I can't imagine the pain you must be going through

One of the clichés we frequently offer to grieving people, in our seemingly hopeless attempt to offer some comfort, is 'I can't imagine what it must be like for you.' This expression is supposed to offer consolation, but apart from the offence it might cause by being a cliché, it could – for a thoughtful listener – provoke additional offence because of its logical absurdity.

Take a minute to think about it. If you utter these words – 'I can't imagine what you must be going through' – to someone who is grieving, then what you are saying, from a strictly logical viewpoint, is that you have no empathy at all for their situation. Yet this is the total opposite of the message you intend to convey. 'Empathy', according to oxforddictionaries.com, means 'the ability to understand and share the feelings of another'. Most of us would agree that empathy is a desirable human trait and that if we are going to understand and share the feelings of another, although we may never have been in their predicament, we will need to use our imaginations. We may not have had a relative who died tragically, but most of us have friends or family members whom we value dearly, and we can indeed imagine how devastated we would feel if they were to die suddenly. Unless we have a pathological deficit of empathy, we don't have to actually undergo the loss of a loved one to feel, if only to a small but nonetheless affecting degree, the distress of someone who is actually grieving. We instinctively put ourselves in their shoes and have no trouble at all imagining ourselves in a similarly dreadful situation.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're objecting that it's an idiom, and idioms can't always be analysed with logic. Although I don't have any historical analyses of this idiom at hand, my gut feeling born of years of listening with fascination as other people talk, tells me that this expression started out as its opposite, that is: 'I can imagine how you must feel'. This is, in fact, the true message we want to convey to the grieving person: this is an overwhelmingly distressing situation, but I can feel some of your pain along with you. Feeling someone else's distress is what motivates us to help them in the first place; we can all too easily imagine ourselves in that same situation, and we too would appreciate it if someone were to help us.

But somewhere along the way, the opposite of the current idiom – 'I can imagine how difficult it must be for you' – was offered a little too glibly for the liking of the person in despair, and the mourning person spat back, 'No, you can't imagine how difficult it must be! Have you ever lost a child/mother/father/dog/pet snail/whatever?'

So gradually we all adopted the reverse form of the expression and now utter its exact – if illogical – opposite: I can't imagine how difficult it must be for you. We somehow explain this to ourselves (usually only on a subconscious level) by reasoning that the tragedy is so overwhelming that it's beyond the capacity of our feeble imaginations. Many of us may have limited imaginations, but all of us at some time have envisaged various worst-case scenarios that could befall us and have shuddered at the prospect that they might actually manifest in our lives. People with anxiety and panic disorders, for example, have an unenviable aptitude for this kind of imagination. Mental health professionals even have a word for it: catastrophising. All of us can do it, and some of us, unfortunately, are past masters at it.

I suspect now, however, that both the positive and negative forms of this expression are unacceptable. The positive form ('I can imagine how difficult it must be for you') won't do, because it was already a cliché even before it sounded hollow and trite. And the negative version is not only a cliché, but compounds the insult with its stupidity.

It can be hard to think of comforting words – words that will encourage, enthuse and cheer – at the best of times, let alone at a time when not only the grieving person, but also we feel so dreadful. We despair and feel inadequate and that we are not up to the task: how can we – puny humans that we are – possibly offer anything to counteract the enormity of death and the psychological devastation that it brings upon those closest to the deceased?

But the truth is that we can. In my next post I'll talk about how to write a condolence card.