When grief becomes performative, silence is more honest.

It’s a strange kind of cruelty — offering your condolences with one hand, and turning your back with the other.

My daughter received a message — soft, kind, sorrowful — from someone who used to be her friend. Someone who had once laughed with her, and more recently, laughed at her. Someone who once knew her inside out, and now won’t even stand beside her in the hallway.

This girl messaged my daughter after the death of her best friend. She offered condolences. Words of comfort. A digital candle in the storm.

And when my daughter — raw, grieving, desperate for connection — said, “Can we please rebuild our friendship?”

She was met with silence.

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You don’t get to break someone, then pretend to care when they’re shattered.

No.

Worse than no.

Nothing.

Ghosted. Erased. Forgotten again.

Because some people only want to be seen grieving, not actually feel it — not sit in it, not show up for the ones left behind.

The silence screamed louder than any message. And the grief? It got heavier.

You don’t get to offer your sympathy, pose as the wounded soul, and then bolt the moment someone needs you. If you do, then your sympathy was never real. It was a mirror for yourself — not a light for someone else.

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Friendship doesn’t end at the funeral gates.

True friendship doesn’t dissolve under pressure. It doesn’t hide when the moment is hard.

It doesn’t vanish when someone asks for warmth.

You can’t send your “I’m so sorry for your loss” texts and then vanish when someone asks for human connection. That’s not kindness — that’s cowardice.

And to those who perform compassion while refusing to practice it — let me tell you something painful:

Your fake condolences are more hurtful than saying nothing at all.

Because pretending to care is not harmless.

It’s another form of emotional abandonment — and sometimes, it hurts just as much as the loss.

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