How to deal with grief when a close friend or family member dies?

The world falls apart when a family member or friend dies. Relatives and friends can restore some stability to life, important is: those who are grieving should not be marginalized under any circumstances.

Because grief does what it wants and there is no way to exercise control over it. “He is a seesaw, everything is confusion, you cannot prepare for anything, he is brutal,” Peter Schneider recalls what happened to him when his wife died.

Six years have passed since this sportswriter came home one night and found his partner dead. Her heart had simply stopped beating. Thus began a real nightmare for him.

in his book The worst noise is silencepublished in German, describes how only his “shell” trotted through the forest when he went running, while he was afraid of the sunset every afternoon, he thought about suicide and at some point he even believed that the pain would not subside Never.

When a person passes away unexpectedly, their family and friends are abruptly ripped from their daily lives without warning. So the most important anchor in the following grief period is the social environment, says the president of the German Grief Support Association, Carmen Birkholz.

“Over and over again the people affected report that people escape them. They then feel like lepers,” says Birkholz.

Peter Schneider evokes how the general good mood quickly disappeared as soon as he joined a group. “That was terrible,” he admits.

Schneider and Birkholz recommend reaching out to people who are grieving. And whoever doesn’t know what to say can say exactly that: “I don’t know what to say”.

Nor is there a fear of a stutter or a struggle to find the right words. “It’s the same as first aid at the scene of an accident: the worst thing is to do nothing”, compares Schneider. Therefore, he calls to react with empathy and take those who are going through a duel by the arm, the topics of conversation will appear alone.

Birkholz, who is a grief counselor and companion, further recommends not waiting in the weeks and months after the bereaved person makes contactbecause this is usually difficult for them in this situation.

Instead, she recommends offering this contact over and over again, showing that the grief is understandable and that the person going through it should take the time they need to process the grief.

Schneider found the support of friends and colleagues in his grief. Immediately from the beginning he approached them and asked them to behave as usual. And he told them that he would let them know if anything made him uncomfortable.

He also ensures that it is important to let yourself be helped. “I grabbed all the support I could find,” he says. And she found solid pillars, such as the grief support service and a psychotherapist.

“Looking and not finding”, Carmen Birkholz describes that phase in which a great inner closeness is experienced with the deceased person. This and other sensations occur on a huge scale and cannot be controlled.

Therefore, it helps to make a “first aid plan” and write it down for difficult stages. This can be from a chat with a friend, to going back to walk the dog, as well as going for a jog in the woods, eating pizza, calling the helpline or simply crying.

Certain rituals can also be useful, or also immerse yourself in memories, visit the grave or light candles. But it’s also okay to allow yourself to drift off topic, to take a break from grieving.

“Mourning is a healer. The person who died finds a place inside you”, Birkholz describes this process. At some point, the memory is no longer heartbreaking, but warm. And the space for gratitude for the time shared appears.

The time that can elapse until that “some moment” is uneven. Peter Schneider tells that two years after the death of his wife he fell back into a “deep hole”. “It demoralized me strongly. I thought it would never end, ”he says.

For Carmen Birkholz, this is no exception. Why do you often hear about cases of spouses who spend the second or third year much worse than the first after the death of their partner.

And to this is added another factor that makes it even more difficult: that then, unlike the first stage of mourning, they are no longer heard or contained by the people around them.

For Peter Schneider, meanwhile, mourning became a “miss and remember”, according to himself. His wife always lives inside him, he says. But now he has a new life: he has moved away and remarried.

“Things are working again,” the man analyzes, slight surprise in his voice. “I could never imagine this during the duel,” he admits.