First Her Husband Was Severely Injured. Then Her Best Friend Walked Out Of Her Life
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Sadie and Steven* had been close friends for more than a decade. They’d been through a lot together: bad stuff—break ups with toxic men, depressive episodes—but good stuff, too, like the beginning of Sadie’s relationship with Nate. Steven was there the night Nate asked Sadie out for the first time. Two years later, in August 2019, he was a member of her wedding party. The trio was close—Steven was like a brother, says Sadie—and the three of them even lived together in Montreal through the claustrophobic days of the early COVID-19 pandemic.
They were still living together in August 2020 when Sadie and Nate were in a life-altering car accident that left Nate, 30 at the time, with a severe traumatic brain injury and Sadie, then 34, as his full-time caregiver. At first, Steven and a few other close friends came together as the couple’s central source of support, managing a Facebook page set up to fundraise and share info with their wider community, walking their dogs, crying over the crummy hand Sadie and Nate had been dealt. (Steven didn’t want to see any of the videos or photos of Nate that Sadie had taken in the hospital, documenting his progress, but he wasn’t the only one.)
Sadie and Steven continued living together—Nate was hospitalized through the fall of 2020—until about four months after the accident. That’s when Steven abruptly announced he was moving out. He reassured her that he got a place nearby, so he’d be over all the time for dinners and sleepovers. It would be like nothing had changed. He was gone a few days later. Sadie never heard from him again.
As a society, we’re not great at grief and all of its thorny variations and attendant complex emotions. Though Sadie and Steven’s example is extreme, feeling unsupported—or feeling ill-equipped to offer support—following a loss or traumatic event is all too common. A 2024 survey by the Canadian Grief Alliance, a cross-country consortium of grief specialists and organizations formed during the pandemic, found that half of respondents didn’t feel supported following a death or other serious loss. More still felt their grief wasn’t properly recognized by those around them.
Enter grief literacy. Though the term existed in academic circles for years, it was given an official definition at a meeting of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement in London, Ontario, in 2018. Mary Ellen Macdonald, a medical anthropologist and professor in the division of palliative medicine at Halifax’s Dalhousie University, was at that meeting. For so long, death and dying have been sequestered to clinical environments, like hospitals and hospices, Macdonald explains. But what happens when a grieving person leaves that setting and bumps into someone at the grocery store who asks how they’re doing? “If they say, ‘Actually, I’m not doing great,’ people don’t know how to respond,” says Macdonald. “There’s this sense that grief is somehow contagious, so we pull away.”
Grief literacy is rooted in the notion that grief isn’t uncommon or atypical, so our social spaces and interactions should be constructed such that they’re inclusive and safe for grievers. It means having resources available in public spaces, like libraries and faith centres, but also creating awareness that those resources are available. “Maybe there’s an ad for grief resources on the side of a bus, or a lecture on grief literacy at the community centre,” says Macdonald. It could also be as simple as a manager who says they have Kleenex in their office if ever it’s needed, or an acquaintance in a grocery store who knows how to ask about a loss.
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Despite eventually coming for us all, death is a rarer thing now, so part of our lack of literacy is down to inexperience. By Confederation in 1867, it’s estimated that one-third of all Canadian children died by the time they were five. In 1925, life expectancy was around 60 years. But today, the child mortality rate is 0.5 percent and Canadians live to an average of 81 years. American census data shows that most people don’t experience the death of a parent until their 40s.
That wasn’t the case for Daniella*, a 43-year-old from Scarborough, Ont., who lost both her parents within a year of each other when she was in her mid-30s. While overall she had a lot of support from her social circle, some friends just didn’t get what she was going through. Few people around her had had a parent die, let alone both. “And the ones who didn’t understand grief, mostly because they hadn’t experienced it, were the most challenging to be around,” she says. One friend expressed her disappointment that Daniella wasn’t able to come to her birthday party because she wasn’t up for casual conversations with strangers.
Andrea Warnick is a Guelph, Ont.-based psychotherapist and counsellor who works with grieving children, teens and adults. (She and Macdonald are also founding members of the CGA.) From her perspective, our discomfort with grief often comes from a place of compassion: We don’t want to make things worse, or we feel the need to say something that will make the person feel better. “Which is incredibly hard to do,” says Warnick. So we end up saying nothing, which just makes grief harder, lonelier, pricklier.
Even healthcare professionals can be uncomfortable with the subject. Warnick started her career as a pediatric oncology nurse, and she says she received zero training or guidance on what to say to her young patients and their families about dying, death or grief. When she tried to start an initiative in which her hospital unit would send cards to bereaved parents on the anniversary of their child’s death, her colleagues shot the idea down. They were worried about reminding people about the worst thing that had ever happened to them. “As if they’ve forgotten,” says Warnick.
Grief literacy is not about moving on, and it’s even less about forgetting. It’s about helping people understand that it’s okay—even comforting—to stay connected to the person who died, despite living in a society that would rather compartmentalize death. “When we confine grief to certain spaces, we’re deresponsibilizing individuals from knowing how to support each other,” says Macdonald. “And that’s our moral obligation as humans.”
Warnick cautions that when we don’t talk about the person who died, we just heighten the grieving person’s fear that they’ll be forgotten. Shortly after their accident, for instance, Sadie wanted to write down all her husband’s quirks of language. Steven told her not to worry—he was there, and he’d help her remember. “Now he’s gone,” says Sadie, “and it’s like I lost even more of Nate.”
Warnick thinks grief is a life skill we should be teaching. The state of New Jersey is doing just that: Legislation introduced last year mandates that high school students receive grief and loss education, including instruction on the physical, emotional and behavioural symptoms of grief, possible coping mechanisms and available resources. The goal is to help normalize the topic, particularly as students’ exposure to stress, loss and trauma increased following the pandemic.
In the midst of that global crisis, the province of Nova Scotia suffered its own tragedy. Over two terrifying days in April 2020, a gunman roamed the central part of the province and killed 22 people in the deadliest mass shooting event in modern Canadian history. Three years after the rampage (and in response to a public inquiry), the federal and provincial governments jointly committed $18 million over two years to improve access to mental health and grief support in Nova Scotia. Last October, $2.3 million in grants were awarded to various community organizations and initiatives, including trauma-informed grief training for first responders and firefighters, an interactive art installation in Portapique to generate conversations around anxiety and hope, and an after-school program for kids aged four and up dealing with grief and loss related to the mass shooting. “Nova Scotia is building a provincial grief alliance that’s really embedded locally. It’s on the ground, not top-down, and that’s key,” says Macdonald. “Grief literacy has to be tailored to your community.”
At the federal level, in fall 2023, the Canadian government also announced $1 million in funding over two years to the CGA to better support Canadians living with grief and to develop resources and raise awareness. It’s groundbreaking funding, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $100 million the Canadian Grief Alliance originally requested to support grief and bereavement programs. In May, the CGA released an action plan with the goal of creating a national grief strategy that will help build the capacity of individuals and communities to support the grieving, similar to the initiatives in Nova Scotia. “Death will always be heartbreaking, but, in this day and age, it’s compounded by how lonely an experience it is,” says Warnick. “We need to know how to show up for each other.”
Stacey*’s sister suffered a debilitating stroke last December. She, like Daniella, was surprised by which of her acquaintances showed up to support her. (This is not uncommon—Warnick warns her patients that the death of a loved one is often followed by a “great reckoning” in personal relationships.) People from her in-laws’ church dropped off food. Her oldest friends, scattered around the U.S., were constantly checking in on a text thread. But her local friends with whom she considered herself very close, didn’t reach out. “Now we’ve completely drifted apart,” says Stacey, 40. “It makes me wonder if something else was going on in our relationship, and they just used this as an escape hatch.”
When someone we thought would be there for us isn’t, without explanation, it’s up to us to fill in the gaps. For Sadie, the months following the accident were a blur, and she knows living with her during such a traumatic time must not have been easy for Steven. “I started imagining all the horrible things I might have done. But I just don’t remember,” she says, “and I don’t have his perspective.”
*Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How To Give—And Get—Support During A Time Of Grief
When your friend is grieving:
1. It’s okay to say you don’t know what to say. It’s better than not saying anything, and even preferable to “How are you?” which can be a loaded question, according to grief specialists.
2. Offer specific and practical help. Weed the garden, shovel the driveway, babysit the kids. Offer to edit correspondence, or figure out what bills need to be paid. If casseroles aren’t your thing, there are lots of ways to pitch in. Look around, identify a task that speaks to your skill set and get to work.
3. Set a reminder. If someone you love experienced the death of someone they loved, note the day their loved one died, their birthday or any other special days on a dedicated digital calendar, and reach out to your friend on those occasions—it can be as simple as a “thinking of you” text. They will appreciate it.
When you are grieving:
1. It’s okay to say you don’t want to talk about it. Grief is exhausting, and you can find yourself discussing details you’d rather not when faced with well-meaning but intrusive questions like, “What happened?” or “How did she die?” Having a back-pocket statement such as, “I’m not up for that conversation, thanks” can help you navigate those moments.
2. Ask for what you need. People around you will be looking for cues, or outright direction, on how to best help you. Note when someone does something you appreciate. And saying, “I just need to be distracted right now” is an option, too.
3. Join a support group. Friends and family can often feel helpless in the face of your grief, or they may be in a rush to “fix” you. They might be experiencing their own grief, too. Talking to people who know exactly what you’re going through—whether it’s acting as a caregiver for a loved one, processing a recent diagnosis, grieving a death—provides much needed emotional validation.
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