Them's fightin' words

I talk grief a lot, if you can't tell. I made this blog to do nothing but put words together about grief. It's rather excessive, really. I'm kind of becoming an unwilling expert on the subject. So when some friends of mine experienced a death of someone they were close to, naturally, I didn't have a clue what to say.

I feel like a failure, really. I want so bad to be supportive and empathetic, but I've been mostly resorting to cliches and awkward questions via text message. And 'text message' means I can think about what I want to say before I say it. But everything I think of saying seems like either condescension or like I'm trying to one-up their loss with talking about my loss. Guess I'm no grief guru after all, just a grief hobbyist.

If anything, I'm good at my own grief and nothing more - a specialist, not a jack-of-all-graves. I've been fighting my own grief so long, but I can't move on to the next fight until I win this one. My friends will have to fight their own grief battles. I can tell them what worked for me, but when it's time for me to duck, it might be a better time for them to jab instead. And there's no one-punch knockout for this crap. You only win by surviving.