Why I Choose Take Advice from Women Who’ve Walked This Road

The unique fellowship of bereaved mothers

In the early days after I lost my child, well-meaning people said a lot of things to me. Time heals all wounds. God needed another angel. At least you still have other children. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. That last one — that one was true. They could not imagine it. And there is no shame in that.

But there is a difference between someone who cannot imagine your pain and someone who has lived inside it. There is a difference between sympathy and the bone-deep knowing that comes from having buried a child — and losing one to suicide carries its own particular weight, a grief wrapped in questions, in silence, in the things the world doesn’t quite know how to hold.

“There is comfort in being truly known — not just heard, but understood from the inside.”

The fellowship no one asked to join

I did not choose this sisterhood. None of us did. But when I first sat across from another mother who had lost her child to suicide, something shifted in the room. She did not flinch when I told her how it happened. She did not look away. She did not search for the right words, because she already knew there are no right words — only presence, and truth, and the willingness to sit in the hard place together.

This is what Scripture calls “bearing one another’s burdens” — Galatians 6:2. Not solving them. Not explaining them away. Bearing them. And sometimes the only one who can truly help bear a weight is someone who knows exactly how heavy it is.

Why I am careful about whose voice I lean on

This is not about being closed off. It is not about shutting out the love of friends, family, or a caring pastor. God brings many kinds of comfort, and every gentle hand matters.

But when it comes to advice — the kind that shapes how I grieve, how I move, how I begin to trust God again with the pieces of my shattered heart — I have learned to be careful. I have learned to lean toward women who know. Who have learned to lean on God during this time. 

The book of Ruth shows us this kind of understanding. Naomi, who had lost everything, did not try to explain her grief to someone who had not experienced loss. She walked alongside Ruth, and Ruth walked alongside her. Two women. Two different griefs. One road. And God wove redemption through both of them.

That is the language of this fellowship. I will stay. I will not run from the weight of your story. I will not hand you a pamphlet and pat your shoulder. I will walk this road with you, because I am already on it too.

What we can offer one another that others cannot

When a bereaved mother speaks to me about the guilt — the endless, relentless guilt — I do not have to explain what she means. I know the 2 a.m. questions. I know the rewinding of every conversation, every moment, every sign missed or not missed. I know the way grief from suicide is different, how it carries a stigma that other losses do not, how some people grow quieter around us, unsure of what to say.

And because I know, I can say what she needs to hear: You are not alone. You are not to blame. God has not turned away from you. He is here, in this very grief, holding what you cannot hold.

Job’s friends sat with him for seven days in silence before they said a word — Job 2:13. That silence, born of presence and not absence, was their most faithful gift. We, too, are women who have learned the holiness of sitting in silence together when words cannot reach.

God’s design for fellowship in suffering

God did not design us to grieve alone. He designed the church — the body of Christ — to be a place where “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). But even within the body, there is a particular grace that flows between those who carry the same wound.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 that God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” Notice the sequence: God comforts us first. And then — that same comfort becomes the gift we carry to someone else. Our grief does not go to waste. Our survival becomes a testimony. Our presence in another mother’s darkest moment becomes the very hand of God extended toward her.

Your survival is not just a miracle for you — it is a ministry to the one who is still in the dark.

How to find your people

If you are in the early days of loss, or still in the long middle of grief, I want you to know: your people are out there. Women who know. Women who will not flinch. Women who have learned to lean on God not because it was easy, but because they had nowhere else to go — and found, when they leaned, that He held them.

Seek them out. In grief support groups for bereaved parents, in faith communities that make space for lament, in the quiet ministry of a woman who has walked ahead of you on this road and reached her hand back. Let their faith steady you when yours is spent. Let their testimony remind you that the story is not over.

You were not made to carry this alone. And God, in His tender mercy, has made sure you do not have to.