There’s no right thing to say to people who are grieving, but the worst thing is fearing to speak at all

You desperately want to say the right thing. The magic thing, the elusive words that will make the unbearable somehow bearable after all – the comforting thing that for some reason won’t come to mind, no matter how long you struggle over the letter of condolence.

Grief is alienating, in a way. It takes the grieving off into a dark, angry world into which the rest of us are afraid to follow. Perhaps it’s having recently had a death in the family, or perhaps it’s having a mercifully very alive teenage son, but I’ve found myself skipping guiltily over reports this week about those four adventurous boys who could have been mine or yours, going missing on a camping trip to Snowdonia; the desperate search, the fading hope, and then the awful news of them being found dead in their car.

As a parent, there are some things you can’t let yourself think about too much. Yet this inability to look other people’s grief squarely in the face translates all too often into isolation for the grieving, who see people cross the street rather than engage in an awkward conversation.

Knowing how to respond sensitively to someone else’s bad news is the last missing piece in the jigsaw of adulthood, the life skill most of us only realise, to our dismay, we are lacking in that particular sniper’s alley of the late 40s and 50s, when everyone is seemingly running from something and it suddenly feels very important indeed to be a good friend. These are the years of losing elderly parents, but also of early heart attacks, cancer diagnoses, of friends blindsided by now-the-kids-are-grown-and-gone divorces. Lately I’ve found myself struggling too often for the right words.

“‘Anything but lasagne,’ said one whose bereavement prompted a succession of identikit foil trays of supper left on the doorstep by kind friends.” Photograph: Justin Paget/Getty Images

What do you say in a condolence letter that doesn’t sound trite or clumsy? Should you leave a casserole on their doorstep, or would that be faintly ridiculous in the age of Deliveroo? After the funeral, do you keep WhatsApping as usual – less obtrusive than a phone call – or is that too impersonal?

But while the internet is full of well-meaning advice – don’t tell someone newly diagnosed with cancer “you’ve got this!” and don’t say “if there’s anything I can do …” because it’s too vague – grief is as individual as love. Some people do want to be cheerfully reassured that everything will be fine and others absolutely don’t. When I asked friends who had suffered losses what had been helpful, the results were hopelessly conflicting.

“Anything but lasagne,” said one whose bereavement prompted a succession of identikit foil trays of supper left on the doorstep by kind friends: though she was genuinely grateful for the thought, by the end she’d begun to dread another baked pasta. Yet a different friend was definite about wanting “all the casseroles”, plus lots of phone calls. Some felt comforted by a kitchen full of people coming and going, weeping and reminiscing; another couldn’t deal with everyone else’s feelings on top of her own, and just wanted letters to read and reread in private.

Black humour works for some people. In the journalist Catherine Mayer’s memoir Good Grief, co-written with her mother, Anne Mayer Bird, after both women were coincidentally widowed around the same time, she describes how her friend the comedian Sandi Toksvig made a mischievous habit of saying things others would consider shockingly inappropriate, and then adding brightly: “Too soon, darling?” But few are brave enough to attempt a joke that could backfire. Modern technology, meanwhile, creates whole new faux pas: a recent Time magazine guide to grief etiquette included warnings not to tag the relatives of the dead when posting old photographs on social media, or else to warn them so they don’t stumble unexpectedly on a jagged memory.

But a friend who had lost a child in utterly heartbreaking circumstances once told me she found it perplexing to see people walking on eggshells around her, trying to avoid detonating a painful memory. The worst had already happened. It wasn’t going to get worse because someone reminded her of the thing she already couldn’t forget.

The unhelpful truth is that there isn’t really a right thing to say, or rather not one universal right thing: there’s only the right thing to say to the right person, which differs every time. But there is one universally wrong thing, and that’s to become so paralysed by the fear of getting it wrong as to end up saying nothing at all.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist