Why I say died, not passed

I watched an interview recently where Stephen Fry was asked about words he dislikes. He pulled out his phone and scrolled through a list filed under the hashtag "hate." Two that stood out were "passed" and "sorry for your loss."

His problem with "sorry for your loss" is that it is a form. You are not thinking when you say it, you are just reaching for something off the shelf. It is not personal. And he is right. It has become the thing people say because they do not know what else to say, and over time it has stopped meaning very much at all.

And "passed" bothers him for similar reasons. You pass an exam. You pass a driving test. You pass a shop. Passed away? No. Died.

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I agree with him. And I think it matters more than people realise, especially when it comes to grief.

I will never say "sorry for your loss" to a client either. There is nothing for me to apologise for. And there is something about the phrase that quietly puts pressure on the person hearing it. It frames their grief as an inconvenience, something that requires an apology from someone else, something that needs smoothing over. It can make the grieving person feel like they should reassure you that they are okay, that it is not too heavy, that you do not need to worry.

And it assumes the experience is entirely negative. Often it is, but not always. Sometimes someone dies and what follows is complicated. Relief, guilt, freedom, love, anger, all tangled together. Saying "sorry" before you have even heard what it is like for them shuts the convesation down before it has started.

Most of the time when someone tells me that a person in their life has died, I stay silent. Not because I do not care, but because I am trying to be with them in what they are feeling rather than filling the space with words that are not really for them. Silence can say more than a rehearsed line.

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When someone dies, they die. It is painful and it is final and no amount of careful wording changes that. But when we say someone "passed," we drift away from the reality. Passed where. Passed how. The word does not land anywhere.

"Loss" does something similar. You lose your keys, you lose your wallet. The word carries an implication that the thing might turn up again, that it is somewhere waiting to be found. When we say "I lost my mum" we are using the same language we would use for a missing umbrella. Something about that does not sit right.

I wonder sometimes whether the soft language makes grief harder rather than easier. If they "passed," maybe the grief should pass too. If it is a "loss," maybe you should have found your way through it by now. The gentle words can create a quiet pressure to be gentle about the whole thing, when actually grief is not gentle at all. It is heavy and messy and sometimes it is angry and sometimes it makes no sense.

In my counselling work I notice what happens when people start to use their own words for what has happened to them rather than the ones they have been handed. There is often a shift. Sometimes it is uncomfortable, sometimes it is a relief. But there is nearly always something that moves when someone says "my dad died" instead of "I lost my dad."

I am not suggesting anyone should correct someone else's language around death. People should use whatever words feel right to them. But I do think it is worth noticing the words we reach for and asking whether they are ours, or whether they were given to us by a culture that is not very comfortable sitting with death.

In the counselling room I will not tiptoe around the word "died" if that is what happened. Not because I want to be harsh, but because I think people deserve to have their experience named clearly. There is something grounding about that. Something that says this happened, it was real, and you are allowed to feel the full weight of it.

Grief does not need polishing. It needs space.

If something in this post felt familiar and you want to talk, you can get in touch through my contact page.