How to Support Someone Who Is Grieving | Octopus Legacy
Written by Steph Douglas, founder of thoughtful gift company Don't Buy Her Flowers
I've spent a significant amount of time thinking about how we handle grief, not because I set out to, but because it kept finding its way into my inbox, my DMs, and has become a significant part of how we do business at Don't Buy Her Flowers. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: the biggest mistake we make when someone we know is grieving isn't saying the wrong thing. It's saying nothing at all.
You won't make it worse
I understand the instinct. Grief is uncomfortable. It's raw and unpredictable, and most of us weren't taught how to sit with someone else's pain without trying to fix it. So, we go quiet. We wait for them to bring it up. We tell ourselves we don't want to intrude, or upset them, or say the wrong thing.
Here's the truth: you can't remind someone of a loss they're already carrying, sometimes every single moment of every day. Their grief doesn't need protecting from your acknowledgement, it needs company. When you reach out, however imperfectly, you're not opening a wound. You're simply saying, I see this. I see you. That is almost never unwelcome, even when it's clumsy, even when you don't have the perfect words.
What is unwelcome is silence. Silence tells someone their loss is too awkward to mention, too heavy to hold space for. It can make an already isolating experience feel even lonelier.
What Cariad Lloyd taught us about grief
We've spoken with a number of experts on grief over the years, and every single one of them has talked about how important it is to acknowledge it. One conversation that's really stayed with me is with Cariad Lloyd, actress, author and host of Griefcast, who came on the Don't Buy Her Flowers podcast to talk about her book, You Are Not Alone. She had so many insightful things to say, including:
- You cannot "break" a grieving person. People often stay silent because they're afraid of saying the wrong thing and making someone sadder. Cariad's point is that you can't make them "more" sad, their world is already broken. Acknowledging the loss, even awkwardly, is always better than pretending nothing happened.
- Grief is patient, and it isn't linear. As Cariad put it, "You can't run away from grief, because if you do, it will wait for years, it's the most patient thing in your life." She's quick to reject the myth of the tidy "five stages of grief." In reality, grief changes, eases, and returns, it's less a process you finish and more a 'lifelong membership'.
- Move away from broad offers. Saying "let me know if you need anything" puts the work back on someone who's already exhausted, forcing them to organise you. It's far more helpful to offer something specific and practical: "I'm dropping dinner off on Tuesday," or "I'm heading to the supermarket, send me your list."
- Normalise the "admin" and logistics of death. Talking about death and preferences before it happens makes the reality easier to handle when it comes. Cariad is a big advocate for practising these difficult conversations; sharing passwords, making clear care plans in advance, so loved ones aren't left carrying extra stress on top of acute grief.
The colleague you see more than your own family
We talk a lot about grief in the context of close family and friends, but there's a whole category of relationship we tend to overlook: our colleagues. Many of us spend more waking hours with the people we work alongside than we do with our own partners or families. We know their coffee order, their Monday moods, the names of their kids and pets. And yet, when one of them is going through a loss, the workplace often falls back on painful formality. A brief HR email. An awkward silence in the team chat. Everyone tiptoeing around the empty desk.
That doesn't have to be the case. A colleague going through bereavement doesn't need you to have the perfect speech prepared. They need to know their team hasn't forgotten, that their pain hasn't been quietly filed away while everyone waits for them to "get back to normal." A short, honest message, "I'm so sorry, I'm thinking of you, there's no pressure to reply", paired with a thoughtful gift can do more than any well meaning but stiff corporate gesture ever could. It says: this is a human workplace, and you matter here beyond your job title. At DBHF, we're proud to support a number of businesses who do exactly this, enabling them to provide something thoughtful and personal to staff in times of need. And their feedback speaks for itself.
The message that changed how I thought about gifting and grief
A few years before we started working with Teddy's Wish, someone from our community got in touch, and it's stayed with me for nearly ten years now. She messaged us on our Facebook page in the middle of a miscarriage. She told us she was surrounded by flowers, sent with love, of course, but that they were wilting in front of her while all she wanted to do was lie on the sofa, cry, and watch terrible telly while her body went through something devastating. Instead, she said, she was stuck finding vases and worrying about keeping the flowers alive, and it felt cruel.
That message really struck me. It also put us in a tricky position, if I'm honest. As a company built on the idea of "don't buy her flowers," we never wanted to look like we were trying to capitalise on someone's grief, that has never been what we're about. But it also confirmed something we already knew, many of us from painful first hand experience: when someone reaches out with genuine thoughtfulness in the middle of your worst moment, it can mean everything. Not another obligation. Not more upkeep. Just comfort, without conditions.
Partnering with baby loss charity Teddy's Wish
When Jen from Teddy's Wish got in touch with us at the start of 2020 about creating care packages for grieving parents, I knew straight away this was a partnership that could help us get it right, creating the right gifts, in the right way, for people navigating baby loss. Six years on, we're still working together, building and shipping care packages to parents going through some of the hardest days of their lives.
Most recently, we launched the Teddy's Wish Community Care Package and this one is especially meaningful because it wasn't built in a meeting room. As Jen, Co-Founder and CEO of Teddy's Wish, put it:
"We asked our community which products they would find most helpful because nobody knows that better than those who have lived it. Every item has been chosen with care and consideration, something gentle and meaningful to offer a grieving parent."
That, to me, is what thoughtful gifting in grief should always be: not a performance, not an obligation, but something built with genuine care by people who understand what's actually needed.
Show up anyway
If there's someone in your life right now, a colleague, a friend, a family member, who's grieving, and you've been holding back because you don't know what to say, let this be your nudge. Send the message. If you want to, choose the gift that says I'm thinking of you without demanding anything in return. You don't need the perfect words. You just need to show up.
Steph Douglas has been running thoughtful gift company Don't Buy Her Flowers since 2014. As well as bereavement gifts and many other occasions (birthday, get well, new baby), Steph and the team work with businesses to offer corporate gifts that connect with their recipients and represent their brand as one that puts people first. View their corporate brochure here to find out more about what they do, or get in touch at [email protected].
