Someone you know has lost a husband, a mother or a child, and you have no idea what to say to them.
In the 300s the bishop Basil the Great heard a rumour that his friend Nectarius had lost his son, a young man and the heir of the family. For three or four days Basil prayed it wasn’t true, until a letter from another bishop confirmed it. “I need not tell you how I sighed and wept,” he wrote to the father. He was slower to write to the boy’s mother. Words offered to a soul in such pain, he told her, can sting the way even the gentlest medicine stings an inflamed eye. He ended that letter by admitting, “Mere words I know cannot give comfort. Just now what is wanted is prayer.”
What should I say first?
Say very little at first, and be there. When Job lost his children (Job 1:18-19), three friends came to comfort him. They wept aloud when they saw him, and “they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, but no one spoke a word to him because they saw how intense his suffering was” (Job 2:11-13). They went wrong when they started to explain his loss. One of them told Job that his children had died because they sinned (Job 8:4). God later said the three had not spoken rightly about Him, but when Job prayed for them, He spared them (Job 42:7-9).
Around AD 380 John Chrysostom learned that a young woman’s husband had died after five years of marriage, and he didn’t write to her at once. While the storm of grief is at its height, he explained to her later, anyone who urges a mourner to stop grieving only makes the tears flow faster and is thought unkind and foolish for it. So he waited until her uncle told him she was beginning to take heart, and wrote to her “when the troubled water has begun to subside.”
What helps in those first days is sharing the grief. At the funeral of his own brother, Gregory of Nazianzus told his grieving parents that “a powerful remedy for mourners is sympathy, for sufferers are best consoled by those who have to bear a like suffering.”
Is it all right to cry with them?
Paul told Christians to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). On His way to the tomb of His friend Lazarus, “Jesus wept,” and the people there said, “See how He loved him!” (John 11:35-36). Ambrose wept at his brother’s funeral in Milan, where he was bishop. The mourners had just heard Paul’s words read, that Christians should not “grieve like the rest, who are without hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Those words can sound as if a Christian shouldn’t cry, and Ambrose answered that in his sermon, “Not all weeping proceeds from unbelief or weakness. … I confess, then, that I too wept, but the Lord also wept. He wept for one not related to Him, I for my brother.”
What do Orthodox Christians say when someone dies?
The choir sings “Memory eternal” three times near the end of every Orthodox funeral and memorial service. It is a short prayer in its own right, and Greeks, Serbs and Romanians also write it as a wish for the dead, in a death notice or a message of sympathy. Here it is in four Orthodox languages, with other words people use:
- In Greek, the hymn is Eonia i mnimi. Eonia tou i mnimi means “eternal be his memory,” and O Theos as anapapsei tin psychi tou means “may God give rest to his soul.” The word for condolences is syllypitiria, or therma syllypitiria, “warm condolences.” At a funeral or memorial, mourners greet one another with Zoi se sas, “life to you,” instead of hello.
- In Russian, Vechnaya pamyat is “memory eternal.” When Russians speak kindly of someone who has died, they may add Tsarstvo yemu nebesnoye, “the Kingdom of Heaven to him.”
- In Serbian, Večan mu pomen means “eternal be his memory.”
- In Romanian, Dumnezeu să-l ierte means “God forgive him,” and Veșnica lui pomenire is “his memory eternal.”
For a woman, the Greek tou becomes tis and the Russian yemu becomes yey. The Serbian mu becomes joj, and in Romanian să-l becomes s-o and lui becomes ei.
If you’re going to the funeral, what happens at an Orthodox funeral walks you through the service, and why the Orthodox pray on the 40th day explains the memorials that follow.
What should I write in a card?
Do what Basil did in his letter to the mother, and write about prayer. Say that you’re praying for the person who died, naming them, and for the family too. Then pray for them. When more words come, they can be about meeting again. Basil wrote to the father, “Let us wait a little while, and we shall be once more with him.” They can also be about a love that death doesn’t end. Chrysostom told the young widow that her love for her husband hadn’t ended, because “neither length of time, nor separation in space, nor anything else of that kind can break up and sunder in pieces the affection of the soul.”
When grief doesn’t ease
Encourage your friend to see a doctor if their grief deepens over the months and they grow more depressed or anxious. If they talk about harming themselves, call or text 988 in the United States.
