Earlier this month, we observed National Cancer Survivors Day. Later this month, on June 23, we will recognize International Widows Day.
At first glance, those may seem like very different experiences. One focuses on life after a cancer diagnosis. The other focuses on life after the death of a spouse.
Yet both have something important in common: the people who show up.
When someone we care about is facing a serious illness, caregiving responsibilities, or the death of a loved one, many of us want to help. We care deeply. We want to say the right thing.
The problem is that we often don’t know what the right thing is.
So we hesitate.
We worry about saying something awkward. We worry about making them cry. We worry about bringing up painful emotions. Sometimes we become so concerned about saying the wrong thing that we end up saying nothing at all.
Looking back on my own experiences, I’ve learned that the people who helped me the most were rarely the people who had the perfect words.
They were the people who stayed.
About a month after my husband John died, I was out for a walk when I ran into one of his college fraternity brothers. He stopped and talked with me for a few minutes before making an observation that has stayed with me ever since.
He said that it had been about a month. By now, he suspected many people had stopped asking how I was doing.
Then he asked me how I was doing.
Not the polite “How are you?” that we often ask while continuing to walk. A genuine question.
He invited me to lunch so we could talk.
What I remember most about that conversation wasn’t any particular piece of advice. It wasn’t a profound quote or a life-changing insight. It was simply that he was willing to sit with me in a difficult season.
During lunch, he shared some of the losses he had experienced in his own life. He didn’t take over the conversation. He didn’t compare his grief to mine. He wasn’t trying to convince me that he understood exactly how I felt.
Instead, he shared honestly.
What surprised me most was that years later, he still questioned some of the decisions he had made. He still carried regrets. He still wondered whether he could have done some things differently.
At the time, I was experiencing many of those same feelings.
Regret.
Anger.
Sadness.
Second-guessing.
I remember wondering whether those feelings meant I was grieving incorrectly or whether I was somehow failing to make peace with what had happened.
His honesty normalized those emotions for me.
It helped me understand that these feelings are not signs that we’re doing grief wrong. They are often a natural part of loving someone deeply and losing them.
When we care about someone, we replay conversations. We revisit decisions. We wonder what we could have done differently. We miss them. We feel angry about what happened. We feel sad about what will never be.
Those emotions don’t mean we loved poorly.
Often, they mean we loved well.
That lunch taught me something that I’ve carried with me ever since: people don’t need us to have the perfect words.
They need us to be willing to stay in the conversation.
To ask how they’re doing after everyone else has stopped asking.
To send the text.
To make the phone call.
To invite them to lunch.
To acknowledge that what they’re experiencing is hard.
To listen more than we speak.
To remain present even when we cannot fix the situation.
Whether someone is living with cancer, caring for a loved one, grieving a death, or adjusting to life after a profound loss, our presence matters more than our perfection.
The people we remember are rarely the ones who said exactly the right thing.
They’re the ones who showed up.
They’re the ones who stayed.
