THE LAST FAREWELL: Maya stared at her phone screen, thumbs hovering over the keyboard. She’d rewritten the message seven times already.
She hit send before she could delete it again. Then she watched the three dots appear and disappear as her best friend Jen typed, deleted, typed again. “Sorry, this is such a blunt message, but my dad died yesterday”
Two minutes later, a reply from her best friend Jen applied: “Oh my god. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? That’s a stupid question. I don’t know what to say.”
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Maya almost smiled. At least Jen was honest about not knowing what to say. Most people weren’t. The next few days blurred together in a strange choreography of avoidance. At school, conversations stopped when she walked into rooms. People gave her those looks – heads tilted, eyes soft with pity, mouths pressed into sad little lines. They asked “How are you?” in hushed, funeral voices, and when she answered “Fine,” they looked relieved, as if she’d given them permission to stop worrying.
Nobody asked about him. Her dad had been terrible at cooking but insisted on making Sunday pancakes anyway, producing charcoal discs he’d serve with a flourish. He’d sung off-key in the car and made up ridiculous names for their dog. He’d been building a bookshelf in the garage for three years, claiming it was “almost done” every time anyone asked.
But the person who existed in those moments – the one who made her laugh, who embarrassed her at parent-teacher conferences, who texted her weird memes at 6am – that person seemed to have vanished. Now there was only “her dad who died.” The tragedy. The thing people didn’t know how to talk about.
“We’re here for you,” people kept saying. But here felt like a careful distance, a buffer zone where nothing real could happen.
Two weeks later, Maya sat with her friends at lunch. They were talking about a movie, and she tried to focus, tried to laugh at the right moments. But she felt like she was watching from behind glass.
“My dad would have hated that movie,” she said suddenly. The words came out wrong—too loud, interrupting someone’s sentence.
Silence dropped over the table like a blanket.
“Oh,” Jen said carefully. “Yeah?”
Maya could see it in their faces—the panic, the fear of saying the wrong thing. She’d become something fragile, something that might break if handled incorrectly.
The fear and the panic
“Never mind,” she muttered.
That night, her older brother called. “How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Everyone keeps looking at me like I’m made of glass,” she said. “And nobody wants to talk about Dad. Like, actually talk about him. They just want to know if I’m ‘okay’ and then change the subject as fast as possible.”
“Yeah,” her brother said quietly. “It’s like he became just ‘the dead dad’ instead of… Dad.”
“Exactly.”
There was a long pause. Then her brother said, “Remember when he tried to fix the dishwasher and flooded the entire kitchen?”
Maya laughed—really laughed—for the first time in weeks. “And then he just stood there in three inches of water saying ‘I know what I’m doing’?”
“While Mom called the plumber.”
They swapped stories for an hour. The funny ones, the embarrassing ones, the small moments that made him real.
I am sad – miss him
The next day at school, Maya tried something different. When Jen asked how she was doing, Maya said, “I’m sad. And I really miss him. But I also keep thinking about this time he got lost in IKEA and called us from the lighting section like he’d been stranded on a desert island.”
Jen’s eyes widened, then she smiled—tentatively, but genuinely. “Really?”
“He was in there for two hours. We lived fifteen minutes away.”
And just like that, the careful distance cracked. Jen asked questions. She laughed. She said, “He sounds like he was really funny.”
“He was,” Maya said. “He was a lot of things.”
She realized something then: her friends weren’t avoiding talking about her dad because they didn’t care. They were terrified of hurting her more, of saying the wrong thing, of making it worse. They thought that bringing him up would remind her he was gone, as if she could forget for even a moment.
But she didn’t need them to fix it or make it better. She just needed them to remember he existed. To let him be a person, not just a tragedy.
Know what to say
Later that week, Maya posted something in her group chat: Quick grief etiquette guide for anyone who needs it:
– It’s okay to not know what to say. “I don’t know what to say” is actually perfect.
– Don’t be afraid to mention the person who died. We think about them constantly anyway. Hearing their name doesn’t make us remember – we never forget.
– It’s okay to ask questions about who they were, what they liked, what they were like. Please do, actually.
– We might seem fine sometimes and then fall apart over something random. Both are real.
– It’s okay to laugh with us. We need normal moments too.
– Just… don’t disappear. Even if it’s awkward. Especially if it’s awkward.
The responses came quickly. Thank you for this. I’ve been so scared of saying the wrong thing. I wish someone had told me this when my grandma died.
That night, Jen texted: What was your dad’s worst dad joke?
Maya smiled at her phone and started typing. She had about a hundred to choose from.
He’d like being remembered this way, she thought. Not as the tragedy, but as the person who made terrible jokes and burned pancakes and got lost in IKEA. As Dad.
The grief was still there—heavy and real and sometimes overwhelming. But now there was room for something else too: the stories that made him who he was, the memories that kept him more than just “the one who died.”
She started typing, and for the first time in weeks, talking about him didn’t hurt quite as much as staying silent.
Navigating grief
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is simply show up—awkwardly, imperfectly, honestly. Ask about the person. Say their name. Share the silence. Let grief be messy and real instead of something to be fixed or hidden. And if you’re the one grieving: it’s okay to need both the tears and the laughter, the talking and the quiet, the memory and the present moment. Your grief doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. And the person you lost gets to be more than just the way they left—they get to be all the moments they lived, too.
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