Guest Blog by Shelby Moore

Shelby Moore offers a different, insightful, and healthy perspective on grief. She is the Chief Executive Officer for Heartlinks Hospice & Palliative Care. Heartlinks is a non-profit organization that provides care for terminally ill patients wherever they call home in Yakima, Tri-Cities, and all throughout Benton and Yakima counties in the state of Washington.

Shelby’s essay offers valuable, practical, and healthy guidance for secondary grievers (relatives, friends, neighbors, and co-workers) on how to provide comfort and support to primary grievers.

If you are a primary griever, share this essay with your relatives, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. They are also grieving and haven’t been taught how to comfort and support primary grievers. Sharing Shelby’s essay is a great way to educate them.

The Greatest Gift We Can Give the Grieving Is Our Presence by Shelby Moore

I watched her tears fall onto the blanket between us.

Without thinking, my hand reached for the tissue box sitting nearby. Before I could slide it toward her, the hospice chaplain sitting beside me quietly stopped me.

“Leave it,” he whispered.

Every instinct in me wanted to hand her a tissue, to do something to lessen the heaviness in the room. Instead, we sat in silence while she cried. The tears came harder. She spoke through sobs about the husband she had just lost, about the quiet house she dreaded returning to, and about the future she never imagined she would have to face alone.

When she finally looked up, she didn’t thank us for saying the right thing. We hadn’t said much at all. She thanked us for staying.That moment changed me.

I have spent more than a decade working in hospice and now serve as the Chief Executive Officer of a nonprofit hospice organization. I have held countless hands, spoken with thousands of grieving families, and walked beside people during the most sacred moments of their lives. I believed I knew how to comfort people. I believed I understood grief.

I didn’t realize until that moment that I had spent years trying to soften grief instead of honoring it.

Several years ago, one of our hospice chaplains asked me a simple but life-changing question.

“Do you really know how to listen?”

At first, I thought the answer was obvious. Of course, I did. I listened every day. I offered warm hugs, reassuring words, and tissues when tears began to fall. I believed compassion meant helping someone feel better.

Then he gently challenged everything I thought I knew.

He explained that one of the first lessons he learned during his grief training was to resist the instinct to immediately offer a tissue or a hug. Not because those gestures are wrong, but because they can unintentionally communicate something we never intend to say.

“It’s time to stop crying.”

“It’s time to wrap this up.”

“I’m uncomfortable with your pain.”

I had never considered that before.

Looking back, I realized I had often been trying to relieve my own discomfort as much as theirs. Watching someone grieve is hard. We desperately want to fix what cannot be fixed.

But grief is not a problem to solve. It is an experience to witness.

Of course, there are moments when someone reaches for a tissue or leans into an embrace, and those moments should be honored. Every grieving person is different. The lesson was never to withhold comfort. The lesson was to stop assuming what comfort should look like.

Take their cues. Allow the silence. Stay present.

If someone chooses to share their grief with you, they are giving you one of the greatest gifts imaginable. They are trusting you with the deepest ache they carry.

That trust deserves reverence. It deserves patience. It deserves your presence.

As a hospice leader, I often remind our team that families will not remember every medication adjustment or every form we completed. They will remember how we made them feel. They will remember who sat beside them when words failed. They will remember who was not afraid of their tears.

I remain deeply grateful for the chaplain who had the courage to tell his CEO that she was doing grief wrong.

He could have stayed silent. Instead, he chose to teach me.

His honesty transformed not only the way I support grieving families but also the way I lead an entire organization. Presence has become part of our culture. We strive not to rush pain away or solve what cannot be solved. We simply stay.

That lesson has changed the way I show up everywhere.

As a leader. As a friend. As a wife. As a mother. As a fellow human being.

Now, when someone cries in front of me, I don’t search for the perfect words. I don’t rush to fill the silence. I don’t immediately reach for the tissue box. I simply stay.

I let them tell the same story over and over if they need to.

I let them speak their loved one’s name long after others have stopped mentioning it.

I let them laugh through tears and cry through laughter.

I remind them that grief has no timeline because love has no expiration date.

If you are reading this while carrying grief of your own, I want you to know something.

If I don’t immediately hand you a tissue while tears stream down your face, it is not because I don’t care. It is because I care enough to let you cry.

If I don’t interrupt your story with advice, it is because your story deserves to be heard.

If I simply sit beside you in silence, it is because your grief deserves a witness more than it deserves a solution.

I will sit with you for twenty minutes or twenty years. I will remember your loved one’s name. I will honor your pain because your love mattered.

Grief does not make me uncomfortable. It makes me honored. Honored that someone would trust me enough to share it. Honored to stand beside another human being as they carry impossible weight.

I know this because I have known loss, too. I know what it feels like to miss someone so deeply that the world keeps moving while your own seems to stand still.

Some of the people I miss most left this world when I was still too young to fully remember them. I cannot recall every conversation or every moment we shared, but I can still feel the warmth of my grandparents' love woven into who I am. Their absence has followed me through every season of life, and when I became a mother, that grief changed shape. I realized my son would never know his great-grandparents, never climb into their laps or hear their stories, and I grieved not only for what I had lost but for what he never would have the chance to experience.

I have learned that grief comes in man

y forms. It arrives in death, but it also arrives in relationships we must let go of for our own well-being. Walking away from unhealthy family relationships carries its own quiet mourning—a grief for what was, what could have been, and what we wished had existed. Those losses may not come with funerals, but they deserve to be acknowledged all the same.

Each of these experiences has taught me that grief is simply love with nowhere to go. It does not disappear because time passes or because the loss looks different than someone else's. It asks only to be witnessed, honored, and carried with compassion.

Our society has conditioned us to respond instead of listen. We rush to fill silence with advice, clichés, and explanations. We search for the perfect words when, often, no words are needed.

But grief does not need to be fixed. It needs to be witnessed.

If someone has given you the privilege of sharing their grief, that is an extraordinary honor. They chose you.

Honor that gift by staying present. By listening more than speaking. By allowing tears to fall without rushing to wipe them away.

Perhaps the greatest act of love we can offer another person is not our advice, our embrace, or even our words. Perhaps it is our willingness to simply stay. To sit beside sorrow without trying to make it disappear. To bear witness to another person’s pain and remind them, through our presence alone, that they do not have to carry it by themselves.

That lesson was given to me years ago by a wise hospice chaplain.

Today, I pass it on to you.

Because if we can learn to truly be present with one another in grief, we may discover that presence itself is one of the purest forms of love we will ever give.