How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair?

When someone is going through a hard time, you don’t need to say some wise thing; you just have to be there, with heightened awareness of what they are experiencing at that moment.

Day did what sensitive people do when other people are in trauma. We are all called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma. Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence.

Talking with depressed people, offering them help and steadfast support, gently but firmly leading them to pursue and maintain treatment, and keeping in touch with them are all effective ways of reducing suicide risk. Depression lies, but you can be the one in somebody’s life who counters those lies with the truth.

David’s friends and fellow officers were blunt, witty, matter-of-fact, and deeply compassionate. They made clear the expectation that I would handle things well, but they also did every conceivable thing possible to make a terrible situation more bearable. They never left me alone, but they never hovered; they kept me plied with sherry and scotch;

It was so hard not to offer anything. I’ve been through enough that I know I shouldn’t try to find a bright side, or explain away the pain, or say “I know how you feel,” but it was extremely uncomfortable to sit with someone my age who was dying, or with the family member of someone who just got very bad news. I was in the position of hel

There were times when, in crisis, I would await the reassuring word from a friend, until I suddenly saw that I should be the one giving reassurance. The discovery changed my life. That was when I knew that we experience pain to sensitize us to the pain of others. Turning our emotions outward, we can use them as the key to free someone else from the