On Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky, Cindy Crawford shared a heartbreaking memory: After her younger brother died of leukemia, she returned to school and nobody said a word. Not her classmates. Not even her teacher. She was left to carry the heaviest burden of her grief alone, while surrounded by people.

Listening to Crawford, I felt my stomach clench with recognition. As a teenager, I returned to school after my father died and experienced the same uneasy silence. My friends didn’t know how to engage with me. No one pulled me aside to say, “We don’t know what to say, but we care.” It wasn’t cruelty; it was awkwardness, and maybe fear. But that silence, that giant elephant in the room, was one of the hardest parts of losing my father. My friends were likely unsure of what to say, so they took the safest option, and said nothing.

Teenagers, especially, don’t want to stand out. They want to blend in. They’re attuned to every tiny social cue about belonging. Losing a parent at 16 marked me as different—and no one around me knew how to bridge that difference.

Humans aren’t born knowing how to talk about grief. We tend to avoid the topic because it feels overwhelming, or because we fear “making it worse” by bringing it up. But silence isn’t neutral. Silence sends the message: Your pain is too big for us to handle. It tells a grieving child: We don’t know what to do with you now.

This isn’t........

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