It's Always More Complicated

Anne Karpf, 'I want to avoid avoidance':

There are times when I long for the comfort of ritual. On several occasions last year I found myself talking to a relative or friend who was dying or had just been bereaved. With close family members and friends you can bank on instinct to tell you what to say. But with those you know less well? Formal expressions of condolence are so much easier than trying to confect something personal that's also meaningful and soothing. Here I've taken a wild stab and often quite missed the target.
....
There's a danger, I've come to believe, in the new, psychobabblish assumption that everyone wants to talk about their loss and is just waiting for you to ask them about it. I agonised over what to write to a couple I know whose adult daughter suddenly keeled over and died recently, and then bumped into them before I had. In the moment all I could think of was to shake my head to convey my shock, and hug them. That was enough but it didn't seem like it so then I offered to bring them some food. No, they protested, please don't: they hadn't yet managed to eat their way through a freezer full of other people's offerings. I next saw the mother after an agonising work meeting in which every single client had felt required to say something about her daughter when all she'd wanted to do was wear her work hat.

In the end what's most needed in contact with the dying and bereaved, I think, is the realisation that one can't make it better, and then a willingness to listen and be present, to try to tolerate the depth or complexity of other people's grief without the need to timetable or shape it. That might be the most consoling thing of all.

In praise of Samaritans.

[I]t wasn't until she was in labour that she discovered that she was nine months pregnant. Neither teenager in denial nor middleaged woman assuming it was The Change:

You hear about this happening, but most of us don't believe it. It's like an urban myth - you enjoy the story without quite conceding it's true. Be honest: how could you be pregnant and not notice? The nurses at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, where Daniella was born, told Becky they see a case like it once a week. "Only, in 70% of cases," she reports, "it's an underage pregnancy - obvious to everyone - and the mother's in denial."