Lilly Dancyger on How to Support a Friend Through Grief

How to support a friend through grief:

1.
Suffer a tremendous loss early in your life. Perhaps the death of a parent at such a young, pivotal age that grief becomes a central part of who you are. Your homeland. Become comfortable in grief, learn its coastlines and caves intimately, so that when someone you love arrives on its shore, stunned and choking, you can greet them and show them around. Like when you and Carly met in college, when she was new to New York, and instead of the usual bars near school you brought her to Red Hook to see your old friends play music, and you stayed long after the bar pulled down the gates and started letting everyone smoke inside. Sharing your secret spots.

2.
Let this friend support you through a second major loss of your own. When Sabina died the summer before your senior year, Carly came and sat with you on the fire escape. Her presence was steady and calm. You felt a little better with her there, even though nothing she could have said or done could have made it actually better. But she knew that. That’s why it worked.

3.
Remain close, even after she moves back to Texas a few years after college. Go there to visit, stay with her and her boyfriend, who also went to school with you. Take a nap on their couch with their dog, even though you usually keep your distance from dogs. Let her show you around. Eat breakfast tacos and go vintage shopping and take photo booth pictures together that will hang on your fridge forever—a black-and white strip of the two of you: deadpan, goofy, glam, sweet.

4.
When her boyfriend becomes her fiancé, prepare to be a bridesmaid. Write your wedding speech, including the story of how she was nervous to approach the boyfriend-turned-fiancé in college, so you invited him to have coffee with the two of you and then pretended to remember somewhere important you had to be. Talk on the phone about color schemes and disco playlists and promise to tease your hair as big as she wants.

5.
When she texts you a few months later that her fiancé has died, ask if you can call, rather than just calling, in case she’s not ready to talk. Pick up immediately when she calls in response. Feel the desire to make this not be true for her jolt through your whole body so intensely you want to scream. Remember that there’s nothing you can say to make it better. Say only that you’re so sorry, so so sorry. That you love her. That you’re ready to get on a plane right now. Convince yourself that you can help her through this. You know the topography of grief; you can point her toward a safe passage.

6.
Know that the type of loss she has suffered is especially complicated. But you know something about this particular kind of grief, too. You’ve never lost a partner, someone you planned to have children with, but you know what it feels like to mourn a person and hate the person who killed them and try to hold in your mind that they are one and the same.

7.
Go to Texas again. Sit in her childhood bedroom with her and her mother—all of you on the floor, leaning against the bed and the wall, staying low. Look at the pictures on her walls, relics from before you met her; a version of her that you feel like you know from stories about community theater and her hairdresser grandmother and her childhood dog. Listen to her explain that she doesn’t feel angry at him. Admire her so much for that wisdom and compassion. Say that you do. You do feel angry at him. See a little spark in her mother’s eye when you say this.

8.
Go with her to the apartment she shared with the fiancé, which she hasn’t been able to bring herself to pack up yet. Offer to do it for her, wanting so badly to be useful. But don’t push. Don’t pick up a single book or dish or article of clothing without a cue from her. See clearly that she’s not ready yet, and instead just be near her while she walks from room to room, marveling at her own things as if seeing them for the first time. When she says maybe she’ll just take some crystals with her for now, offer to cleanse them in the sunshine first. Collect all of the crystals from the bookshelves and windowsills, and carry them out into the yard together, talking about how sunlight can burn away just about anything. Sit in the sun together, and hope this is true.

9.
Stand waist-deep in the cool water of Barton Springs, squinting in the hot Texas sun, watching as she trails her fingers back and forth, back and forth, across the surface of the water, sending out gentle ripples, talking about how she’ll have to start all over again. Not just a new relationship, but a whole new self. “I feel like a newborn baby,” she says. Know that she’s right. She’s a new version of herself now and there’s no going back. Grief is a place you can’t travel to without being transformed. You eat the seeds and then you become queen of a land you never even wanted to visit. Feel the slippery algae on the rocks under your feet. Run your hands over the surface of the water, mirroring her, and say, “I can’t wait to see what you build.”

10.
Remember that, of course, there is no map for grief. That her grief is an entirely different country from your own, and the only person who can ever find their way through it is her. Feel silly for thinking you could impose order on something like this. That you could offer her anything more than your presence. Abandon the idea that you know the way, and instead follow her lead. You are not a guide. You’re just keeping her company for part of a journey that will be long and arduous and once in a while even beautiful. But it will be hers alone.

11.
When she starts dating again, remind her that she doesn’t have to yet, unless she wants to. Worry a little bit that she’s rushing herself, but know that if she says she’s ready, it won’t help her to hear any doubts. Tell her that whatever pace feels right to her, is right. Tell this again to yourself, and believe it.

12.
When she meets someone new, like him immediately when she describes how respectful and compassionate and not-threatened he is about her loss. How he understands that it’s part of her; that she will always be walking its paths and scaling its cliffs.

13.
Go to Texas for a third time. Stand next to her, holding her bouquet, while she and the new man say their vows, and you can see on his face how much he loves her, and you don’t believe in god but you thank whatever is out there that your friend has arrived here, in this moment, and that you get to be here to see it. Cry even though you’re standing there up in the front and everyone can see you. Remember that conversation in the cool water just a few years earlier, about the brand-new self, the brand-new life. Marvel at how far she has traveled, at all she has built.

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Excerpted from First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger. Copyright © 2024 by Lilly Dancyger. Used by permission of The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.