Have you ever noticed how even bereavement cards won't mention the word death?

It's just sunsets, lilies, and pastels.

In this time of profound loss, we offer our deepest condolences.

Because, I mean, what else would we say?

Real talk, though.

What do we say?

Losing a loved one can be an extremely destabilizing experience.

Death yanks us out of the predictable rhythm of our days and not many of us are equipped to know what to say or how to act around someone who's grieving.

I get why we package grief in pastels to make it more palatable.

But let's face it, grief is far from pastel.

More often than not, it's raw, messy and super intense.

Some grief is so visceral, it feels like a physical wound.

So I wonder how do we navigate the complex feelings that come up when someone dies and what is okay to say?

When you hear the word grief You might think of the five stages of grief made popular by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, but Kubler-Ross was talking about the five stages a dying person goes through when coming face to face with the life limiting prognosis, not the grief of losing a loved one.

There are no set stages that everyone goes through, and we do not experience feelings of grief in any particular order.

Here in the U.S., our culturally permitted period for grieving is pretty short.

Employers offer 1 to 5 days off for the loss of a close relative, if they offer any at all.

Five days?

It's been 25 years, three months and seven days since Ginger left the Spice Girls, and I'm still grieving.

We could have had it all Ginger In fact, we pathologize grief that goes on for too long.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM five labels distressing grief that exceeds 12 months as a disorder.

We're somehow just expected to get over it.

So your mother died 12 months ago, eh , and you're still sad about it?

Disorder!

But that doesn't seem right.

Grief is an ongoing experience that can actually help us find connections with others.

After losing her mother in 2017, Shohana Sharmin found solace in comedy and writing.

She even hosted a podcast called Finders Keepers, which aimed to unpack the universal experience of grief.

When my mom passed away, the grief of it was so all encompassing that I felt like I couldn't stop talking about it when I was going through it.

I tried to repress it, I think.

But I am a talker, so I found myself talking about it with friends, especially comedy friends, and especially especially other comedians who had lost a parent.

It just kind of built this community and these connections that were so healing to me at that time that I was like, Oh, we just got to we have to continue this.

We have to keep talking about this.

What should you not say to someone who is grieving or what should you say?

I don't know that there was necessarily a right thing that I wanted to hear.

I think I more just wanted to feel like I was allowed to say things.

The wall that I kept coming up against over and over was This isn't polite conversation, which is ridiculous to me because this is universal.

What's not polite about a universal human experience?

That is a ridiculous line to draw.

I don't know that there is a right thing to say.

I think there is a right feeling to create in terms of being open and, you know, allowing people the space to be in whatever state they're in.

And I think in a society that doesn't want to deal with it, we use words to create distance almost.

So saying sorry for your loss is a way of distancing ourselves from death because we don't want to acknowledge the harsh reality of that.

So I try to focus less on words and more on feelings when it comes to this.

I always say that my favorite messages were, Hey, don't worry about answering.

Don't worry about replying.

I just wanted to say I love you.

I'm here if you need me.

You are loved.

We're with you.

Like those are chef's kiss.

The number of people who told me that over and over again.

The first year is the hardest.

The first birthdays, the hardest, the first Christmas is the hardest.

The first X-Y-Z is the hardest.

I believed it.

I was like, oh, okay, that's true.

Like, the first one is the hardest.

But what we didn't realize is that that again, puts it in the timeline.

You get to be sad for the first year and then the next year it's fine.

It's this process of trying to make it linear of like you're sad for a bit and then you get better.

It's this hero's journey, and that's not how life happens.

That's how television writers write grief.

That's not how actual human beings experience grief.

I am six years out and there are still days when I feel like I can't function because the heart of my life is missing.

Americans tend to think of grief as something very private and individual, But every society has culturally prescribed ways of mourning.

Some societies grieve the loss of a loved one by literally erasing all traces of their existence.

Eradicating any reminders of the deceased, helps the bereaved accept their loss and move on with their lives.

Sounds like me after a bad breakup.

Among the Wari indigenous people in Brazil.

The grieving process long entailed destroying the deceased's property, rerouting the paths that led to their home and avoiding saying their name.

Until the 1960s, in-laws of the deceased would also consume parts of the body to help make the corpse disappear, which was widely regarded as a compassionate and honorable thing to do.

By contrast, during the Victorian era, people invoked the presence of the deceased to help them cope with their grief.

Back then, it was customary to commission a mourning doll to mark the death of the child.

These souls were life size effigies made of wax and dress in the child's own clothing and even their hair.

The doors were either left at the grave or displayed in homes.

Sometimes rooms in specially designated mourning rooms and were treated with a real sense of reverence.

You might think that shedding tears is an instinctive reaction when it comes to expressing grief.

Yet in some cultural circles, weeping is not just frowned upon, but actively discouraged.

In some communities in Bali, Indonesia, tears are thought to weigh down the soul of the deceased with unhappiness and prevents it from ascending to heaven.

Elsewhere, such as in Egypt, China and Greece, people believe the more individuals wail at your funeral, the better.

You better be crying at my funeral.

To this day, there are professional mourners or moirologist whose job is to literally cry at funerals.

Having a sizable crowd of mourners has traditionally been a sign of high social standing.

But professional mourners aren't exclusively status symbols.

In Greece, for example, professional mourners see their work as a moral obligation when they help the families release their own emotions and shepherd the soul of the deceased to the afterlife.

Professional mourners are almost always female as the work of mourning has historically fallen to women.

Women are commonly associated with giving life, and the flipside of that is being entrusted with many of the rituals that surround death.

In some cultural settings It's also not socially acceptable for men to shed tears in public.

Unless you're Drake, then by all means, Scorpio King.

Let it all out.

The work of professional mourners shows that there are clear cultural expectations around how we grieve.

Being able to meet those expectations can bring great solace to those who've lost someone.

Why aren't we better at offering a wide berth to some people who are grieving?

The primary reason that society doesn't want to create space for it is that fear and denial.

Because we don't want the bad thing to happen and we don't want to look behind the curtain to see the ghosts there.

We just want to pretend like it's never going to happen to us.

That's how I lived my life for 27 years.

I pretended like my parents were never going to get sick or die or anything.

I've always been like I understand you're on your own journey, but I am just going to say that it is inevitable and it is universal.

So I appreciate you protecting yourself now, but I also think facing your fears and creating that space for others is actually kind of doing you a favor in the long run too.

As a society maybe we need to become better at making room for grief and facilitating its expression.

And if grief is love, why give it an expiration date?

To quote Rabbi Earl Grollman, grief is not a disorder.

It's the price you pay for love.

The only cure for grief is to grieve.

So what do you think?

Tell us in the comments.