When grief changes your friendships

You've lost someone you love. In the months that follow, alongside your grief, you notice that some of your friendships don't feel the same anymore.

Friendships change for many reasons once grief arrives. For some people, having gone through the most painful and challenging experience of their life so far, they don’t feel the same sense of connection to a particular friend. Grief has a way of influencing which relationships you have the time, energy and emotional capacity to invest in and which ones feel like they belong to a previous version of yourself.

Another reason why friendships change after loss is when someone who you thought would be there for you in your darkest days doesn’t support you in the way that you needed them to. This painful lack of support leads you to end the friendship or take a step back from how much time you spend together.

There is another friendship loss that I hear about in my grief support work and that is the disappearing friend. The person who you thought was a friend might send a message of condolences and then stop messaging altogether. They don’t come to your person’s funeral or they come to the funeral and then don’t contact you again. After you come through the early days of your grief and discover that a previous friend isn’t part of your life anymore, you are left wondering what happened.

The friends who don’t show up for you

Grief makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable and that discomfort is their experience that they need to work through. It’s not your responsibility to manage other people’s discomfort around your grief.

Some friends find it so uncomfortable to be in the presence of your grief that they don’t find ways to show up for you and support you through your loss. They might feel awkward about spending time with you because they don’t know what to say or do. So instead of navigating their own discomfort, they ‘give you space’ and wait for you to feel like your old self again. When grieving people sense this discomfort in their friends, they often end up trying to hide their grief and pretend they are okay, when they really aren’t.

Then there are friends who have never lost anyone close to them before so they have no lived experience to help guide their empathy. They may not realise how overwhelming and all-consuming grief can feel and they underestimate how much support is needed. Or they may expect you to be ‘back to normal’ within a certain time frame if their understanding of grief is limited.

Some friends don’t have the capacity to be there for you in the way that you need them to. Perhaps they are deep in their own struggles at the time that your loved one died or perhaps they don’t have the emotional resilience to be present with your pain.

Whatever the reason your friend wasn't able to support you, the loss of that friendship can be deeply painful. Many people have told me that losing friends has been one of the hardest parts of grief.

We often talk about primary and secondary losses in bereavement support. Primary loss is the death of your person and secondary losses are everything that you lose in the aftermath, including loss of your previous identity, the future plans you had made and changes in important relationships. These secondary losses rarely get acknowledged, but they do hurt.

Grief changes you and it has a way of showing you exactly who in your life is capable of sitting with your pain without trying to fix it or cheer you out of it. Moving forward, you get to choose who receives your time and energy and it isn’t always going to be the same people that were a big part of your life before grief entered the picture. The friends who found ways to genuinely be there for you are usually relationships worth investing in and nurturing.

What helpful support actually looks like

If you are a friend, wondering how to be a good support person for someone who is grieving, please know that it’s less about saying the right thing and more about simply taking action and doing something.

"Let me know if you need anything" puts the responsibility back onto the person who is grieving, at a time when they barely have the energy to get through the day, let alone figure out what to ask for and then actually ask for it. Helpful support might look like picking up their children from school or dropping off meals. It might be sending a text message saying "I'm heading to the supermarket, send me your list". Perhaps you can offer to visit with your friend’s favourite coffee and let them know that you will just sit and be with them. Mow their lawn, ask them out for a walk and send messages to check in without expecting a reply (especially on days like anniversaries or birthdays).

Get comfortable with the fact that your friend is experiencing pain and learn how to sit with their pain without trying to fix it or offer platitudes. If you are trying to be a good support person, it can be really beneficial for you to have someone else to talk to so that your emotional needs don’t land on the friend you are there to support.

In terms of having conversations, focus on listening and asking questions that give your friend the opportunity to share. Try asking your friend about the person that has died; their name, what their person was like and their happiest memory of their loved one. These questions invite stories which help your friend share and keep the memory of their person alive. If your friend cries during conversation, this isn't something you need to fix or try to manage. Your role is to listen, allow emotion to flow and be empathetic in your presence.

All of us will experience grief in our lives at some point. While we don’t need to take our friend’s pain away, we can find ways to be present, so they don’t need to face their grief alone. The support we give each other during times of grief can reduce the sense of isolation and deepen our friendships along the way.