Bearing Witness to Grief: A Powerful Way to Support Someone Who is Grieving

It's been an interesting experience for me to experience the loss of my dad and both feel my own grief and also observe it with the lens of a palliative care physician.

I have noticed how healing it has been for me when others bear witness to my pain and also when they bear witness to my dad as a person.

This is how we can best support people who are grieving after someone they love has died: bear witness to the pain or bear witness to the person.

Helping healers heal others and themselves.

Delia

Delia Chiaramonte, MD

www.integrativepalliative.com

Coping Courageously: A Heart-Centered Guide for Navigating a Loved One’s Illness Without Losing Yourself is available here: www.copingcourageously.com 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Integrative Palliative Podcast. If you care for the ill or aging, either at work or at home, this podcast is for you. You'll get plenty of tips for how to help care for the ill person and just as many tips on how to care for yourself. I'm glad you're here. Let's get started. Welcome to the Integrative Palliative Podcast. This is Dr. Delia Caramonte, and today we are going to talk about bearing witness to grief. So the title of this episode is Bearing Witness to Grief, a powerful way to support someone who is grieving. And if you've been listening along with me in 2025, you'll know that I've missed a couple episodes and I am so very sorry about this, but it's because I myself am grieving the loss of my father, and I made the choice to prioritize myself and my family. So thanks for your understanding. Now, this loss of my father was complicated and traumatic, and I'll tell you more about that next time, but today I just want to talk about the idea of bearing witness. And I want to talk about it because I have noticed in these past several weeks how much it matters. And I don't think that I really realized that before. I knew things like you shouldn't rush someone who's grieving, and any way that you grieve is normal and fine. And of course I knew that you shouldn't reject people who are grieving or run away from their grief. But until I really experienced it in this intense way, I don't think that I realized the importance of just bearing witness. And what I mean by that is acknowledging the experience of grief and also the specialness of the person who is being grieved. So those two things, bearing witness to the loss and bearing witness to the person. I think this really is the fundamental way to support somebody who's grieving. And it's great for anybody who's a supporter, too, because it takes away the responsibility of saying, you know, just the right thing or coming up with some wise statement about the person because none of that is helpful. Really, what is helpful to someone who's grieving is acknowledge what I'm going through and acknowledge my person who I miss. And I think it's a nearly universal experience that if you know somebody who's grieving, you want to do the right thing, you want to be there for them and show up for them, but you may not know how to do it or what to say. And you may be afraid to say the wrong thing. And then when we're afraid to say the wrong thing, sometimes we pull away. And partly for that reason, people tend to feel very lonely when they're grieving. Part of that is that grief is kind of intrinsically a lonely experience because nobody else can can feel just what you're feeling. But also, some people who you're normally close to may pull away because they're just not sure what to do. Also, sometimes people are afraid they'll make it worse. So if they bring up the person or say, you know, how are you doing, or I'm sorry for what you've been through, they're worried that maybe you forgot about it and now they're going to make you feel worse. And of course, that isn't so, because if you're grieving somebody, you're on some level thinking about them most of the time. And someone else bringing up support or bearing witness to your struggle is not going to make you feel worse. It will generally make you feel better. So personally, I've had several people who just repeatedly keep checking in, thinking of you, you know, how are you doing? I'm here if you want to talk. And I really deeply appreciate that. So if you have somebody in your life who's grieving, you don't need to run to their house and spend all day with them. They probably don't even want that, but you certainly could send a text or an email or a card just acknowledging their situation, acknowledging what they're going through, or acknowledging the specialness of their person. And ideally, both of those things. So, what does it mean to bear witness to somebody's pain or loss? Basically, you are just acknowledging the grief without trying to minimize it and without trying to fix it, because of course you can't fix it. But just the acknowledgement itself is helpful. And I think that's what people sometimes don't realize is that for an unfixable situation, just acknowledging it, seeing it, telling the person that you get it, you see it, is itself a healing act. So sometimes people make the mistake of trying to put a positive sheen on it, like, well, at least he lived a long life, or God doesn't give you more than you can handle, or everything happens for a reason. But really, the safest and generally most supportive thing to say is something like, I am just so sorry, and I see how hard this is. And ideally, you would continue to bear witness longer than you think you would need to, because this is, of course, a common experience that everybody shows up for the first week or two. And then the general message sometimes to the grieving can be like, well, it's about time for you to move on and get over it, but that's sometimes not how people feel themselves when they're grieving. So it's really important to bear witness in the beginning, and it's also important to bear witness over time, maybe even especially around holidays or anniversaries, anniversaries of their birth or of their death, maybe around Mother's Day or Father's Day, maybe big holidays where the person may have been a focal point of the family. So continuing to bear witness to the pain that comes with losing somebody, not just in the beginning times, but over time. So basically the idea here is that just communicating, I see it. This is really hard for you, and I see it. Just that is a healing experience for the person who is grieving. And I don't think I ever really learned that. I certainly didn't learn that in medical school. And I don't think I really knew that that itself, I see it, I see you, I see it, that that itself is a healing act. But I myself have perceived that. That that just that when people acknowledge, wow, this is really hard and I see it, that that itself is healing for me. So I will be better at doing that for other people going forward. And that's why I wanted to share it with you guys today. And the other thing that I realized in this experience is that bearing witness is not just for the pain, but it's also for the person, the person who has died. So for my dad, we had a little Zoom memorial, and he didn't know a lot of people. He lived a small life, he was a very introverted person, but it felt important to me to share him with other people, both people who knew him, but also people who care about me but didn't know him. It felt surprisingly to me important to share him, to have other people know him. And that's really bearing witness to the person. And again, I didn't realize before that that would be important. I wouldn't have thought that that was particularly important to me, but it turns out that it was. And so that's why I want to share it with you in case that's true for other people in your life. So when people say things to me like, oh, I loved his art or what an interesting person he was or what a unique life he led, it turns out that those statements are healing for me. And I wouldn't have known that before. And in trying to figure out why is that so healing for me, is when I came to this idea that bearing witness to the person and who they were is really important for the grieving person. So we can offer that to other people. Bear witness to their pain and loss, but also bear witness to their loved one. And if you knew their loved one, you can share your own perspective. But if you didn't know their loved one, you can ask about them. So someone who's grieving, you might say, tell me about your mom, tell me about your dad, tell me about your sister or your friend or your aunt or your uncle. What were they like? What was something you really appreciated about them? What kind of person were they? How did they live their life? This bearing witness to who they were when they were on this earth is healing to the people who love them. So this is what I want you to remember when you have somebody in your life who's grieving. That could be someone that you know, it could be a patient, it could be someone in your family. Don't avoid the topic because you're afraid you'll make them sad. You won't. Don't offer cliches like everything happens for a reason, because nobody grieving wants to hear that. And don't think you have to come up with something profound to say, because you don't, and there isn't really anything profound that you can say. So just remember, bear witness to their loss and bear witness to the person that they lost. Those two things, if you do that, you will be a huge support to someone who's grieving. And you can do it with a text, you can do it with a card, you can do it in person, you can do it with a phone call, you can do it by sending a gift basket. It doesn't matter how you do it. But I think that's our guiding light for supporting someone who's grieving. Bear witness to their pain, bear witness to their person. So tell me what you think. If you yourself have been through a grieving experience, where it's part of the work that you do, you work with people who are grieving, or you just have a different idea because of your life experience, share it with me. You can find me at Integrativepalliative.com. You can send me an email through there or sign up for my newsletter. I would really love to hear from you. I think we have to talk about these things because then we get better at supporting each other. And really, we're just all walking each other home on this crazy earth in this challenging life. So thanks for listening. Thanks for being here. Let me know what else I missed. And please share this podcast with someone who you think might be interested. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye. This podcast is brought to you by the Integrative Palliative Institute. Visit our website, integrativepalliative.com. There you can access physician and clinician training, well being coaching, free downloads, and other cool stuff. And feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and share your favorite episode with a friend.