SilkRoad
Lay the coin on my tongue
- Joined
- May 26, 2009
- Messages
- 3,932
- MBTI Type
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 6w5
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
i found the canadian "i'm sorry for your loss" to be confusing, and i don't think the time of loss is the best time to expect someone to remember their social graces, often loss is difficult to acknowledge straight after it happens so people don't associate "i'm sorry" with the condition they are in on an immediate basis, and treat "i'm sorry" the way they are used to otherwise.
so i directly translated the hebrew "i share in your sorrow". it was very appreciated and immoderately understood because there was no automatic response to it. but being a foreigner might have given it legitimacy.
alternatively, feel free to try this ready-made condolences poetry from south africa's finest.
Yeah, that is pretty tragic stuff on that link. It makes me want to tell the poets I'm sorry for their lack of talent.
It doesn't pain me when they say "it's not your fault" - just makes me feel a bit silly and wonder if I've made things worse for them, which is the last thing I would want to do, obviously. It's hard to know what is going through someone's mind when they've experienced something harsh.
I like "I share in your sorrow" but it does sound sort of "foreign", so might sound strange if you're from an English-speaking country.
Us Canadians do apologise a lot!