Somebody you know has had a death in the family and you have not rung. You have picked the telephone up twice and put it down again. It is not that you do not care; it is that every sentence you can think of sounds wrong when you hear it in your own head, and the fear of saying the wrong thing has quietly turned into a decision to say nothing at all.

This page is written for you rather than for the person who has been bereaved. It is the most common thing that happens to them and it is the thing they mention most often afterwards, usually about somebody they had known for twenty years.

So the first thing worth knowing is the ratio between the two risks. Almost nothing you could say will do the damage you are afraid of. Saying nothing reliably does damage, because silence is not read as tact — it is read as absence, and often as a verdict: that the death was too much, or that the friendship was not what they had thought it was. Nobody in the fourth month is scoring your sentences. They remember who turned up and who went quiet, and they remember almost none of the words.

Say the person's name

The dead are erased from conversation with astonishing speed. Within a fortnight most of the people around a bereaved family have stopped using the name at all, out of a fear of upsetting somebody who is already upset. The effect is that the person is deleted twice: once by the death and once by everybody's manners.

Use the name. I keep thinking about your dad. I was remembering Frances at the shop this morning. It is the single most useful thing on this page and it is the thing people are most frightened of doing. You are not reminding anybody of something they had forgotten — they are thinking about it every hour of the day. You are telling them that the person existed and that somebody else noticed.

I do not know what to say is a complete sentence

It is also true, which is rarer. Said plainly, and then followed by silence, or by sitting down, or by a hand on an arm, it does everything a cleverer sentence would do and it has the advantage of being honest. What it says underneath is: I am here, I am not going to pretend, and I am not going to make you manage my discomfort for me.

The sentences worth avoiding are the ones trying to solve something. At least it was quick. She had a good innings. He is out of pain now. Everything happens for a reason. Every one of them is an attempt to make the death smaller so that it is easier to stand next to, and the bereaved person hears the attempt. What they hear underneath is: please be less sad, because this is hard for me.

Do not ask how they are

It is the reflex greeting and it is the one question a newly bereaved person cannot answer. The true answer is unspeakable in a corridor. The polite answer is a lie they have already told nine times that day, and telling it again costs them something they have not got.

Better: I have been thinking about you. I am glad to see you. Or, if you want to open a door rather than knock on it, ask how today is. That is a smaller question and it can be answered honestly without a collapse. Some days are survivable and some are not, and the day-sized question lets them tell you which one this is.

Do not say let me know if you need anything

This is the kindest-sounding sentence in the language and it is close to useless, because it hands the work back. To take you up on it, somebody who is not sleeping and cannot finish a sentence has to decide what they need, decide whether it is a big enough thing to ask you for, ring you, and risk being a burden. Almost nobody does it. The offer stays open for a year and is never once used.

Offer one specific thing, at a specific time, and make it easy to refuse:

I am at the shop now. I will leave bread and milk on the step at six and you do not have to come to the door.
I am walking the dog at eight tomorrow. I will take yours as well.
I am free every evening this week. Which one shall I come and sit with you?
Send me the account number and I will ring the utility company and sit on hold for you.
I am doing the school run for the rest of the week. It is arranged rather than offered.

The last shape is the strongest and it is worth learning: say what you are already doing rather than asking whether they would like you to do it. I am bringing dinner on the day of the funeral can be turned down in three words and usually will not be. Would you like me to bring dinner requires a decision from somebody who has no decisions left in them.

Do not compare, and do not rank

I know exactly how you feel, I lost my father last year. You do not, and the sentence turns the conversation round to face you. Grief is not interchangeable: the same death is a different event for the daughter who nursed him and the son who lives three states away, and both of those are different again from yours.

There is a version that works and it is the shorter one. My father died two years ago. It is the worst thing there is. I am not going to tell you it gets better, because what it does is get different. That says you have some idea of the country without claiming their map of it, and then it stops and lets them talk.

Ranking is worse than comparing. Nobody needs to hear that it must be harder because he was young, or easier because she was old, or that at least it was not a child. Every one of those is a bystander deciding how much this is allowed to hurt.

Do not explain the death

The smoking, the weight, the appointment they should have made sooner, the hospital that should have caught it, the plan somebody's god is supposed to have: every explanation is an attempt to make the death make sense, and making sense of it out loud is not your work to do. From the inside it also lands as an accusation — of the person who died, or of the family who did not make them go.

If they explain it themselves, ten times, in slightly different words, let them. Repetition is how a person makes an unbelievable thing believable, and being allowed to tell it without interruption is worth more than any observation you could put into the gap.

There is no timetable, and the fourth month is often worse than the second week

The first fortnight has adrenaline in it, and a funeral to arrange, and a house full of people. What follows is the part nobody photographs: the paperwork, the quiet, and the slow arrival of the fact. The stretch from about the third month to the sixth is frequently the hardest, and it is exactly the stretch in which everybody else has decided the crisis is over.

So do not calibrate your sympathy to the calendar, and do not be surprised by grief that turns up late, or sideways, or in the middle of a birthday party. How long has it been now is a question with no good answer. Ask nothing, and stay anyway.

Keep turning up

This is the whole of it, and everything above is detail. In the week of the funeral a bereaved family is at the centre of a crowd: flowers, food, telephone calls, cousins in the spare room. Within a month the crowd has gone, the cards have stopped and the person is alone in a house with a wardrobe full of somebody else's clothes.

So put dates in a diary. Ring in the sixth week, when nobody else is ringing. Ring on the birthday, on the anniversary and at the first holiday. Say the name in the message. Do not make any of it conditional on being invited, and do not stop because you get no reply — an unanswered message is not a rejection, it is somebody with no capacity to answer, and it is still evidence that they were thought about.

You are not going to fix any of this, and that is not the job. The job is to be the one who did not disappear.

What to say, when you do not know what to say