CHAPTER 7

Sympathy Cards (Words)

Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.

—Proverbs 16:24

Since almost the dawn of time, philosophers have been arguing about the nature of language, namely, its inadequacy. René Descartes claimed that language was misleading because of the personal judgments and assumptions that are inherently built into it. Thomas Hobbes said that words were the “money of fools”; as much as we try, we cannot buy truth with them. David Hume thought that language deludes us; what we assume are ideas are merely illusions or fiction.1

I’m no philosopher. Frankly, I’m a writer and I still feel a deep frustration with the inadequacy of words. We all do at the street level of life, from unresolved office spats, to recurring spousal disputes, from explaining the concept of God to a toddler, to trying to express the depth of one’s affection to a lover. The insufficiency of language is perhaps never more acutely felt than when death strikes, when you desire nothing more than to comfort a friend, but you simply don’t have the words.

“I just don’t even know what to say right now.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard many times in my life. I’ve heard it uttered by fellow aid workers as we stared out into fields of debris in the aftermath of a hurricane or flood, hands over our gaping mouths. I’ve seen it appear in texts on my phone as I informed friends that I would not be having a baby this year after all. I’ve heard it choked out through sobs as loved ones learned of my sister’s death. I’ve said it myself, to a friend after she received a stage four cancer diagnosis in the prime of her life. To a colleague who had lost his wife.

This frank honesty is refreshing in some ways and names outright how deficient we all are in the face of tragedy. I’ve never minded it, never held it against anyone for saying it. If there’s one thing that we all have in common, it’s that grief makes us all novices. Death is not natural, and its dialect is foreign to us.

There are plenty of phrases we utilize as placeholders in an attempt to communicate the inexpressible. We “hold space,” “send love and light,” and relay “thoughts and prayers.” Many people turn to customary expressions of worship during times of grief. They immediately revert to the hope we have in the life to come, to the comfort of knowing God’s ways are higher than ours, and to the anticipation of the “sweet by-and-by.” But these invocations of gladness have always felt mismatched to the moment for me. Phrases and sentiments that once felt like a familiar buoy of hope can feel like betrayal when leveraged at the wrong time.

Almost eight years ago, I was visiting a refugee resettlement camp in Uganda. Our teams were providing livelihood supplies to Congolese refugees who had fled their homeland and crossed the border. As our Land Rover rattled down the rutted red dirt roads of the camp, I stared out the window at crude hut after crude hut, family after family that was eking out an existence in this wilderness.

Many people shared with us stories of their flight from Congo. Most were missing family members. The stories of refugees were all too familiar: a little boy who had been captured by a rebel militia, a mother who had been raped and shot, a little girl who’d fled into the jungle and had to be left behind so the rest of the family could escape in time.

We bumped confidently along down the road while the stereo system blasted a popular worship song. The song was praising God for being the defender of the weak, the One who lifts up the needy on the wings of the eagles. Really? Defender of the weak? What about these people? Who defended them in their time of need? What comfort have You offered them, God?

Similarly, after my sister died, I’d cringe to hear the song “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.” For me at the time, that song posed cruel questions followed by shouts of acclamation that left me feeling hollow and gutted: “Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!” and “Where’s thy victory, oh grave? Alleluia!”

I knew exactly where death’s sting was. I’d just put my only sister in a box and laid her in the ground. That felt an awful lot like a victory for death to me.

Sometimes, something that is true isn’t the whole truth. Never is it more important to tell the whole truth than in times of deep sorrow and confusion. If we are going to speak to the hope of a situation, we must also speak to the pain of it, the agonizing sorrow of the loss.

It is Scripture itself that offers us an alternative language in the midst of our confused sorrow. This language is called lament. Biblical scholars note that laments make up nearly one-third of the psalms, and the prophetic books of the Old Testament are brimming with them. Jesus Himself laments over the wayward state of Jerusalem (see Matt. 23:37–39). Akin to the death wail, the words offered in lament are untamed and brazen. They challenge platitudes and dismantle our cheery charades. They name unequivocally what is wrong and broken in the world.

Lament does not deny hope. Rather, lament tests hope’s mettle, summons it into the darkness, where it actually belongs. Author, singer-songwriter, and theologian Michael Card writes, “Lament is not a path to worship, but the path of worship.”2 When we operationalize the severe and painful language of lament, we stand in agreement with God. We affirm with Him that suffering mars our existence and death is brutal and unnatural. We declare that evil is in opposition to His plan and that sin is the great enemy of our flesh and spirit. We assert that love is divine and divinely bestowed, and the loss of it is cruel and unusual. What is worship, if not to stand in agreement with God in truth, in joy, and in sorrow?

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I’ve never been totally comfortable with the word “sympathy,” much less with an entire genre of cards dedicated to the concept. To me the word has a patronizing connotation. No one likes the idea of somebody feeling sorry for you. Having someone’s sympathy, to me, indicates that a weakness or vulnerability is present on my part. It makes me feel like I’m a bother or a problem that needs fixing.

Maybe it’s the cards themselves that make me feel uncomfortable. Most sympathy cards depict tranquil scenes in soft-hued pastels. They often portray the halcyon landscape of a Thomas Kinkade reality: gently rolling hills, pastoral homesteads, serene seashores, and kindly creatures such as deer, birds, and butterflies. Also flowers. Lots of flowers.

These images stand in stark contrast to the actual experience of a loved one’s death. Death feels nothing like a walk in the park or a peaceful stroll on the beach. But I get the point. Why add insult to injury? When expressing sympathy, it seems most sensitive to convey your message with an air of calm and placidity. But it hasn’t always been that way.

The genre of the sympathy card is an outlier in the greeting card industry as a whole. After all, almost every other category of greeting card exists to recognize celebratory occasions: birthdays, graduations, weddings, and holidays. While letters of sympathy, congratulations, and friendship have been written and delivered for ages, greeting cards did not emerge as a cohesive industry until the mid-nineteenth century. Christmas cards, which originated in England as special drawings with messages designed to spread Christmas cheer, initially dominated the trade. These were lithographed, printed, colored by hand, and produced up to a thousand at a time, though this number quickly increased as the business of merrymaking took off.3 Birthday and Easter cards followed shortly thereafter.

Sympathy cards were slower to follow. In fact, the first sympathy cards ever to be produced were sent by the bereaved to the community to announce the death of a loved one. “The cards were very somber looking,” writes Hallmark archivist and historian Sharman Roberts. Some included artwork and simple poetry. “You would have known the minute you received a sympathy card that the message was death. All used lots of black—or maybe an engraved image of a mourner or tombstone. The envelopes were edged in black. There would be no mistaking the intent of the card.”4

Brandy Schillace notes that in these early death notices, people did not “pass on.” They died. The announcements named with little delicacy the grave reality of the situation. But that directness did not last long. She cites a card sent in the late nineteenth century that reads: “And though the body moulders here, the soul is safe in heaven.” A mere ten years later, in the early twentieth century, another card with the same poem was sent, with one slight alteration: “And though the body slumbers here, the soul is safe in heaven.” In the span of just a decade, the dead went from decaying to simply sleeping.5

The use of euphemisms continued to expand along with the sympathy card business. Sympathy cards as we know them today, sent from condolers to the bereaved family, began to emerge in the 1910s. They were originally simple and utilized muted pastels for coloring. Most offered words of comfort in the form of short, rhyming poems that expressed fondness for the departed, hope for the life to come, and love for those in grief.6

Few if any cards now use the word “dead” or “death.” They might mention suffering, hardship, or trial. But most refrain from explicitly naming the occasion for the sending of the card. Images on cards are usually nature-themed, portraying deer, seashells, flowers, trees, or sunsets. Religious imagery such as a cross, angels, or praying hands is also common.

I suppose most people prefer that their sympathy cards strike a happy medium between the forthright and the circuitous, the somber and the reassuring. Perhaps the aesthetic history of greeting cards reflects our increased reticence to overtly name the tragedy that has occurred. It showcases our fear of doing or saying the wrong thing and highlights an underlying assumption that the best thing you can do for a mourner is to soften, reframe, or even deny the new reality in which they are living. What we are tempted to do for ourselves in the face of tragedy—numb, ignore, harden ourselves—we are tempted to do for others. But this is misguided mercy. And many times, it’s the easy way out.

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Meghan O’Rourke, who writes about grieving the loss of her mother to cancer in her memoir The Long Goodbye, bemoans the loss of rituals in our society. She writes, “The disappearance of mourning rituals affects everyone, not just the mourner. One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say.”7

I know from experience that it’s a daunting endeavor to offer condolences to someone. But I never realized how much work it was to receive condolences, especially as a well-curated introvert. By default, I like to be left alone. It’s important to me for people to think I’m managing the ups and downs of life with competence and tenacity, and it’s easiest to maintain this persona by keeping people at arm’s length. Simply listening to someone’s offer of comfort means having to show up emotionally to hear it and accept it. It requires you to admit struggle. This, I suppose, is all part of the grief work. I guess it’s the labor of being loved.

But there are a few things that make that labor a bit more manageable. The truth is, people have said some strange and unhelpful things to me in the aftermath of my losses. Some of them were downright bizarre. But people have also said valuable things, beautiful things. They have shown up and offered words that filled me up rather than drained me. I’ve tried to sort out what makes a statement or sentiment helpful and what makes it hurtful. What is the “x factor” that makes a condolence particularly… condolatory?

Shortly after the start of the pandemic, I received an email from an acquaintance whom we’d bought a piano from a few years prior. It was a short email, in which he simply stated that he was thinking of me because it must be so hard for me to hear people dismissing COVID-19 as “just the flu” when my sister had died after contracting the flu. He told me he was praying for me. Something about that email made me feel so seen. He acknowledged how random and painful the triggers of grief can be, even a year or more later. He noticed what no one else had noticed.

Four months after my sister died, Hurricane Dorian ravaged the Bahamas, and I went down to the island nation as part of a team to set up a disaster response. A colleague named Hannah, whom I’d met only in passing, was part of the team. One evening, in the midst of the chaos of the response, she pulled me aside and told me that she, too, had lost a sister when she was younger. She didn’t go into great detail, but she acknowledged how complex and life-altering it is to lose a sibling, and she told me that I was not alone.

Sometimes, when people learn of your loss, they want to connect with you in that holy, hollow space that is grief. And the easiest way to relate is by sharing about a similar experience. There were quite a few times in the weeks after my sister’s death that I was cornered at the office, the grocery store, or at church by people who initially approached me to offer sympathy, but then went on to share in exhaustive detail their own grief story. By the end of the conversation, they were in tears and I was trying to comfort them. I don’t always mind stepping into another person’s pain with them, but in an attempt to show understanding, people often inadvertently ask the bereaved, still fresh off of a loss, to shoulder more than they are already carrying.

What Hannah offered me, quite literally in the midst of a disaster, was a glimpse of her own sorrow, as a show of solidarity and a reminder that I wasn’t alone. She didn’t do it in such a way that required me to carry anything or that centered herself in that moment. Rather, she reminded me that she was there to walk alongside me if ever I needed it.

The week after my sister died, Tim and I drove home to North Carolina in a stupor, completely disoriented by what we’d experienced over the last four weeks and overwhelmed by all the arrangements yet to be made for the funeral. Our friends Lizzy and Graham reached out to us: “Just let us know when you want us to come over.” They said they’d get a babysitter, bring food, and hunker down with us to talk for as long as we needed. The night they came over was the first night in almost a month that I’d felt myself take a breath, as Tim and I were able to sit at a table with friends who cared deeply for us, and talk, curse, yell, laugh, and cry for as long as we needed.

Gifted condolers follow the protocols of sitting shivah by taking cues on how to be with the griever from the griever. Believe it or not, a bereaved person doesn’t always want to cry. Sometimes they want to laugh. Sometimes they want to scream. Sometimes they want to sit in silence. Sometimes they want to talk about death and sometimes they want to talk about other things (because our lives are so much more than the grief we are experiencing!). Lizzy and Graham made space for all these emotions and offered their unconditional presence for everything we were feeling.

The most impactful condolence I received came to me from my boss at the time. As I was leaving the office to drive back to Tennessee for my sister’s funeral, I nearly broke down in his office, completely wrecked by what I was stepping into that weekend.

“How am I going to do this?” I asked him and began to share how overwhelming the funeral planning had been, how nervous I was to deliver the eulogy, and how devastated I was for my parents, my brother-in-law, and my niece and nephew.

He listened intently and then paused before offering a humble word of advice.

“God will help you.”

“What?”

“God will help you.”

It wasn’t a theological treatise. It wasn’t an explanation of what happened or why it had happened. It wasn’t a promise that everything was going to be okay. It was a simple offering of wisdom, coming from a man who had seen his fair share of suffering. It was a statement of elementary truth to which I could cling. I was not alone. God was not absent. While He might not alleviate my pain, He would guide me as I navigated my way through it.

That humble word of wisdom carried me through the funeral and the months to follow. It didn’t answer every question or soothe every fear, and it wasn’t a map with precise directions out of the wilderness of grief. But it was a compass, a true north.

To feel seen. To connect in simple solidarity. To be offered unconditional presence. To be given a word of wisdom. What each of these friends offered had one thing in common. Love. Their condolences were not about them, but about me. True, deep love need not embellish itself with eloquence or well-rehearsed rhetoric. Though it may at times be offered timidly, clumsily, or imperfectly, real love never fails. Never.

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When my sister died, hundreds of sympathy cards, letters of condolence, and notes of encouragement came in from all over the world. There were stacks and stacks of them, from every corner of the US, from Japan, Australia, the UK, and the Netherlands. My parents devoured them in the weeks that followed her death, reading every word and drawing comfort from the love and prayers being offered.

I, however, avoided those cards like the plague.

The truth is, every ritual of mourning has the potential to send you deeper and deeper into the reality of your loss. To read those cards would have been to acknowledge afresh that she was in fact gone. Receiving a sympathy card means that someone you love has died. I was still not ready to fully accept that she had died.

Finally, just before the one-year anniversary of her death, I decided that it was time. After visiting my parents one weekend, I packed up my car and placed the box brimming with pastel-colored envelopes carefully in the backseat next to my sleeping toddler. Once I got home, I began to read. Not all at once. But slowly, a few at a time, whenever I found the strength to do so. It took me eight months to read them all.

The cards that were sent to us weren’t especially unique or extraordinary. Many were typical sympathy cards, imprinted with the customary tranquil landscapes, florals, and crosses. Yet, they were in many ways profound. This was because so many of those who sent cards had the courage to offer their personal words to us in our time of mourning.

Most of the letters began in a similar fashion. The writer acknowledged how imperfect and inadequate their words would be. Many stated how foolish they felt even trying to extend comfort. But, as one person wrote in their card, words were all they had to offer.

After reading the first dozen or so, I resolved to approach that box of cards not with a spirit of vigilance, wariness, or cynicism. Cynicism is a cruel companion in grief. It leaves you feeling nothing but smug and empty. I silenced the voice inside that said: This person has no idea what I am going through, or What do they even know about my sister? or How dare you write about hope at a time like this!

Instead, I decided to try to approach the cards and letters with a spirit of trust and curiosity. With curiosity as my companion, I discovered so much extraordinary beauty in those cards. I felt seen, like an army of condolers was bearing witness to my pain, not in a way that was voyeuristic, but with reverence, respect, and deep empathy. I found words of wisdom; insights that reoriented me around the truth. I felt camaraderie, as many people shared that they also had experienced catastrophic loss and had survived. Mostly, I felt love, geographically far-flung, yet mysteriously close and intimate.

Perhaps sympathy cards have been inaptly named. I wonder at times if they should be called empathy cards. “Empathy” as a term has its own complex and ever-evolving history. The concept didn’t exist in the English language until it was introduced by the American psychologist Edward Titchener in 1909 as a translation of the German Einfühlung, which means “feeling into.”8 Empathy involves a much deeper level of emotional engagement than sympathy. Empathy moves from the spectatorship of sympathy toward actual participation. You feel another person’s pain as if it were your own.9 Inherent in empathy is risk, the chance that you, too, may experience the waves of sorrow churned up by grief. But few good, beautiful, and meaningful things in life don’t involve some level of risk. Love is a risk. Condolences are a risk.

When I look back on all the sympathy cards I received and the condolences I was offered, I truly feel that friends and strangers alike took the risk of entering into my sorrow with me. One card we received from Amy in Raleigh was engraved with a simple swirling, silver design and was imprinted with the words: “There’s no map for this kind of loss.” On the inside she had written a simple note: “The Lord draws near to the brokenhearted.”

True. There is no map. But her words became my compass.

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We’ve lost our way with words when it comes to sorrow. In recent years, people have rightly named how hurtful and damaging fictitious platitudes can be. We’ve recognized that you can’t simply explain away suffering or provide a theological elucidation to bring someone to the other side of grief. We’ve emphasized the importance of mere presence and encouraged the use of supportive silence. This was needed.

But I’m afraid the result is that now, anyone who would dare to offer condolences does so at their own peril. People are afraid. They fear saying or doing the wrong thing and being shut out, so much so that sometimes they fail to show up at all. It’s uncomfortable enough to simply be around people who are suffering. Fear of rubbing salt in the wounds with an ill-timed word is enough to make many avoid the bereaved entirely. This has been one of the hardest parts of grief for me. I hate feeling like I’m putting people in an awkward position. I hate being the elephant in the room.

To be honest, sometimes the grieved just want words, imperfect though they may be, to fill the void. Death itself is enough of a hush. In their book, There Is No Good Card for This: What to Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love, Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell write, “All of our difficult times involve some degree of shame, fear, and loneliness. At times like that, we don’t need anyone to impress us or skillfully talk us out of our pain. We mostly just need the kindness that compels anyone to try.”10 To me, you can say almost anything, and as long as it’s said in kindness, I can receive it as an offering of love. I will say that without a doubt, absence is more painful than someone’s imperfect presence, and silence is more wounding than someone’s awkward attempts at offering comfort. Love covers a multitude of imperfect words.

The latter part of Romans chapter 8 is a passage about present sufferings and future hope. We join with creation in groaning, as fervently as a woman in labor, for physical renewal and the redemption of our bodies (see vv. 22–23). We have been given the first fruits of the Spirit, but the full harvest of the kingdom is yet to come. In this mysterious space of the already-but-not-yet, Paul recognizes an important fact: We do not know how to pray. Words escape us.

But once again, we find an example of love’s unfailing tenacity. God does not leave us alone in our weakness, but rather gives His Spirit to join us in our groanings. The groans of the Holy Spirit transcend language, uttering hopes, desires, requests, and sorrows that are “too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26 ESV). As this sacred translation occurs between the human and the divine, we experience the unfailing love of a God who doesn’t require sanctimonious elocution in order to hear us. As it turns out, groans seem to be the holy language that God speaks.

Love. Lament. Empathy. Hope. Presence. More than eloquence or poise, these are the competencies that make you fluent in the language of condolence.

During a typical year, sympathy cards make up 6 percent of all greeting cards sent for everyday purposes.11 But in April 2020, that percentage drastically increased. While most of us were aware of pandemic shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, retailers were dealing with short supplies of another item: sympathy cards. In hard-hit areas like New York and Florida, shelves of sympathy cards in drugstores and grocery stores were empty. One online greeting card retailer noted that she normally sells six sympathy cards per month. In April 2020, she sold 275.

When a pandemic deprives us of our typical ceremonies and customs, we cling to the few safe practices that remain. We may not be able to gather for funerals or even deliver meals, but we can send a card in the mail. We may be robbed of our rituals, but we will always have our words. No plague or pestilence, no upheaval or uncertainty can steal the love and sympathy we have for one another. Ann Peterson, who designs cards and sells them online, said her best-selling card in those early days of the pandemic bore the image of an angel with her forehead pressed into her arm.12

As if we were joining our imperfect voices with the heavenly groans of celestial beings.

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