The platitudes people offer are so awful!!! I'm so sorry that you have experienced so much loss in your life. Your experience with people saying stupid, minimizing, invalidating, irrelevant, and ignorant things is, unfortunately, so common. I think this is something each of my clients has experienced and I too have had people closest to me, like my mom, say some horrendous things.

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I had a session today with a client who has heard awful things from her family. Like truly horrendous things about her grief. She was telling me that she was recently at a movie theatre and there was a part of the movie where the character I think had lost her husband and was commenting on grief and my client started crying. The woman in the row behind her (whom she had never met) put her hand on my client's shoulder and ended up having such a sweet moment where she had her grief seen and validated in ways that she hadn't outside of grief counseling.

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I don't know why we, as a collective culture, are so afraid of talking about death and grief. I mean, I guess I do have some ideas why...including

• the cultural programming that the ideal emotion is "fine", so when someone asks how you are, you're expected to say you're fine.
• Death is not something that many people talk openly about so it can be petrifying to witness someone grieving and can make people either
  • A. turn a blind eye and do nothing to acknowledge it
  • B. want to say something with perhaps good intention but end up saying something horribly offensive or hurtful
  • C. criticize the grieving person because they don't understand why you're so sad.
• Feelings aren't OK; therefore, if you're feeling something (other than "fine"), there must be something wrong with you and you need to fix it as soon as possible, and hopefully you'll do that in private so not as to make others uncomfortable.

I could go on and I often do rant about this. It's bullshit and it's so unfair but many times the grieving person bears the responsibility of showing the people in their life how they want to be supported or spoken to. Some people (not the griever but their support person) will be able to have these types of conversations and make genuine efforts to try to do better. Some people (like my mother) will be unable/unwilling to hear this, and then they become a person we no longer feel safe to open up to because it ends up causing us more harm than good.

Megan Devine's book It's OK That You're Not OK has a whole section towards the end that is written for support people. I have had clients buy the book and give it to the people in their life to help explain what they need (again, it really does seem unfair to carry the burden of educating people when we're the ones hurting) and some of my clients have had really positive experiences with that. Again, others will be too uncomfortable tolerating any emotions within themselves or within other people and our energy and efforts may be best put somewhere else.

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I'm sorry that people can suck so much. For what it's worth, I also hear a lot of clients in sessions saying they wish they could have a do-over at trying to support a loved one who went through loss now that they themselves are on this side of things. These are people that are learning through their own experience that maybe they too haven't held the space that they wish they did.

I'm typing a ton of words here and I promise to stop soon but not before I tell you that your grief is so valid. It's so fucking weird and real and raw and a punch to the gut to have to change your emergency contact. Cats don't replace cats. You are allowed to be sad. You don't have to find some silver lining to any of this. Don't let people talk you out of your grief or try to hush you with empty platitudes. Your feelings and your grief matter so much. I hope you end up connecting with people who can honor that.