with them. Often, the most powerful words are the ones left unsaid.

But you never tell someone they are still grieving – unless your intention is to destroy any chance of having a relationship with that person. If someone is that careless with you, a person you have no relationship with, do you really want to try to be friends with them? If you do, if you really want to build a relationship with someone who’s lost a child, choose your words with care.

Remember, there’s only one expert in your grief: you.