The morning after her father died, Susanne Jones had to go to work. She was waitressing in Germany at the time, and one of her regulars—a man she saw often but barely knew—could tell something was wrong and asked her what had happened. She tearfully told him the truth: Her dad had passed away the night before. And then she watched him freeze.
“He literally turned his entire body away from me,” Jones recalls—shoulders angled off, face averted. He aimed an “I’m so sorry” at the empty air in front of him, then added, “I hope everything’s gonna be better.” Her father was dead, she thought to herself. Nothing was going to be better.
Decades later, Jones researches supportive communication at the University of Minnesota, and she’s studied this exact moment: why the people who want to help so often get it wrong, and what actually works instead. That long-ago customer wasn't cruel, she says; he was overwhelmed. Most of us are when faced with someone else's tears.
Here's the instinct nearly all of us have the moment the floodgates open: do something. Our desire to say the perfect thing or make the tears stop comes from a loving place, yet it’s usually the wrong move. “It feels uncomfortable because we feel this need to fix it,” says Amanda Holmstrom, a professor in the department of communication at Michigan State University who studies social support. “This person feels badly, and I want to make them stop—for their own sake, maybe to decrease our own discomfort.” Yet when someone is crying their eyes out, they're usually not in a place to hear the perfect thing anyway, which means you don't have to put so much pressure on yourself to find it.
Betty Ferrell has watched this play out for nearly five decades. As director of nursing research and education at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif.—and a nurse for 49 years—she helped build the field of hospice care back when it was a brand-new idea. One of the earliest lessons she learn
