Ask His Name

What a bereaved mother wants you to know about showing up for grief

Susie Shaw’s son died when he was nine. His name was William. She wants you to ask her about him.

That’s the whole revelation in a New York Times piece this week — Ask Me About My Dead Son — and it landed hard here. Because it’s the thing we get most wrong when someone we love is grieving, and the thing that’s most within our power to get right.

We go quiet. We think we’re being respectful. We think silence is the safest gift we can give someone carrying a loss that big.

Susie says the opposite.

She wants the questions.

“Tell me about him. What was his name? What was his favorite color? What did he like to do?”

Because William is still her son. He’s just not here to make new memories with — so the old ones are all she has left to talk about, and she only gets to talk about them when someone opens the door.

That’s the first thing I want you to sit with.

Silence doesn’t protect the griever. It isolates them.

Every time we avoid the name, avoid the question, avoid the child, we’re not sparing them pain — we’re taking away one of the only places they still get to be a parent out loud.

The second thing Susie offers is just as sharp, and it applies far past the death of a child. Don’t ask how to help. Decide, and show up. Coffee at eight. The kids at the park on Thursday. Laundry, together, this weekend.

Grief takes the wheel from people — the last thing they need is one more decision to make on your behalf. Show up already knowing what you’re bringing.

The third thing is the one I think about most in my own work, because it’s the one our culture resists hardest: there is no finish line.

Susie isn’t stuck. She isn’t failing to move on. Carrying William forward, permanently, is not a symptom — it’s simply what loving him now looks like.

We keep asking grieving people when they’ll be done. They won’t be. That was never the deal.

Here’s where this connects to something bigger than any one conversation with a grieving friend.

Every workplace has a Susie in it right now.

A colleague whose child died last year and who still flinches when someone changes the subject fast.

A teammate whose parent is dying slowly and who has learned to grieve in the fifteen minutes between meetings.

We build entire cultures — teams, offices, families — around the same avoidance Susie is naming. We think steering clear is kindness. It’s actually abandonment with good manners.

This is exactly the terrain I walk into with Showing Up: Support for Your Team During Loss and Transitions.

Not because workplaces need a grief policy. Because the people in them need each other to stop going quiet at the exact moment when presence matters most.

The skills Susie is describing — ask the direct question, offer the specific help, release the deadline for someone else’s healing — those aren’t instincts most of us are born with. They’re trained. That’s what the session builds.

You don’t have to be a bereaved parent to use what Susie taught Anna Martin this week. You just have to be someone who’s ever gone quiet around someone else’s pain, worried you’d say the wrong thing, and said nothing instead.

Say something. Ask his name.

As an End-of-Life Navigator, I guide people over unfamiliar terrain — helping people know what’s normal in dying, death, and grief, and what to expect.

With grace, Trish 💙