Attaining Wisdom!

How to console a friend who's just lost someone close? This question has been going on in my mind since some time now..


Ever since I developed some brains, I have had problems relating to people at an emotional level. So recently I found myself in a dilemma when my best friend lost her uncle who was a father figure in her life.
I seriously don't get the whole "consoling your friend" part. Especially when anything you say triggers tears in the said friend. As it is I hate talking on the phone, now talking to her became similar to giving an exam in which you are sure you aren't going to pass,& there's no cheating to save you. My conversations with her would be somewhat like this,
Me: Hey don't think about it too much. It's going to be okay.
To which I would get a weird silence & a sniffling sound from her end. 
And I'd say: Hey are you crying? (hoping very much that she isn't & wondering what to say next if she is).
To which I'd get a reply: manju I'll talk to you later.
& she'd cut the phone, relieving me from the responsibilty of consoling her.
I have wasted countless hours thinking upon a solution. I even called up mutual friends asking them what am supposed to do in such a case. And all of them gave the same replies. The tried and tested methods, "don't mention anything that will make her remember her uncle", "don't act too happy in front of her", "dont ask insensitive things to her" & so on and so forth. With all this in mind, talking to my friend felt like testing a mine field..one wrong move & you are gone..! 
Also, since i did develop some brains while growing up afterall, you can believe that i do have the social sense of a normal human being, even though it might seem otherwise. So all these were things that were already known to me & I was already taking care of them. What actually bothered me was how to get my friend back to normal, without making her cry atleast once during my pathetically small conversation with her. How to get a smile on that pretty face of hers? How to get her back to her normal bubbly self?


Right from childhood, when I would cry after falling down, or scraping my knees bad on crashing my cycle, or cry when i got some other injury, whether it be physical or emotional, my best friend was always there for me. She knew just what to say that would make everything feel right to me. A hug & a few soothing words & I'd stop crying, & believe me, I regret to say it  but sadly its true, I was an awful crybaby in my past(thankfully). But it had always been really easy to console me or atleast my friend knew how to do it. But its right the opposite with her. As it is, my whole childhood went in her consoling & supporting me as she was the mature & elder one & so I never got much of a chance to do the same for her. And now when I had a chance, I found out that i really sucked at such things. I kept thinking that am letting her down & that didnt help. In addition to that, fate transpired against us. She was so busy with performing the last rites that she was hardly staying at her home, & I was so busy with my college & classes stuff & coming home so late that it was impossible for me to visit her at her place. By the end I was really desperate to get even a small smile on her face, to get her resembling to something normal, & I was ready to do anything for it.


So when she called me to her place the next weekend I grabbed at the chance even though I hadn't had my bath till then (on weekends I don't bath in the mornings unless I have to go out :P & I hope she never reads this part :p). At first talking to her was a bit awkward, I still wasn't sure how sensitive she was, whether she was crying or thinking on it & so on. But thankfully I didnt have to worry or work much at consling her. I was testing dangerous waters here, but right after the first few awkward moments, everything started feeling normal. She started talking about her cousins, how they were reacting to it, & I for once surprisingly made the right sympathetic comments at exactly the right moments. From there she went on  talking normally, like the chatterbox she actually is, about what she had been upto in the past few days, how her friends were reacting to it, the insensitive albiet funny incidents & so on. We even managed to get the topic of guys in there somewhere & I even came to know about her latest crush somehow. Don't ask me how we got there, even am confused & wonderously surprised about how the conversation ended up the way it did. But whatever it was, it made me happy & relieved to see my best friend happy & finally smiling & to know that I caused it to happen in someway :) 


So ultimately consoling a friend isn't really hard, you just have to be yourself & your friend will catch on it. Though ofcourse being too happy in front of someone in mourning will be the height of insensitivity, but your friend needs a dose of normalcy, so instead of consoling them like everyone else has been doing, its wiser to just be yourself with them, its wiser to be normal. Atleast that's what I learned in the end :)