I'm an avid newspaper reader. First thing every morning while a cup of instant coffer heats up in the microwave, I go to the front door and collect my two daily newspapers, The (Florence) Morning News and The State. As I sip my coffee, I flip through the pages of The State paper first, skipping the sports sections and advertisements, but never missing the news, editorials, comics, or Dear Abby.
This morning's Dear Abby column hit me hard, making me a little sad and a little angry, and it opened my eyes a little. So I'm not the only one, huh. Here's a quote:
"Dear Abby, could you please share suggestions on how to offer support to someone who is grieving? Well-meaning friends have used my loss as an opportunity to relive their past losses with grisly and sad details. Perhaps these people are trying to relate, but it's torture. I have a feeling I'm not the only person who has suffered through this ignorance."
No, you're not the only one. In the months after Tim died, several people called me to "express their sympathy," but after one or two sentences they spent the next thirty minutes or more dumping on me all of their own troubles and grief, grisly details included. They weren't interested in me. They were using me to vent.
Two of these people were women Tim and I barely knew. But one had been a good friend of Tim's in their youth and over the years since, and she was genuinely grieving the loss of his friendship. Yet she too spent only a couple of minutes talking about Tim, and nearly an hour talking about herself, her many ailments and her multiple other problems.
And it's not just women. A couple of men who were friends of Tim's have called me this past year to see how I'm doing, or so they claimed. After I said, I'm okay, how are you? they spent many minutes telling me how bad off they are, how broke, or sick, or troubled in some other way.
Maybe they wanted me to know they understand my pain. If so, they could have said so in one of two minutes, surely, and then added something positive, uplifting, helpful. There was no comfort in what they said, no real concern or caring for me.
Maybe they thought I was such a "rock," so strong, so close to the Lord, that I didn't have any real need for their comfort, concern or caring. If that's how they felt, they were wrong.
As I think back, I realize that if they had called Tim, he would have helped them get through their current crisis situation, with his humor, his genuine friendship, his listening ear and "shoulder to cry on." In his absence, I was a Tim-substitute to them. I listened, and where appropriate shared scripture verses, or my own personal experiences of the Lord's comfort, strength and grace. I promised to pray, and in some cases I prayed right then, over the phone.
After all, I did ask How are you, and I did want to know. I did care. But at the same time, I hope I remember what it felt like to get those non-comforting sympathy calls and never treat someone else who is grieving that way.
Thanks, Dear Abby, for running that column today.
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