[dougmccune]

I know folks are disagreeing with you a bit in this thread, but I just wanted to say that I 100% agree with you. 17 year-old me could have written the same words after the loss of my mom. I know loss. I will never know your loss. To me, that acknowledgment is a show of respect.

[smeej]

It's exactly this. As I said, I don't even know my brother's grief and we lost the same sister.

Nobody else knows the things about her that made me laugh, the little memories I have, the things about her that only I ever experienced in the way I experienced them. We shared things no one else can ever know.

I know for a fact that other people have experienced gigantic, devastating loss. Other people do know grief. Some of them know grief even more severe than mine. I encourage them to say so to grieving people, because it is important that people know they aren't alone.

But not one person who has ever lived or can ever live has lost my relationship with my sister but me. Saying otherwise reduces her to just "a person who died," not this person who had this life and this relationship, who has now died.

And that's what's so radically insulting about it. Don't do that to a grieving person. If people matter individually at all, then the grief of the people who loved them is fundamentally unknowable by anybody else.

I think anyone who has entered into the depths of their own grief knows this.

I don't expect to be able to convince the whole internet.