What to Say When Family Member Is Sick

En español l Anyone who has been seriously ill or had a loved one with a wellness crisis knows that friends and family can say simply the right affair — and merely the wrong i, too.

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How do you lot console a friend who is bilious or grieving?

After my mother all of a sudden became ill and passed away concluding twelvemonth, a woman she considered a shut friend came upwardly to my father correct before the funeral service and said, "I've been having problem downloading books on my Kindle. Practise you think you could look at it later and help me?" (I am not making this upwardly.)

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And I notwithstanding recall the stupor I felt several years agone after my 8-twelvemonth-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia and a friend actually said to me, "Well, everything happens for a reason." (Actually? This is supposed to make me feel better?)

My coworker has an even better one: On her mother's 2nd solar day in hospice, an acquaintance from church building came to visit, plopped herself in a chair adjacent to the bed and announced to her mother, "Well, you've had a neat life. You've washed wonderful things. Now information technology's time to let get and be with God."

None of this surprises Letty Cottin Pogrebin, 73, author of How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who's Sick.

The veteran journalist and writer has heard it all, mostly cheers to her own stint every bit a breast cancer patient in 2009. During the long stretches in the hospital waiting room, she began talking to other patients, swapping anecdotes and eventually soliciting their advice about what to say — and what not to say — to someone who's seriously ill.

The don't-say-this examples in her book range from flinch-worthy reactions to a diagnosis — "Wow! A daughter in my office just died of that!" — to empty platitudes like "Mayhap it happened for the best" and "God simply gives y'all what you can handle."

Pogrebin casts a wide internet in her book, offering suggestions for a number of tough situations, including how to remember which friend has what health trouble — an increasingly common occurrence for those in her seventysomething age grouping. She writes about how to testify pity to someone with Alzheimer'due south, to those with a terminal disease, and — in a chapter titled "As Bad as Information technology Gets" — to parents who've lost a child to a disease.

She also offers some alternatives to that knee-jerk phrase, "Permit me know if at that place'south annihilation I can exercise," which puts the burden on the patient or the family to ask for needed assistance, something they may be embarrassed to exercise.

"It's OK to say, 'What can I practice to help?' as long as you follow it with something similar, 'I'm not just maxim it, I really mean it,'" Pogrebin says. "Then propose a few things you think might be helpful that you lot are actually willing to practice."

So why practice people find it so difficult to know what to say to the sick or dying (or to their family)? Pogrebin says so many of u.s.a. are awkward effectually those who are ailing "because they arouse our own sense of vulnerability and mortality."

We fall dorsum on clichés similar "I'm sure you lot'll be fine," because they permit u.s. distance ourselves from our discomfort. To the ill person, though, it only sounds dismissive.

Disease and death are likewise reminders of how fiddling control nosotros have over the things in life that are the most precious to us — our wellness and the health of those nosotros love, says Phyllis Kosminsky, Ph.D., a clinical social worker who specializes in helping people deal with hard issues similar life-threatening disease and grief.

Kosminsky, who counsels patients at the Centre for Promise in Darien, Conn., agrees with Pogrebin that often a simple, heartfelt "I'1000 and so sorry" is the best way to express your sympathy without demeaning what the other person is going through.

The social worker also acknowledges that, especially as we age, "information technology can sometimes feel like life is a never-ending series of losses and we but tin can't face one more."

If yous experience as if you've reached your emotional limit, don't experience bad about taking some fourth dimension to recharge, she says. Offer to do what y'all can "in means that experience manageable to you," such as picking up groceries, taking the canis familiaris for a walk or stopping by merely once a calendar week to say hello.

And if visiting a hospital or hospice makes you uncomfortable, find other ways to express your business organisation. For my coworker, an offer to take her children to the movies or to dinner so she could stay with her mother would have been much more than meaningful than an bad-mannered sickroom visit.

We asked Pogrebin to tell us v things to say — and five things never to say — to someone who's ailing.

What to say:

1. I'm so glad to come across you.

2. I'm so deplorable you lot take to become through this.

3. Tell me what's helpful and what's not.

four. Tell me when you desire to be alone, and when you want visitor.

5. Tell me what to bring and when to go out.

What not to say:

1. Is it concluding?

ii. It could exist worse.

3. Peradventure it's in your head.

4. What do you think you did to crusade information technology?

v. (To a mourner) God must take wanted him/her.

Candy Sagon is a senior acquaintance editor for health for AARP.

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Source: https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-06-2013/what-to-say-to-sick-friend.html