How to Care for People in the Wake of Major and Irreversible Loss

Life is loss. We all know this. We’ve experienced this in our lives and in our communities. However, walking through our own personal loss and supporting someone else on their journey through life after loss are two differing experiences. When we are in the supporting role, we want to offer comfort and the peace and love of Christ. But that is rarely easy, and the words are too often trite, misplaced, or insufficient. To help fill that void, professor and theologian Jerry Sittser, author of A Grace Disguised, offers the following guidelines for the pastors, mentors, and friends who are walking alongside someone experiencing loss, particularly a major or catastrophic loss. Yet they are good and helpful words for everyone in understanding and surviving loss.

Related: Lament toolkit: understanding and practicing biblical lament

Natural loss vs. irreversible loss

Loss begins the moment we’re born and continues throughout the whole of one’s life. We age, we get sick, we move, we change jobs, we transition from one phase of life to the next. There are losses associated with all of that. But we rarely classify those transitions as losses simply because they are natural, normal, and inevitable in life. We have to make the necessary adjustments as we go our way. These transitions may trip some of us up or be a little bit more difficult, but for most people, these transitions are a natural part of maturing in life.

There’s a blurry line between what I call a natural loss and an irreversible or catastrophic loss. For example, adult children who lose a parent at the age of 88. That’s what we call a natural loss. Yes, they will gather for a memorial service, they will laugh, they will cry, and they will grieve. But that’s a kind of natural and normal loss most of us have to face. It’s different when parents lose a child. That’s a violation of the natural order of things, and that’s what I would call a catastrophic or irreversible kind of loss. These are the big losses of life. 

Another example of a natural loss would be a broken leg—it just happens as someone is growing up. On the other hand, an amputation is an irreversible kind of loss. That’s permanent, and you will be profoundly impacted by that the rest of your life.

Considerations for how people cope with loss

When we think about loss, there are a few things we need to consider before we can tend and care for those in the midst of loss—or cope with a loss of our own.

Expect complications

First, recognize that you are going to encounter complications in how each person copes with loss. I reject the notions of stages of grief, and this is why: not everyone goes through the same stages. Not everyone goes through the same stages in the same order, and some people don’t go through some of the stages at all. I’ve met people who have never bargained with God, and others who have never been angry even though they’ve gone through horrible losses. For others, some stages of grief keep coming back year after year after year.

All irreversible loss is bad, but it’s bad in different ways. It’s always a variation on the theme. Everyone is unique, so we have to recognize that our loss experiences are utterly unique—and they’re all bad. Whether it’s cancer, divorce, multiple losses, unemployment, or chronic mental health, it’s all bad.

So, even though there is a kind of template for stages of grief, we can’t be trapped by it. Some people are naturally resilient people, while others are not. Factors that come into play include faith, mental health, physical health, emotional stability, family background, personality, and community or lack thereof. Some people are going to naturally seek others out in the wake of loss, and others will feel self-conscious or embarrassed and not know how to ask for help. They may have a mistrust of people or be afraid of their emotions.

To support a grieving person who is resistant to some kind of human connection, you can’t pry open the door. The door has to be open in their soul. Presence makes a difference, though. Be consistently present until that person feels comfortable around you. When that moment of openness comes, you—or some other consistent person—can be the trusted person they turn to.

Reject the notion of “recovery”

Second, I reject the notion of recovery. If by “recovery,” we mean getting back to circumstances, feelings, or a sense of self that we once had and experienced and assumed about ourselves, then I prefer to not focus on “recovery” but on a word like “integration.” How can you integrate that loss into the larger landscape of your life until it becomes a part of life that you can manage a little bit more smoothly? It’s not about resignation or acceptance but transformation. We learn to carry the loss with us. We’re actually enlarged by the loss. Our capacities for relationships, love, compassion, or resilience grow as a result of loss.

Some people’s lives are utterly transformed in the wake of loss, like discovering a new vocation. Joni Eareckson Tada is a great example of this. She had a horrific accident, and it not only changed the course of her life vocationally, but it had an impact on millions of other people too.

Loss can expand our emotional capacity. It can call forth virtue in us. It may sound harsh to say, but I don’t think it’s possible to grow much as a Christian without some form of suffering. In a fallen world, it’s become necessary in the formation process. I have rarely met a mature person who has not gone through some kind of loss along the way.

Be cautious about giving answers

Third, be mindful of the role of answers. We must beware when and how we give or quote answers along the way because it can actually be an act of cruelty. Many people go through a terrible loss, then receive notes and calls from people who immediately begin spewing out Bible verses as if they could speak the mind of God.

Job’s three friends are a cautionary tale for all of us. It’s probably smartest for us to be quiet, to listen, and to be present over the long haul while we wait for the Holy Spirit to open those doors where we can give some kind of word of consolation, or perhaps even some kind of theological answer when the time is right.

The Bible does not provide a set of answers, per se, nor do theological pronouncements spare people from having to go through something. The right answer—or even God’s answer—is not going to spare a person from having to go through the process of actual loss, suffering, and transformation. There are no shortcuts in that process; people who suffer loss still suffer. Look at Job or Joseph in the Bible. There is no comfort in those stories; there is a kind of consolation, but only under a certain set of terms—and one of them is that suffering is simply a part of life.

However, the Bible may provide a map that gives us a sense of the landscape we’re going to have to move through. Some biblical texts that provide a map to get us through the landscape of loss include Romans 5:1-5; Romans 8:28-39; and 2 Corinthians 3:17-18. But even if you’ve studied these texts and even earned the right to quote them based on personal experiences with loss, I still think it’s best to be quiet and not jump into providing answers to people with a fresh loss.

Carry faith when others cannot

Fourth, carry faith for others when it’s needed. Sometimes when you’ve gone through a really hard experience, like an irreversible loss, you might lose faith a little bit. You may be sitting in worship and you try to sing, but you can’t because you begin to cry. Or when you try to pray, you find that you can’t; you’re just quiet. Even as you sit there, hardly able to listen to the sermon or engage in worship, know that the other people around you are believing for you. They are carrying you by their faith. And sooner or later, you realize that you are doing that for other people too.

I was talking with a woman who had been through a horrific set of losses, and she said, “I can’t believe in God anymore.” And I looked at her and said, “Give yourself a break. I’ll believe for you.” That sounds heretical, but I wasn’t being presumptuous. I was just being a member of the body of Christ, doing my job. Sometimes we have to pick other people up and carry them for a while. Listen to those stories with sympathy and compassion and realize that some people carry wounds that we will never be able to comprehend. And then you can say a little prayer: “Lord, right now, I want you to know I’m believing for this person.” Then let God work out what that means because God’s better at his job than I am.

Four biblical stories with lessons for loss and suffering

Job’s story

I think the lesson in Job’s story is the need to be vulnerable. Job’s three friends had the answers; Job had only questions. He was angry, and he didn’t hesitate to speak that anger to God. And, in the end, God honors him for it. Job finally discovers that the ultimate answer to his suffering is not some kind of theological principle; rather, it’s an encounter with the living God. In some ways, that’s a dissatisfying answer. Yet, at the deepest level of our being, that’s the answer we truly long for.

Related: Dust and ashes: a confession of faith for Job and all of us

Joseph’s story

There’s one little detail in Joseph’s story that has had a big impact on me, and it’s only a handful of verses. Joseph is betrayed by his brothers and sold as a slave into Potiphar’s house. He works his way up until he is finally in charge of everything Potiphar has. But Potiphar’s wife betrays him by trying to seduce him, and Joseph ends up in jail for many years.

Then something happens. The baker and the butler both have dreams while they are also in prison, and Joseph interprets their dreams rightly. For the baker, it’s bad news: he loses his head. For the butler, it’s good news: he’s restored to his former position. And Joseph says to the butler, “Remember me before Potiphar.” But the butler immediately forgets.

Now, when I crawl inside Joseph’s head and try to think about the narrative he’s constructed, my bet is that Joseph saw the butler as his ticket out of prison. He hoped God was going to use the butler to work out his whole mess. But then God abandons him, and Joseph is in prison for a few more years. What he imagined was God’s way ended up not being God’s way. We know that if Joseph had gotten his way, it would’ve been good for him but no one else. Joseph had to wait and live in misery for a few more years before all the doors opened up, beyond anything Joseph in his wildest dreams could have imagined.

To me, that is a story about waiting in your suffering.

Ruth’s story

In the book of Ruth, we tend to focus on Naomi’s losses because she lost a husband and both her sons—and what appeared to be her inheritance. But Ruth lost a husband. And what’s amazing about Ruth is that she not only suffered, but she chose to keep suffering by making sacrifices, not for herself but for her mother-in-law, Naomi. She keeps stepping into the redemptive story that she doesn’t even know is unfolding. It is not just through her suffering, but through the choices she makes to continue to suffer on behalf of another person, that eventually draws her into the family line of Jesus. From David all the way to the Messiah, Ruth is one of only four women who is mentioned in the Messianic genealogy. And that wasn’t because she lost her husband; it was because she chose to sacrifice for the sake of Naomi.

Choosing to make sacrifices in the wake of a loss, as Ruth did, seems counterintuitive, if not impossible. We can make decisions that make life harder for us in two ways. One is a good kind of hard, as Ruth did. The other is a bad kind of hard, say, becoming self-pitying and turning in on the self.

Jesus’s story

This story is really about descent and suffering that leads all the way to death. God’s ultimate answer to suffering is God’s suffering.

Related: Why did Jesus have to die for us?

8 principles for walking through loss

A lot of my own personal reflection lends itself to those who are walking through loss, both for those experiencing a personal loss as well as for those who may be a pastor, mentor, or friend, walking alongside someone experiencing loss.

1. People need to face the experience directly. 

The natural inclination is to duck it, avoid it, or try to run from it. Catastrophic loss is ruthless. It runs us down, and it will not let go. It’s like a bulldog that grabs hold of our leg. The best way to ultimately deal with loss is to turn and face it head on. That doesn’t happen in the first month or even the first year, but ultimately, when it comes to any form of irreversible loss, you have to pivot and look at it directly. Easier said than done. That’s why we need the support of the Christian community and pastoral care and maybe a therapist.

Related: How counseling helped my faith

2. Step in and step out of loss.

This can’t be done all the time or with the same degree of intensity, but there’s a concept of “dosing.” That means you can only take big losses on in small doses, then do it over a long period of time. We learn to pace ourselves and mount in small doses. The reason why we do this is because loss touches every area of life. It’s like blood poisoning. It works its way into the whole human body. So, somehow, we have to learn to step in, then step out, step in, and step out because we have a life to live. The grass keeps growing, the world keeps turning, bills have to be paid, kids still have to be raised, spouses still have to be loved, and we still have to earn a paycheck. That feels like a violation—that the world has not stopped for you in your loss. As a friend, mentor, or pastor to someone who has experienced loss, then, we need to coax them into recognizing that it’s possible to step in and out of loss.

3. Turn grief into mourning.

Grief is more of the emotional experience of loss that can be persistent, unrelenting, and ruthless in our lives. Mourning is a turning out—not a turning in—and learning to ritualize loss and channel it in some way. In other words, you develop rituals or practices that enable you to take it on and then to walk away, only to turn and take it on again. Some people I know have picked a piece of music that helps them to mourn deeply, or they read something every day, or they discover a poet or website. They ritualize loss by saying, every night, after their kids go to bed, “I’m going to take an hour and I’m just going to sit and feel terrible”—maybe weep, read something, or write in a journal—knowing that the next morning, they have to get up at 6:00 a.m. and start life all over again. The ritualizing enables a person to stay in loss for a long time without being debilitated by it.

4. Turn over every stone. 

Loss provides an opportunity to grow. At first, you’re obsessed with the loss itself, and you mourn that primary loss. But sooner or later, you start taking some little detours or digressions. You take these little side trips and you discover that there’s a lot to learn. Genuine new vistas open up in your life as a result. For example, you may explore the kind of spouse, or parent, or friend you are. You may take a fresh look at priorities and commitments. I’ve met many men in the wake of losing their wives through untimely death, and they say, “I was idolatrous with my work. I regret that so much.” And then they turn and discover that they have grandchildren that they can prioritize as they reconsider their use of time and resources. Or a person might discover how oblivious they’ve been to other people’s losses and suffering.

5. Learn how to grieve previous losses.

Grief has a cumulative effect. When we face one, we’re reminded of others, and we have to grieve them all. Mental health professionals suggest that loss becomes a kind of triggering event. It awakens memory, deeper emotional memory of previous losses, such as abandonment, failure, abuse, neglect, despair, or rejection. A new grief forces a revisitation of those, and we discover how strong those feelings are when we thought we had put those feelings to rest.

6. Take responsibility for the impact of our lives.

We never mourn as solitary people. In the human community, we stand on the same stage and we act parts in the same play. But we also have people in the audience who are watching us, such as children, friends, or colleagues at work. And mourning can become a kind of strange performance—not a posture or showing off, but how we enter into grief, how we process it, and how we do that in the human community and in the church. Loss assigns us to a script; we have to decide how we’re going to play the role. Loss provides us with an opportunity to witness, not by putting a shiny plastic smile on our face; rather, we witness in our weakness, through our suffering, and in our pain. Even by one thin thread we still hold onto faith and open the door for God’s work of grace in our lives.

Related: How God called me to care for others on the same road as me

7. Build a team.

We can’t do this alone. When there’s a loss, especially if it’s a public loss of some kind, you’ll see a whole lot of people show up on the doorstep for maybe the first three months. They maybe make a meal, send a card, or wish you well. But then they move on. I don’t look at that as negative; rather, it’s inevitable in the human community. We don’t have time to carry everybody’s burdens, and most of us are not immediately affected by someone else’s loss. We might know them or miss them at church, but it’s a second or third order relationship; for us to mourn for them and care for them over the long haul is simply not possible for most of us. So we do our part with a card, a meal, or a word of consolation, then we move on.

In the end, the circle of people who are in it for the long haul has to be small. When a person suffers loss, they can’t keep explaining themselves to 50 people. It’s exhausting. But they can with five. As someone supporting a person suffering loss, you need to decide when you will be part of that team. When is it appropriate? When do you step up and realize that this loss and consequent support is going to affect your life for the next two or ten years? If you say yes to being part of that small team, that’s when you begin to do life with those people. Perhaps it’s a monthly phone call, or maybe it’s writing down the anniversary of the loss and being intentional about checking in on that day. Discern how to build that team—a small, consistent group of people so that the person with loss is surrounded by a handful of people who will remember and enter into their suffering over a long period of time.

8. Live in tension permanently.

To speak on that tension, I’m borrowing from a famous Rilke poem. He talks about both the beauty and the terror of knowing God. That’s a tension, isn’t it? Beauty and terror, joy and sorrow, mystery and revelation, immediacy and transcendence, and so on. A sign of spiritual health in people is that they learn to live in those tensions. They don’t have to be all of one thing. They can be both deeply sad and yet have some hint of joy in their life at the same time. They can enter into the anguish of the world and still live with some degree of peace. That’s the life of transformation, and that’s the human capacity that God has given to us as imitators of Christ. That’s how Jesus lived. He mourned and was joyful at the same time.

Now, that is impossible to do in the first month or year after a loss, but I do think suffering can lead us to that deeper kind of life where we learn to live in those tensions—and we do it permanently rather than successively. In other words, I can be sad and happy simultaneously; it’s not, “I once was sad; I’m happy now.” Our nerve endings at the end of our fingertips can communicate to us both pain and pleasure with the same nerves. I think that’s true of the capacity of the soul.

Related: How facing death with Christian hope can help us find new life in Christ

To help someone live in that tension, you can look for hints that they provide and then step into that space with them. For example, the first time they’re happy, they may be shocked and feel that it’s almost a violation. They’re resistant to that happiness and feel almost guilty: How could I ever be happy again in the wake of losing a child? As someone stepping into that space, you can say, “Let’s talk about this. Why are you so uncomfortable with this moment of happiness?” And maybe you simply suggest that it’s possible to have both feelings—sad and happy—at the same time. One does not necessarily exclude the other. Look for those little cracks like that. Those are little divine moments that pastors, counselors, or friends can step into and help people to see what can really happen in their lives. They don’t “graduate” from their loss, but they learn to carry it. It never goes away, but it can be carried a little bit more lightly. And I don’t think we can tell them that; I think we can show them that that is actually happening and that’s the direction in which they have to go.

In the end, it’s not the loss that matters—because we’re going to face big ones—but it matters how we respond. By the grace and the love and the redemptive work of Jesus in our lives, that response can be one that is not only good for us and our family and our friends, but for the broader human community.

This material was originally recorded as a webinar for pastors and chaplains in the Reformed Church in America (February 2025). It has been lightly edited for clarity and wider use by Becky Getz.

 

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