I've Got Your Better Place Right Here, Buck-O

Let's talk about the worst thing you can say to a person in mourning

Jared Paventi

Jul 12, 2024

Bing AI Image Creator’s result for “They’re in a better place.” I’m not sure what’s going on with the guy up front and on the right.

“At least they’re no longer suffering.”

That’s pretty good. I’ve used that more than once, usually when someone dies of cancer or some other illness.

“They aren’t in pain anymore.”

Factual. They’re dead, so they aren’t really feeling anything really. Again, when it’s cancer, I’ll use this.

“This must be like a weight lifted off of you.”

Ehhhhhh. This is very situational and you better know the person well.

“It’s all part of God’s plan.”

Don’t like it. It’s creeping awfully close to…

“They’re in a better place now.”

There it is, an all-timer funeral phrase uttered by people who don’t know what to say and haven’t put enough thought into it. It’s Hall of Fame worthy for its overuse, it’s lack of emotional sincerity and for being the absolute, No. 1 worst thing you could possibly say to someone in mourning.1

Be speechless. Say, “I’m sorry.” Say anything else, just don’t say, “They’re in a better place now.”

Because, really, who gets to say where the better place is?

The better place is heaven, right? We are a Christian society and the endgame for those who believe in God is to be with him in Heaven. The better place.

But, isn’t there a better place than the better place?

Let’s pause for a quick disclaimer…

I know that people going through the receiving line at calling hours don’t know what to say. Hell, I never do. It’s not said with malintent and I want to recognize that early before I lose some of you to for what could be misconstrued as an anti-Christian or anti-religious stance.

Standing in the receiving line at a funeral home or place of worship is a pretty lonely place, no matter how many people come through to express their condolences. At your one of your weakest moments, accepting the sympathies of others seems like a particularly cruel tradition. It’s not a time to be cheered up or see silver linings, which is exactly what saying “They’re in a better place” hopes to achieve. It’s more self-serving than comforting. It’s cliched. I’d rather you get my name wrong or shrug.

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Another image offered by Bing’s AI Image Creator using the same search string. I have no idea what I’m looking at here.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Thinking back to September 1997, I don’t remember if anyone told me that my mother was in a better place. Frankly, the calling hours were a bit of a blur and I was pretty numb throughout. Sometimes when I’m in these types of situations there is a staticky hum that fills my head, like a bit of low white noise, that drowns out the world around me as I wait for whatever I’m at to end as quickly as possible.

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In that moment, if I were to have been honest and clear-minded, I would have told the person no, that my mother was not in a better place. I would have told them that the better place for her to be was here, cancer-free, complaining about the C-minus I got in Spanish 202 the previous semester or something stupid that my sister did. Or maybe the better place would have been sitting on one of our neighbors’ porches, having a beverage and firing up a lung dart, as was common during the warm-weather months on our street.

The point is that box in the front of the room was not a better place; others aren’t to say where the person should be or where they are better off.

I haven’t read a lot of suicide notes2, but I can’t find evidence of anyone ever committing suicide because they wanted to go to the better place. Sure, they want to leave this place, but it’s not to get to a mythical land.

That mythical land? It’s contingent on your belief system. Evangelicals pray for the rapture, the event where non-believers are slaughtered and they will ascend to a higher plane to be with Christ. They will almost certainly tell you that is a better place. There’s no room for me there3. Catholic heaven probably looks different than Islamic heaven, which probably differs greatly from LDS heaven. By laying your belief of an afterlife and what it looks like on someone else, who may see the matter differently, your reflecting a truth that doesn’t necessarily fit as intended. Again, it’s nice for you to say. It makes you feel better.

But, it’s not supposed to be about you.

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There are plenty of pragmatic Christians who don’t believe in an afterlife. Atheists certainly do not. Judaism is ambiguous, at best. Applying this one-size-fits-all approach diminishes the other person’s beliefs and rips open the roadway to nothingness. If you believe there is no afterlife — and one in four of us fall in that group — is nothing really a better place?

I think the headline of this HuffPost article is a little heavier — ‘They're In A Better Place’ And The Christian White-Washing Of Grief — than its content. It starts with a story about a woman from the Bible Belt whose father died of cancer and how she dreaded the talk of him being in a better place:

But as a young woman who still very much needed her dad, hearing that he was in a “better place” just made her feel more alone.
It all felt pretty presumptuous, even if Devon had grown up Christian.
“I was just in the beginning stages of gaining the bravery to truly question my faith,” said Devon, who now identifies as a spiritual Atheist and doesn’t believe in the concept of heaven.
“Watching my father die a relatively slow and painful death, my questioning began to deepen, and I was becoming more critical of a religion that for years I desperately wanted to stick within me,” she said.
Suddenly, “in a better place” felt more “predatory” than helpful or hopeful, she said. “At the time, all I really wanted to hear was ‘I’m here for you.’”
As she saw it, that simple phrase packed a heavy, unspoken assumption: If her dad was a believer, then he was in a better place. If she, too, followed Jesus, then she could look forward to being reunited with her dad someday.

Going back to something I wrote earlier, it devalues the role a person has in their own life. Where is the better place for my father-in-law? In a mausoleum or snoring loudly in his chair as my mother-in-law reads on the couch? Were the people who died on 9/11 — parents, spouses, siblings, colleagues — less valuable on earth than they are in the better place? It’s a really widely-casted net, I know, but a person’s value is determined by themselves and those who surround and lift them up. Applying a label of the better place where they now may or may not inhabit steals that value. It takes away the identity and what made them important to the person in the receiving line at the calling hours.

At best, it’s cringey. At worst, it’s passively cruel.

So what should you say?

The experts all agree: keep it neutral and be genuine.

At the base level, offer condolences:

“I’m very sorry.”
If you lost someone of a similar relation: “I know this is painful.”
“Your _______ was special. I know this is hard.”
“My condolences to you.”
“I can’t fathom what you are going through and I am incredibly sorry for your loss.”
If appropriate for either one of you: “I’m praying for you.”

If you knew the deceased:

“______ will remain in my memories.”
“______ was an amazing friend/role model. I will treasure the time I had with them.”
Pick out a short memory you can share.

I once went to the calling hours for a three-year-old4 and when I got to their parents, I froze. I looked at the mother, who was doing her best to keep it together, and said, “I have no idea what to say.” I gave her a hug, whispered an “I’m sorry,” and moved on.

It’s the long game where you, as a friend or family member, are important. The calling hours and funeral and burial and post-funeral buffet eventually ends. And then what?

Then you have a family alone without their loved one. It’s the check-in later that week or in a couple weeks that matters. It’s the lunch or drinks after work next month that counts. Keeping up a cadence of being present in that person’s life and being there for if/when they want to talk is the more important than anything you can say in the minute or two of facetime you get with them in the receiving line.

Just remember: You can do better than, “They’re in a better place.”