Why are people trying to downplay how awful this is?

I am a highly sensitive person OP and people have suggested that you are but given your responses here I really don't see it.

I agree op this young woman is going to experience many losses, many losses many people have not experienced.

She will also not understand at the moment the losses she is yet to encounter.

Unconditional support for her has gone, it will make her life harder.

People say daft, inappropriate things all the time ? Death is a difficult conversation, and people can struggle to know what to say.

No idea why you are so hung up on this, and I highly doubt the young women involved cares about you and your colleagues opinion on what is a ‘better’ death for grieving families to deal with.

I do think they are just trying to relate. I’ve been in the other end of this too when I was TTC and couldn’t and many friends in their second babies trying to empathise how difficult it was when I had my third miscarriage and was going for IVF.

i was enraged! It’s not the same in any way! But I think you must be an empath and a high sensitive person which I am too.

No two griefs are the same, no two people are the same. If the young woman has any siblings, they will all be experiencing the grief around this differently. Has the colleague whose wife is dying made any indication that these words have caused harm? I'm presuming you aren't close enough to know how the daughter feels or you would have mentioned it.

Saying they know how the other person feels is not accurate and I wouldn't use it; however, I think for most people who say it, it's a normal way within their communities to normalise grief so the person feels less alone and an attempt to
say that they are using their own experiences of grief to empathise. We are limited social creatures, and we use our own experiences to connected with each other.

Language in these situation is always very limiting and different communities develop different ways to express that and they can clash with how these difficult experiences are shared in other communities. While I get how it can come across as downplaying, I don't think saying that in itself is downplaying, it's when people go on how about much worse they had it or how they just got on with it after experiencing a death that it turns into downplaying.

This is pretty common around death. A similar one that caused issues in my family were those who went on that my MIL was 'in a better place' repeatedly, which caused some upset to others, including my husband. We could get that to them it was a normal thing to say at the time to comfort at a painful time, but to my husband, it came across that there was a better place for his mother than here with the family. As his mother had chosen not to undergo cancer treatment that had very low prospects to maintain quality of life as long as possible in a horrible situation, grief had those kindly meant words feel like salt in the wound. Even thinking back on it brings tears to my eyes.

I'd only get involved or really think much of those kinds of common place lines if I became aware that they were hurting someone directly involved. Otherwise, I'd probably not think twice about it. It's imperfect language, but language around this is quite limited and we're all imperfect in this. Others may feel differently, but I'd rather they expressed something even badly than nothing at all. At least doing it badly can be a start.

The difference is stark.

Chances are your parent has been robbed of some good years and will die from dementia, whereas very elderly people with dementia still had all their best years and will likely die with dementia rather than from it.

People just need something to say in what are obviously difficult conversations. You are massively over involving yourself in this.

How do you know that never having gone through those experiences? I feel you are being unfairly judgmental . I feel I would have coped better in my early 20s than how I did in my late 20’s when I had young children and wanted my mum’s support but I can never know that as I didn’t experience both . Don’t rank grief

It’s not a competition. Everyone will have their own stories. You need to stop comparing @laughloseya it’s not helping you or anyone else.

Our only point of reference of things like this is our own experience. Losing a parent at any age is awful and the impact reverberates through the rest of your life however old you are when it happens.

The problem you’ve got is what you said and how you meant it is clear in YOUR mind but as you can see it is being interpreted differently by other people. That’s not all down to other people it’s also down to how you’ve said / explained it. You’re also saying they were attention seeking - we don’t know if they were or not as we don’t know the people.
I may have interpreted the same way as many on this thread and thought you were rude I’m not sure

They're are all trying to make the event relatable to themselves because that helps them to empathise. I see that as a real positive.

Way to go to make it all about you OP
<slow handclap>

Yes, and it's natural that most people use their closest experience to help them emphasise.

empathy = you can understand exactly what the person is going through, having been through an IDENTICAL thing

@FFSToEverythingSince2020 that is NOT the definition of empathy. You do not have to have been through the identical thing to have empathy. You don't even have to have gone through a similar thing.

The Cambridge dictionary:
Empathy - the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation.

Errrr ... you've started a whole thread to talk about this with strangers. I'd definitely call that gossip.

I find this thread really distasteful.

@laughloseya there are loads of very sad posts on this thread, and not once have you shown an ounce of empathy or sympathy.

And nor do you.
There is arrogance in presuming to grade people's grief based on your own experience. The people you have spoken to have expressed their sympathy for the girl; it doesn't matter how they arrived at that. You do not and cannot know how they feel or felt. Your experience is not universal. You also have no understanding of what the girl might be feeling or how she will ccope. Feel sympathy for her, of course, but acknowledge your assessment of her feelings now and in the future might be wide of the mark. That's all you can or should do with certainty. Forget about policing others.

Just support the family, all of you. Don't compare or make it about yourselves. Your all distorting the situation and making it about yourselves. Your all just as bad as each other.

This is the crux of this thread. The colleague was talking to OP, not to the family involved. So there is in fact no possibility to express empathy or sympathy or anything to the family. OP seems to see herself as some sort of conduit to the family so whatever is expressed to her will somehow be intuited by the family. It won’t. I mean, talk about making it all about you!

My dad died when I was 24. So what? It didn't make it more or less difficult than it happening at any other point in my adult life, grief is not a points-based system. My sibling a decade older found it much harder.

I know children who were aged 2 months,5 and 7 when their mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The older two were told that mummy would die. They understood enough to meant that she would not be coming back. She died 2 months before her youngest child turned 1. She was 37 years old.

Your colleagues are just trying to relate with their own stories of grief. It isn't your place or anyone else's to judge if it's less painful to watch a loved one go through a sudden or drawn out death. It isn't your place to judge if being older or younger makes dealing with the parents death easier or harder.

This!!

Ah, its never easy being the grief police is it @laughloseya ? Thank god that young woman's got you to tell other people how they should feel about her loss.

"I know how she feels.." while maybe inappropriate, isn't a competitive statement. It's an attempt to engage with the emotion. People are putting themselves as closely as they can in the position of the bereaved drawing on their own life experiences of similar situations. It's a way of empathising that isn't quite correct, but the intention is there.